Being careful not to wake Fenchurch, who was still managing to sleep fitfully, he slid his way out of the maintenance hatchway which they had fashioned into a kind of bunk for themselves, slung himself down the access ladder and prowled the corridors moodily.
They were claustrophobic and ill-lit. The lighting circuits buzzed annoyingly.
This wasn't it, though.
He paused and leaned backwards as a flying power drill flew past him down the dim corridor with a nasty screech, occasionally clanging against the walls like a confused bee as it did so.
That wasn't it either.
He clambered through a bulkhead door and found himself in a larger corridor. Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end so he walked towards the other.
He came to an observation monitor let into the wall behind a plate of toughened but still badly scratched perspex.
``Would you turn it down please?'' he said to Ford Prefect who was crouching in front of it in the middle of a pile of bits of video equipment he'd taken from a shop window in Tottenham Court Road, having first hurled a small brick through it, and also a nasty heap of empty beer cans.
``Shhhh!'' hissed Ford, and peered with manic concentration at the screen. He was watching The Magnificent Seven.
``Just a bit,'' said Arthur.
``No!'' shouted Ford. ``We're just getting to the good bit! Listen, I finally got it all sorted out, voltage levels, line conversion, everything, and this is the good bit!''
With a sigh and a headache, Arthur sat down beside him and watched the good bit. He listened to Ford's whoops and yells and ``yeehay!''s as placidly as he could.
``Ford,'' he said eventually, when it was all over, and Ford was hunting through a stack of cassettes for the tape of Casablanca, ``how come, if ...''
``This is the big one,'' said Ford. ``This is the one I came back for. Do you realize I never saw it all through? Always I missed the end. I saw half of it again the night before the Vogons came. When they blew the place up I thought I'd never get to see it. Hey, what happened with all that anyway?''
``Just life,'' said Arthur, and plucked a beer from a six-pack.
``Oh, that again,'' said Ford. ``I thought it might be something like that. I prefer this stuff,'' he said as Rick's Bar flickered on to the screen. ``How come if what?''
``What?''
``You started to say, `how come if ...'''
``How come if you're so rude about the Earth, that you ... oh never mind, let's just watch the movie.''
``Exactly,'' said Ford.
