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said the barman, slapping the packets on the bar, “twenty-eight pence if you’d be so kind.”
    Ford was very kind—he gave the barman another five-pound note and told him to keep the change. The barman looked at it and then looked at Ford. He suddenly shivered: he experienced a momentary sensation that he didn’t understand because no one on Earth had ever experienced it before. In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be farther than sixteen thousand miles from yourbirthplace, which really isn’t very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born six hundred light-years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse.
    The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a shocking, incomprehensible sense of distance. He didn’t know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with a new sense of respect, almost awe.
    “Are you serious, sir?” he said in a small whisper which had the effect of silencing the pub. “You think the World’s going to end?”
    “Yes,” said Ford.
    “But, this afternoon.”
    Ford had recovered himself. He was at his flippest.
    “Yes,” he said gaily, “in less than two minutes I would estimate.”
    The barman couldn’t believe this conversation he was having, but he couldn’t believe the sensation he had just had either.
    “Isn’t there anything we can do about it then?” he said.
    “No, nothing,” said Ford, stuffing the peanuts into his pocket.
    Someone in the hushed bar suddenly laughed raucously at how stupid everyone had become.
    The man sitting next to Ford was a bit sozzled by now. His eyes weaved their way up to Ford.
    “I thought,” he said, “that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something.”
    “If you like, yes,” said Ford.
    “That’s what they told us in the army,” said the man, and his eyes began the long trek back toward his whisky.
    “Will that help?” asked the barman.
    “No,” said Ford, and gave him a friendly smile. “Excuse me,” he said, “I’ve got to go.” With a wave, he left.
    The pub was silent for a moment longer and then, embarrassingly enough, the man with the raucous laugh did it again. The girl he had dragged along to the pub with him had grown to loathe him dearly over the last hour, and it would probably have been a great satisfaction to her to know that in a minute and a half or so he would suddenly evaporate into a whiff of hydrogen, ozone and carbon monoxide. However, when the moment came she would be too busy evaporating herself to notice it.
    The barman cleared his throat. He heard himself say, “Last orders, please.”
    The huge yellow machines began to sink downward and to move faster.
    Ford knew they were there. This wasn’t the way he had wanted it.
    Running up the lane, Arthur had nearly reached his house. He didn’t notice how cold it had suddenly become, he didn’t notice the wind, he didn’t notice the sudden irrational squall of rain. He didn’t notice anything but the caterpillar bulldozers crawling over the rubble that had been his home.
    “You barbarians!” he yelled. “I’ll sue the council for every penny it’s got! I’ll have you hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled … until … until … until you’ve had enough.”
    Ford was running after him very fast. Very very fast.
    “And then I will do it again!” yelled Arthur. “And when I’ve finished I will take all the little bits, and I
will jump
on them!”
    Arthur didn’t notice that the men were running from the bulldozers; he didn’t notice that Mr. Prosser was staring hectically into the sky. What Mr. Prosser had noticed was that huge yellow somethings were screaming through the clouds. Impossibly huge