Wash

"....and, 23rdly -- Out There, 

in The Space-Time Vortex,
'Time', and 'Distance' 

have No Meaning...."

 

“We’re going,” he said excitedly, and shivered with energy.

  “Where? How?” said Arthur.

  “I don’t know,” said Ford, “but I just feel that The Time is Right. Things are Going to Happen. We’re on Our Way.”

  He lowered his voice to a whisper.

  “I have detected,” he said, “disturbances in The Wash.”

  He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like The Wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off.

  Arthur asked him to repeat what he had just said because he hadn’t quite understood his meaning. Ford repeated it.

  “The Wash?” said Arthur.

  “The Space-Time Wash,” said Ford and, as The Wind blew briefly past at that moment, he bared his teeth into it.

  Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat.

  “Are we talking about,” he asked cautiously, “some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?”

  “Eddies,” said Ford, “in the Space-Time continuum.”

  “Ah,” nodded Arthur, “is he. Is he.” He pushed his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown and looked knowledgeably into the distance.

  “What?” said Ford.

  “Er, who,” said Arthur, “is Eddy, then, exactly, then?” Ford looked angrily at him. “Will you listen?” he snapped.

  “I have been listening,” said Arthur, “but I’m not sure it’s helped.”

  Ford grasped him by the lapels of his dressing gown and spoke to him as slowly and distinctly and patiently as if he were somebody from the telephone company accounts department.

  “There seem …” he said, “to be some pools …” he said, “of instability … he said, “in the fabric …” he said.

  Arthur looked foolishly at the cloth of his dressing gown where Ford was holding it. Ford swept on before Arthur could turn the foolish look into a foolish remark.

  “ … in the fabric of space-time,” he said.

  “Ah, that,” said Arthur.

  “Yes, that,” confirmed Ford.

  They stood there alone on a hill on prehistoric Earth and stared each other resolutely in the face.

  “And it’s done what?” said Arthur.

  “It,” said Ford, “has developed pools of instability.”

  “Has it,” said Arthur, his eyes not wavering for a moment.

  “It has,” said Ford, with a similar degree of ocular immobility.

  “Good,” said Arthur.

  “See?” said Ford.

  “No,” said Arthur.

  There was a quiet pause.

  “The difficulty with this conversation,” said Arthur after a sort of ponderous look had crawled slowly across his face like a mountaineer negotiating a tricky outcrop, “is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees. They weren’t like this. Except perhaps some of the ones I’ve had with elms that sometimes got a bit bogged down.”

  “Arthur,” said Ford.

  “Hello? Yes?” said Arthur.

  “Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.”

  “Ah, well, I’m not sure I believe that.”

  They sat down and composed their thoughts.

  Ford got out his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was making vague humming noises and a tiny light on it was flickering faintly.

  “Flat battery?” said Arthur.

  “No,” said Ford, “there is a moving disturbance in the fabric of space-time, an eddy, a pool of instability, and it’s somewhere in our vicinity.”

  “Where?”

  Ford moved the device in a slow, lightly bobbing semicircle. Suddenly the light flashed.

  “There!” said Ford, shooting out his arm; “there, behind that sofa!”

  Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind.

  “Why,” he said, “is there a sofa in that field?”

  “I told you!” shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. “Eddies in the space-time continuum!”

  “And this is his sofa, is it?” asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.

  “Arthur!” shouted Ford at him, “that sofa is there because of the space-time instability I’ve been trying to get your terminally softened brain to come to grips with. It’s been washed up out of the continuum, it’s space-time jetsam, it doesn’t matter what it is, we’ve got to catch it, it’s our only way out of here!”

  He scrambled rapidly down the rocky outcrop and made off across the field.

  “Catch it?” muttered Arthur, then frowned in bemusement as he saw that the Chesterfield was lazily bobbing and wafting away across the grass.

  With a whoop of utterly unexpected delight he leaped down the rock and plunged off in hectic pursuit of Ford Prefect and the irrational piece of furniture.

  They careened wildly through the grass, leaping, laughing, shouting instructions to each other to head the thing off this way or that way. The sun shone dreamily on the swaying grass, tiny field animals scattered crazily in their wake.

  Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.

  The sofa bobbed this way and that and seemed simultaneously to be as solid as the trees as it drifted past some of them and hazy as a billowing dream as it floated like a ghost through others.

  Ford and Arthur pounded chaotically after it, but it dodged and weaved as if following its own complex mathematical topography, which it was. Still they pursued, still it danced and spun, and suddenly turned and dipped as if crossing the lip of a catastrophe graph, and they were practically on top of it. With a heave and a shout they leaped on it, the sun winked out, they fell through a sickening nothingness and emerged unexpectedly in the middle of the pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground, St. John’s Wood, London, toward the end of the last Test Match of the Australian series in the year 198-, with England only needing twenty-eight runs to win.

  Important Fact from Galactic History, Number One : (reproduced from the Siderial Daily Mentioner’s Book of Popular Galactic History)
  The night sky over the planet Krikkit is the least interesting sight in the entire Universe.

Do.

Politicians like to panic. 

They need Activity; 

it's their substitute 

for Achievement.

ROMANA: 

The clipboard marks the spot. 

I'll stand guard.

(The Doctor climbs through 

the hole and up a ladder. 

When he's out of sight, Romana 

enters and heads for a staircase. 

The Doctor reaches the top of the ladder.)

RORVIK: 

Is this what you're looking for, Doctor?

(Rorvik drops the clipboard.)

Tom : 

Look here, Rorvik. 

You've got to stop this back-blast. 

You'll kill us all.

RORVIK: 

So you say, Doctor. 

I say it's the only 

way out of here.

(Rorvik stands on the Doctor's fingers.)

Tom : 

You can't blast through those mirrors. 

You must realise by now it just 

throws the energy straight back.

RORVIK: 

They've got to break. 

Everything breaks eventually.

(He kicks the Doctor back down the ladder, 

comes after him and starts 

to strangle him with his own scarf. 

Romana arrives and tries 

hitting Rorvik with the clipboard.)

Tom : 

Never mind the clipboard, 

short the cables.

(The Doctor gives Romana the manacles.)

Tom : 

Drain the main power line. 

Earth it to The Ladder.

ROMANA: 

I know. I've done it.

(Rorvik lets The Doctor go and heads 

for the ladder to undo the damage.)

Tom : 

Biroc? What are 

you doing here?

BIROC: 

Nothing.

Tom : 

It's all right for you.

BIROC: 

And for You, Too : 

Do Nothing.

Tom : 

Do Nothing?

ROMANA: 

Of course, Doctor. 

Don't you see?

Tom: 

Yes, that's right. 

Do Nothing.

....if it's the right 

sort of Nothing.

(They join hands with Biroc and fade away. 

Rorvik has removed the manacles 

from the cable.)

RORVIK: 

Run, Doctor. Scurry off 

back to your blue box. 

You're like all the rest. 

Lizards when there's 

a man's work to be done. 

I'm sick of your kind. 

Faint-hearted, do-nothing, 

lily-livered deadweights. 

This is The End for all of you! 

I'm finally getting 

something done! 

Bwahahahaha!

MacDonald :

No. Watch.

Do.

No, no, no. 

Clean. Clean.

The Governor :

It seems the little fella's

not so bright after all.

MacDonald :

No. But brightness has never

been encouraged amongst slaves.

The Governor :

Oh, don't be so touchy, Mr MacDonald.

All of us were slaves once,

in one sense of the word or another.

Kolp :

If you feel the ape's unsatisfactory,

we can have him reconditioned.

MacDonald :

That isn't necessary.

The Governor :

You're quite right, Mr MacDonald.

But not for any of your 

bleeding-heart reasons.

Reconditioning. That's all

any of you ever think of, isn't it?

Don't you realise, if we were to take

every ape who disobeyed an order

and sent him back for reconditioning, 

Ape Management would become overcrowded.

Kolp :

It's the only thing that has any effect.

MacDonald :

Just makes them worse.

The Governor :

Some of them couldn't be worse.

I've been having a comprehensive list compiled.

