ADAMS, Douglas - Life, the Universe, and Everything

by Life, the Universe

  skeleton the other, whilst his brain tried to work out which of his ears it

  most wanted to crawl out of.

  "Bet you weren't expecting to see me again," said the monster, which

  Arthur couldn't help thinking was a strange remark for it to make, seeing as

  he had never met the creature before. He could tell that he hadn't met the

  creature before from the simple fact that he was able to sleep at nights. It

  was ... it was ... it was ...

  Arthur blinked at it. It stood very still. It did look a little familiar.

  A terrible cold calm came over him as he realized that what he was looking

  at was a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly.

  He wondered why anybody would be showing him a six-foot-high hologram of a

  housefly at this time. He wondered whose voice he had heard.

  It was a terribly realistic hologram.

  It vanished.

  "Or perhaps you remember me better," said the voice suddenly, and it was a

  deep, hollow malevolent voice which sounded like molten tar glurping out of a

  drum with evil on its mind, "as the rabbit."

  With a sudden ping, there was a rabbit there in the black labyrinth with

  him, a huge, monstrously, hideously soft and lovable rabbit - an image again,

  but one on which every single soft and lovable hair seemed like a real and

  single thing growing in its soft and lovable coat. Arthur was startled to see

  his own reflection in its soft and lovable unblinking and extremely huge brown

  eyes.

  "Born in darkness," rumbled the voice, "raised in darkness. One morning I

  poked my head for the first time into the bright new world and got it split

  open by what felt suspiciously like some primitive instrument made of flint.

  "Made by you, Arthur Dent, and wielded by you. Rather hard as I recall.

  "You turned my skin into a bag for keeping interesting stones in. I happen

  to know that because in my next life I came back as a fly again and you

  swatted me. Again. Only this time you swatted me with the bag you'd made of my

  previous skin.

  "Arthur Dent, you are not merely a cruel and heartless man, you are also

  staggeringly tactless."

  The voice paused whilst Arthur gawped.

  "I see you have lost the bag," said the voice. "Probably got bored with

  it, did you?"

  Arthur shook his head helplessly. He wanted to explain that he had been in

  fact very fond of the bag and had looked after it very well and had taken it

  with him wherever he went, but that somehow every time he travelled anywhere

  he seemed inexplicably to end up with the wrong bag and that, curiously

  enough, even as they stood there he was just noticing for the first time that

  the bag he had with him at the moment appeared to be made out of rather nasty

  fake leopard skin, and wasn't the one he'd had a few moments ago before he

  arrived in this whatever place it was, and wasn't one he would have chosen

  himself and heaven knew what would be in it as it wasn't his, and he would

  much rather have his original bag back, except that he was of course terribly

  sorry for having so peremptorily removed it, or rather its component parts,

  i.e. the rabbit skin, from its previous owner, viz. the rabbit whom he

  currently had the honour of attempting vainly to address.

  All he actually managed to say was "Erp".

  "Meet the newt you trod on," said the voice.

  And there was, standing in the corridor with Arthur, a giant green scaly

  newt. Arthur turned, yelped, leapt backwards, and found himself standing in

  the middle of the rabbit. He yelped again, but could find nowhere to leap to.

  "That was me, too," continued the voice in a low menacing rumble, "as if

  you didn't know ..."

  "Know?" said Arthur with a start. "Know?"

  "The interesting thing about reincarnation," rasped the voice, "is that

  most people, most spirits, are not aware that it is happening to them."

  He paused for effect. As far as Arthur was concerned there was already

  quite enough effect going on.

  "I was aware," hissed the voice, "that is, I became aware. Slowly.

  Gradually."

  He, whoever he was, paused again and gathered breath.

  "I could hardly help it, could I?" he bellowed, "when the same thing kept

  happening, over and over and over again! Every life I ever lived, I got killed

  by Arthur Dent. Any world, any body, any time, I'm just getting settled down,

  along comes Arthur Dent - pow, he kills me.

  "Hard not to notice. Bit of a memory jogger. Bit of a pointer. Bit of a

  bloody giveaway!

