The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (57 page)

Where it wasn’t black you were inclined to wish that it was, because the colors with which some of the unspeakable details were picked out ranged horribly across the whole spectrum of eye-defying colors, from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead, taking in Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow, Burnt Hombre and Gan Green on the way.

The unspeakable details that these colors picked out were gargoyles that would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch.

The gargoyles all looked inward from the walls, from the pillars, from the flying buttresses, from the choir stalls, toward the statue, to which we will come in a moment.

And if the gargoyles would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch, then it was clear from the gargoyles’ faces that the statue would have put them off theirs, had they been alive to eat it, which they weren’t, and had anybody tried to serve them some, which they wouldn’t.

Around the monumental walls were vast engraved stone tablets in memory of those who had fallen to Arthur Dent.

The names of some of those commemorated were underlined and had asterisks against them. So, for instance, the name of a cow that had been slaughtered, and of which Arthur had happened to eat a fillet steak, would have the plainest engraving, whereas the name of a fish that Arthur had himself caught and then decided he didn’t like and left on the side of the plate had a double underlining, three sets of asterisks and a bleeding dagger added as decoration, just to make the point.

And what was most disturbing about all this, apart from the statue, to which we are, by degrees, coming, was the very clear implication that all these people and creatures were indeed the same person, over and over again.

And it was equally clear that this person was, however unfairly, extremely upset and annoyed.

In fact it would be fair to say that he had reached a level of annoyance the like of which had never been seen in the Universe. It was an annoyance of epic proportions, a burning, searing flame of annoyance, an annoyance that now spanned the whole of time and space in its infinite umbrage.

And this annoyance had been given its fullest expression in the statue in the center of all this monstrosity that was a statue of Arthur Dent, and an unflattering one. Fifty feet tall if it was an inch, there was not an inch of it that wasn’t crammed with insult to its subject matter, and fifty feet of that sort of thing would be enough to make any subject feel bad. From the small pimple on the side of his nose to the poorish cut of his dressing gown, there was no aspect of Arthur Dent that wasn’t lambasted and vilified by the sculptor.

Arthur appeared as a gorgon, an evil, rapacious, ravening, bloodied ogre, slaughtering his way through an innocent one-man Universe.

With each of the thirty arms that the sculptor in a fit of artistic fervor had decided to give him, he was either braining a rabbit, swatting a fly, pulling a wishbone, picking a flea out of his hair, or doing something that Arthur at first look couldn’t quite identify.

His many feet were mostly stamping on ants.

Arthur put his hands over his eyes, hung his head and shook it slowly from side to side in sadness and horror at the craziness of things.

And when he opened his eyes again, there in front of him stood the figure of the man or creature, or whatever it was, that he had supposedly been persecuting all this time.

“HhhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!!!” said Agrajag.

He, or it or whatever, looked like a mad fat bat. He waddled slowly around Arthur, and poked at him with bent claws.

“Look …!” protested Arthur.

“HhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!!!” explained Agrajag, and Arthur reluctantly accepted this on the grounds that he was rather frightened by this hideous and strangely wrecked apparition.

Agrajag was black, bloated, wrinkled and leathery.

His bat wings were somehow more frightening for being the pathetic broken floundering things they were than if they had been strong muscular beaters of the air. The most frightening thing was probably the tenacity of his continued existence against all the physical odds.

He had the most astounding collection of teeth.

They looked as if each came from a completely different animal, and they were ranged around his mouth at such bizarre angles it seemed that if he ever actually tried to chew anything he’d lacerate half his own face along
with it, and possibly put an eye out as well.

Each of his three eyes was small and intense and looked about as sane as a fish in a privet bush.

“I was at a cricket match,” he rasped.

This seemed on the face of it such a preposterous notion that Arthur practically choked.

“Not in this body,” screeched the creature, “not in this body! This is my last body. My last life. This is my revenge body. My kill-Arthur-Dent body. My last chance. I had to fight to get it too.”