Who is The Master That Makes The Grass Green?

Enkidu ate grass in the hills with the gazelle and lurked with wild beasts at the water-holes; he had joy of the water with the herds of wild game. But there was a trapper who met him one day face to face at the drinking-hole, for the wild game had entered his territory. On three days he met him face to face, and the trapper was frozen with fear. He went back to his house with the game that he had caught, and he was dumb, benumbed with terror. His face was altered like that of one who has made a long journey. 

-With awe in his heart he spoke to his father: 'Father, there is a man, unlike any other, who comes down from the hills. He is the strongest in the world, he is like an immortal from heaven. He ranges over the hills with wild beasts and eats grass; the ranges through your land and comes down to the wells. I am afraid and dare not go near him. He fills in the pits which I dig and tears up-my traps set for the game; he helps the beasts to escape and now they slip through my fingers.'

His father opened his mouth and said to the trapper, 'My son, in Uruk lives Gilgamesh; no one has ever prevailed against him, he is strong as a star from heaven. Go to Uruk, find Gilgamesh, extol the strength of this wild man. Ask him to give you a harlot, a wanton from the temple of love; return with her, and let her woman's power overpower this man. When next he comes down to drink at the wells she will be there, stripped naked; and when he sees her beckoning he will embrace her, and then the wild beasts will reject him.'

So the trapper set out on his journey to Uruk and addressed himself to Gilgamesh saying, 'A man unlike any other is roaming now in the pastures; he is as strong as a star from heaven and I am afraid to approach him. He helps the wild game to escape; he fills in my pits and pulls up my traps.' 

Gilgamesh said, 'Trapper, go back, take with you a harlot, a child of pleasure. At the drinking hole she will strip, and when, he sees her beckoning he will embrace her and the game of the wilderness will. surely reject him.'

Now the trapper returned, taking the harlot with him. After a three days' journey they came to the drinking hole, and there they sat down; the harlot and the trapper sat . facing one another and waited for the game to come. For the first day and for the second day the two sat waiting, but on the third day the herds came; they came down to drink and Enkidu was with them. 

The small wild creatures of the plains were glad of the water, and Enkidu with them, who ate grass with the gazelle and was born in the hills; and she saw him, the savage man, come from far-off in the hills. 

The trapper spoke to her: 'There he is. Now, woman, make your breasts bare, have no shame, do not delay but welcome his love. Let him see you naked, let him possess your body. When he comes near uncover yourself and lie with him; teach him, the savage man, your woman's art, for when he murmurs love to you the wild' beasts that shared his life in the hills will reject him.'

Do Nothing (So Long as It's The Right Sort of Nothing)

Tom : 

Never mind the clipboard, 

short the cables.

(The Doctor gives Romana the manacles.)

Tom : 

Drain the main power line. 

Earth it to The Ladder.

ROMANA: 

I know. I've done it.

(Rorvik lets The Doctor go and heads 

for the ladder to undo the damage.)

Tom : 

Biroc? What are 

you doing here?

BIROC: 

Nothing.

Tom : 

It's all right for you.

BIROC: 

And for You, Too : 

Do Nothing.

Tom : 

Do Nothing?

ROMANA: 

Of course, Doctor. 

Don't you see?

Tom: 

Yes, that's right. 

Do Nothing.

....if it's the right 

sort of Nothing.

(They join hands with Biroc and fade away. 

Rorvik has removed the manacles 

from the cable.)

RORVIK: 

Run, Doctor. Scurry off 

back to your blue box. 

You're like all the rest. 

Lizards when there's 

a man's work to be done. 

I'm sick of your kind. 

Faint-hearted, do-nothing, 

lily-livered deadweights. 

This is The End for all of you! 

I'm finally getting 

something done! 

Bwahahahaha!

You know, I'm thinking, Spencer. 

I'm thinking how Rick threatened to kill me, 

how he clearly hates my guts. 

But he is out there, right now, 

gathering shit for me to make sure 

I don't hurt any of the fine people 

that live here. 

He is swallowing His Hate and 
getting shit done. 

That takes guts.

-- Negan.