  "`That's funny,' my spirit would say to itself as it winged its way back

  to the netherworld after another fruitless Dent-ended venture into the land of

  the living, `that man who just ran over me as I was hopping across the road to

  my favourite pond looked a little familiar ...' And gradually I got to piece

  it together, Dent, you multiple-me-murderer!"

  The echoes of his voice roared up and down the corridors. Arthur stood

  silent and cold, his head shaking with disbelief.

  "Here's the moment, Dent," shrieked the voice, now reaching a feverish

  pitch of hatred, "here's the moment when at last I knew!"

  It was indescribably hideous, the thing that suddenly opened up in front

  of Arthur, making him gasp and gargle with horror, but here's an attempt at a

  description of how hideous it was. It was a huge palpitating wet cave with a

  vast, slimy, rough, whale-like creature rolling around it and sliding over

  monstrous white tombstones. High above the cave rose a vast promontory in

  which could be seen the dark recesses of two further fearful caves, which ...

  Arthur Dent suddenly realized that he was looking at his own mouth, when

  his attention was meant to be directed at the live oyster that was being

  tipped helplessly into it.

  He staggered back with a cry and averted his eyes.

  When he looked again the appalling apparition had gone. The corridor was

  dark and, briefly, silent. He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely

  unpleasant thoughts and would rather have had a chaperone.

  The next noise, when it came, was the low heavy roll of a large section of

  wall trundling aside, revealing, for the moment, just dark blackness behind

  it. Arthur looked into it in much the same way that a mouse looks into a dark

  dog-kennel.

  And the voice spoke to him again.

  "Tell me it was a coincidence, Dent," it said. "I dare you to tell me it

  was a coincidence!"

  "It was a coincidence," said Arthur quickly.

  "It was not!" came the answering bellow.

  "It was," said Arthur, "it was ..."

  "If it was a coincidence, then my name," roared the voice, "is not

  Agrajag!!!"

  "And presumably," said Arthur, "you would claim that that was your name."

  "Yes!" hissed Agrajag, as if he had just completed a rather deft

  syllogism.

  "Well, I'm afraid it was still a coincidence," said Arthur.

  "Come in here and say that!" howled the voice, in sudden apoplexy again.

  Arthur walked in and said that it was a coincidence, or at least, he

  nearly said that it was a coincidence. His tongue rather lost its footing

  towards the end of the last word because the lights came up
and revealed what

  it was he had walked into.

  It was a Cathedral of Hate.

  It was the product of a mind that was not merely twisted, but actually

  sprained.

  It was huge. It was horrific.

  It had a Statue in it.

  We will come to the Statue in a moment.

  The vast, incomprehensibly vast chamber looked as if it had been carved

  out of the inside of a mountain, and the reason for this was that that was

  precisely what it had been carved out of. It seemed to Arthur to spin

  sickeningly round his head as he stood and gaped at it.

  It was black.

  Where it wasn't black you were inclined to wish that it was, because the

  colours with which some of the unspeakable details were picked out ranged

  horribly across the whole spectrum of eye-defying colours 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 which these colours picked out were gargoyles

  which would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch.

  The gargoyles all looked inwards from the walls, from the pillars, from

  the flying buttresses, from the choir stalls, towards 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 which had been slaughtered

  and of which Arthur Dent had happened to eat a fillet steak would have the

  plainest engraving, whereas the name of a fish which 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 which 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 centre of all this monstrosity, which 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 which 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 which wasn't lambasted and vilified by the

  sculptor.

  Arthur appeared as a gorgon, an evil, rapacious, ravenning, bloodied ogre,

  slaughtering his way through an innocent one-man Universe.

  With each of the thirty arms which the sculptor in a fit of artistic

  fervour 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

  which Arthur at first looking 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.

  "HhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!" 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 batwings were somehow more frightening for being the pathetic broken

  floundering things they were that if they had been strong, muscular beaters of

  the air. The 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 they 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

  sticky plasters.

  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," sai
d 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 further.

  Agrajag advanced still further.

  "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 particularly

  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 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 which leapt 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 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 you started your vendetta against me! What about the time 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