“But …”

“I was at,” roared Agrajag, “a cricket match! I had a weak-heart condition, but what, I said to my wife, can happen to me at a cricket match? As I’m watching, what happens?

“Two people quite maliciously appear out of thin air just in front of me. The last thing I can’t help but notice before my poor heart gives out in shock is that one of them is Arthur Dent wearing a rabbit bone in his beard. Coincidence?”

“Yes,” said Arthur.

“Coincidence?” screamed the creature, painfully thrashing its broken wings, and opening a short gash on its right cheek with a particularly nasty tooth. On closer examination, such as he’d been hoping to avoid, Arthur noticed that much of Agrajag’s face was covered with ragged strips of black Band-Aids.

He backed away, nervously. He tugged at his beard. He was appalled to discover that in fact he still had the rabbit bone in it. He pulled it out and threw it away.

“Look,” he said, “it’s just fate playing silly buggers with you. With me. With us. It’s a complete coincidence.”

“What have you got against me, Dent?” snarled the creature, advancing on him in a painful waddle.

“Nothing,” insisted Arthur, “honestly, nothing.”

Agrajag fixed him with a beady stare.

“Seems a strange way to relate to somebody you’ve got nothing against, killing them all the time. Very curious piece of social interaction, I would call that. I’d also call it a lie!”

“But look,” said Arthur, “I’m very sorry. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding. I’ve got to go. Have you got a clock? I’m meant to be helping save the Universe.” He backed away still farther.

Agrajag advanced still farther.

“At one point,” he hissed, “at one point, I decided to give up. Yes. I
would not come back. I would stay in the netherworld. And what happened?”

Arthur indicated with random shakes of his head that he had no idea and didn’t want to have one either. He found he had backed up against the cold dark stone that had been carved by who knew what Herculean effort into a monstrous travesty of his bedroom slippers. He glanced up at his own horrendously parodied image towering above him. He was still puzzled as to what one of his hands was meant to be doing.

“I got yanked involuntarily back into the physical world,” pursued Agrajag, “as a bunch of petunias. In, I might add, a bowl. This particular happy little lifetime started off with me, in my bowl, unsupported, three hundred miles above the surface of a particularly grim planet. Not a naturally tenable position for a bowl of petunias, you might think. And you’d be right. That life ended a very short while later, three hundred miles lower. In, I might again add, the fresh wreckage of a whale. My spirit brother.”

He leered at Arthur with renewed hatred.

“On the way down,” he snarled, “I couldn’t help noticing a flashy-looking white spaceship. And looking out of a port on this flashy-looking spaceship was a smug-looking Arthur Dent.
Coincidence?!!
”

“Yes!” yelped Arthur. He glanced up again, and realized that the arm that had puzzled him was represented as wantonly calling into existence a bowl of doomed petunias. This was not a concept that leaped easily to the eye.

“I must go,” insisted Arthur.

“You may go,” said Agrajag,
“after
I have killed you.”

“No, that won’t be any use,” explained Arthur, beginning to climb up the hard stone incline of his carved bedroom slipper, “because I have to save the Universe, you see. I have to find a Silver Bail, that’s the point. Tricky thing to do dead.”

“Save the Universe,” spat Agrajag with contempt. “You should have thought of that before your started your vendetta against me! What about the time when you were on Stavromula Beta and someone …”

“I’ve never been there,” said Arthur.

“ … tried to assassinate you and you ducked. Who do you think the bullet hit? What did you say?”

“Never been there,” repeated Arthur. “What are you talking about? I have to go.”

Agrajag stopped in his tracks.

“You must have been there. You were responsible for my death there, as
everywhere else. An innocent bystander!” He quivered.

“I’ve never heard of the place,” insisted Arthur. “I’ve certainly never had anyone try to assassinate me. Other than you. Perhaps I go there later, do you think?”

Agrajag blinked slowly in a kind of frozen logical horror.

