Chapter 39 Chapter Thirty-Nine

Arthur Dent was annoyed by the constant waking of the guns. Finchitch still managed to fall asleep fitfully, and Arthur was careful not to wake her.He slid out of the maintenance hatch, which he had converted into a makeshift bunk.He climbed down the entrance ladder and wandered sullenly in the corridor. The hallway was narrow and dark, with lights flickering constantly.The lighting circuit hums annoyingly. But it's not that voice. He stopped, leaning back against the wall as a silver drill flew past him, entered the dimly lit hallway with a sickening scream, and slammed into the wall every now and then like a headless chicken.

Neither is this. He stumbled through a partition door and found himself in a vast hallway.The pungent smell wafted from the end of the corridor, so he walked down the corridor in the opposite direction. He saw a monitor embedded in the wall. The front of the monitor was covered with plexiglass. The glass was thick, but the surface was severely worn. "Would you please turn the volume down a little bit?" he said to Ford Prefect, who was crouching among the video equipment in front of the monitor.He had taken the equipment from the window of a shop in Totham Court Road, to which he threw a small brick and a large pile of empty beer cans.

"Shh!" Ford hissed, staring wildly at the screen.He is watching "The Magnificent Seven" (a classic western film made in Hollywood, USA in 1960). "Just a little bit," said Arthur. "No!" Ford yelled. "We just got to the wonderful part! Listen, I got everything right, the voltage, the line conversion, everything, and this is the wonderful part!" Arthur sighed, his head aching too, and sat down beside him to watch the highlights.He listened as calmly as possible to Ford's exclamations and yells and "Yah!" "Ford," Arthur said finally, as Ford rummaged through a pair of videotapes for a tape of "Casablanca" (American classic film, shot in 1942) after the movie ended, "how could you..."

"It's a good thing," said Ford. "That's what I came back looking for. Do you know that I never finish it? I always miss the end. The night before the Vogons came I only Looked half way through. After they blew up the place I thought I'd never see it again, what happened?" "It's just life," Arthur said, taking a can of beer. "Oh, here it is again," Ford said, "I think it's going to be something like that. I like these things." When Rick's bar (a scene from the movie) flashed on the screen, he said, "How can you what?"

"what?" "You just said: 'How could you...'" "How can you have such a disrespectful opinion of the Earth and yet... Forget it, watch your movie." "Exactly," said Ford.