"Adams, Douglas -- So Long and Thanks for All The Fish (4)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

saw one. The hand sat on the bar. It took orders, it served
drinks, it dealt murderously with people who behaved as if they
wanted to be murdered. Ford Prefect sat still.

"We are not worried about the expiration date," repeated the
barman, satisfied that he now had Ford Prefect's full attention.
"We are worried about the entire piece of plastic."

"What?" said Ford. He seemed a little taken aback.

"This," said the barman, holding out the card as if it was a
small fish whose soul had three weeks earlier winged its way to
the Land Where Fish are Eternally Blessed, "we don't accept it."

Ford wondered briefly whether to raise the fact that he didn't
have any other means of payment on him, but decided for the
moment to soldier on. The disembodied hand was now grasping his
shoulder lightly but firmly between its finger and thumb.

"But you don't understand," said Ford, his expression slowly
ripening from a little taken abackness into rank incredulity.
"This is the American Express Card. It is the finest way of
settling bills known to man. Haven't you read their junk mail?"

The cheery quality of Ford's voice was beginning to grate on the
barman's ears. It sounded like someone relentlessly playing the
kazoo during one of the more sombre passages of a War Requiem.

One of the bones in Ford's shoulder began to grate against
another one of the bones in his shoulder in a way which suggested
that the hand had learnt the principles of pain from a highly
skilled chiropracter. He hoped he could get this business settled
before the hand started to grate one of the bones in his shoulder
against any of the bones in different parts of his body. Luckily,
the shoulder it was holding was not the one he had his satchel
slung over.

The barman slid the card back across the bar at Ford.

"We have never," he said with muted savagery, "heard of this
thing."

This was hardly surprising.

Ford had only acquired it through a serious computer error
towards the end of the fifteen years' sojourn he had spent on the
planet Earth. Exactly how serious, the American Express Company
had got to know very rapidly, and the increasingly strident and
panic-stricken demands of its debt collection department were
only silenced by the unexpected demolition of the entire planet