“You haven’t been to Stavromula Beta … 
yet?”
he whispered.

“No,” said Arthur, “I don’t know anything about the place. Certainly never been to it, and don’t have any plans to go.”

“Oh, you go there all right,” muttered Agrajag in a broken voice, “you go there all right. Oh, zark!” He tottered, and stared wildly about him at his huge Cathedral of Hate. “I’ve brought you here too soon!”

He started to scream and bellow, “I’ve brought you here too zarking soon!”

Suddenly he rallied, and turned a baleful, hating eye on Arthur.

“I’m going to kill you anyway!” he roared. “Even if it’s a logical impossibility I’m going to zarking well try! I’m going to blow this whole mountain up!” He screamed, “Let’s see you get out of this one, Dent!”

He rushed in a painful waddling hobble to what appeared to be a small black sacrificial altar. He was shouting so wildly now that he was really carving his face up badly. Arthur leaped down from his vantage place on the carving of his own foot and ran to try to restrain the three-quarters-crazed creature.

He leaped upon him, and brought the strange monstrosity crashing down on top of the altar.

Agrajag screamed again, thrashing wildly for a brief moment, and turned a wild eye on Arthur.

“You know what you’ve done?” he gurgled painfully; “you’ve gone and killed me again. I mean, what do you want from me, blood?”

He thrashed again in a brief apoplectic fit, quivered and collapsed, smacking a large red button on the altar as he did so.

Arthur started with horror and fear, first at what he appeared to have done, and then at the loud sirens and bells that suddenly shattered the air to announce some clamoring emergency. He stared wildly around him.

The only exit appeared to be the way he had come in. He pelted toward it, throwing away the nasty fake leopard-skin bag as he did so.

He dashed randomly, haphazardly through the labyrinthine maze; he seemed to be pursued more and more fiercely by klaxons, sirens, flashing lights.

Suddenly, he turned a corner and there was a light in front of him.

It wasn’t flashing. It was daylight.

A
lthough it has been said that on Earth alone in our Galaxy is Krikkit (or cricket) treated as a fit subject for a game, and that for this reason the Earth has been shunned, this only applies to our Galaxy, and more specifically to our dimension. In some of the higher dimensions they feel they can more or less please themselves, and have been playing a peculiar game called Brockian Ultra Cricket for whatever their transdimensional equivalent of billions of years is.

“Let’s be blunt, it’s a nasty game” (says
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
, “but then anyone who has been to any of the higher dimensions will know that they’re a pretty nasty heathen lot up there who should just be smashed and done in, and would be, too, if anyone could work out a way of firing missiles at right angles to reality.”

This is another example that
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
will employ anybody who wants to walk straight in off the street and get ripped off, especially if they happen to walk in off the street during the afternoon, when very few of the regular staff members are there.

There is a fundamental point here:

The history of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
is one of idealism, struggle, despair, passion, success, failure and enormously long lunch breaks.

The earliest origins of the
Guide
are now, along with most of its financial records, lost in the mists of time.

For other, and more curious, theories about where they are lost, see below.

Most of the surviving stories, however, speak of a founding editor called Hurling Frootmig.

Hurling Frootmig, it is said, founded the
Guide
, established its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and went bust.

There followed many years of penury and heart-searching during which he consulted friends, sat in darkened rooms in illegal states of mind, thought about this and that, fooled about with weights, and then, after a chance encounter with the Holy Lunching Friars of Voondoon, who claimed that just as lunch was at the center of man’s temporal day, and
man’s temporal day could be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so lunch should be (a) seen as the center of man’s spiritual life, and (b) held in jolly nice restaurants, he refounded the
Guide
, laid down its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and where you could stuff them both, and led the
Guide
on to its first major commercial success.

He also started to develop and explore the role of the editorial lunch break that was subsequently to play such a crucial part in the
Guide’s
history, since it meant that most of the actual work got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing.