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, thrashed wildly for a brief moment, and turned a
wild eye on Arthur.
"You know what you've done?" he gurgled painfully. "You've only 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 clamouring emergency. He stared wildly around him.
The only exit appeared to be the way he came in. He pelted towards 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 claxons, sirens, flashing lights.
Suddenly, he turned a corner and there was a light in front of him.
It wasn't flashing. It was daylight.
Chapter 19
Although it has been said that on Earth alone in our Galaxy is Krikkit (or
cricket) treated as fit subject for a game, and that for this reason the Earth
has been shunned, this does only apply 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 Hitch Hiker'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 of the fact that The Hitch Hiker'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 are there.
There is a fundamental point here.
The history of The Hitch Hiker'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 Voondon (who claimed that just as
lunch was at the centre of a man's temporal day, and man's temporal day could
be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so Lunch should
(a) be seen as the centre of a man's spiritual life, and
(b) be 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 which 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 on an afternoon and saw
something worth doing.
Shortly after this, the Guide was taken over by Megadodo Publications of
Ursa Minor Beta, thus putting the whole thing on a very sound financial
footing, and allowing the fourth editor, Lig Lury Jr, to embark on lunch+
breaks of such breathtaking scope that even the efforts of recent editors, who
have started undertaking sponsored lunch-breaks for charity, seem like mere
sandwiches in comparison.
In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship - he merely left his
office late one morning and has never since returned. Though well over a
century has now passed, many members of the guide staff still retain the
romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a ham croissant, and will
yet return to put in a solid afternoon's work.
Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr have therefore been
designated Acting Editors, and Lig's desk is still preserved the way he left
it, with the addition of a small sign which says "Lig Lury Jr, Editor,
Missing, presumed Fed".
Some very scurrilous and subversive sources hint at the idea that Lig
actually perished in the Guide's first extraordinary experiments in
alternative book-keeping. Very little is known of this, and less still said.
Anyone who even notices, let alone calls attention to, the curious but utter
coincidental and meaningless fact that every world on which the Guide has ever
set up an accounting department has shortly afterwards perished in warfare or
some natural disaster, is liable to get sued to smithereens.
It is an interesting though utterly unrelated fact that the two or three
days prior to the demolition of the planet Earth to
make way for a new
hyperspace bypass saw a dramatic upsurge in the number of UFO sightings there,
not only above Lords Cricket Ground in St. John's Wood, London, but also above
Glastonbury in Somerset.
Glastonbury had long been associated with myths of ancient kings,
witchcraft, ley-lines an wart curing, and had now been selected as the site
for the new Hitch Hiker's Guide financial records office, and indeed, ten
years' worth of financial records were transferred to a magic hill just
outside the city mere hours before the Vogons arrived.
None of these facts, however strange or inexplicable, is as strange or
inexplicable as the rules of the game of Brockian Ultra-Cricket, as played in
the higher dimensions. A full set of rules is so massively complicated that
the only time they were all bound together in a single volume, they underwent
gravitational collapse and became a Black Hole.
A brief summary, however, is as follows:
Rule One: Grow at least three extra legs. You won't need them, but it
keeps the crowds amused.
Rule Two: Find one good Brockian Ultra-Cricket player. Clone him off a few
times. This saves an enormous amount of tedious selection and training.
Rule Three: Put your team and the opposing team in a large field and build
a high wall round them.
The reason for this is that, though the game is a major spectator sport,
the frustration experienced by the audience at not actually being able to see
what's going on leads them to imagine that it's a lot more exciting than it
really is. A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far
less lifeaffirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most
dramatic event in sporting history.
Rule Four: Throw lots of assorted items of sporting equipment over the
wall for the players. Anything will do - cricket bats, basecube bats, tennis
guns, skis, anything you can get a good swing with.
Rule Five: The players should now lay about themselves for all they are
worth with whatever they find to hand. Whenever a player scores a "hit" on
another player, he should immediately run away and apologize from a safe
distance.
Apologies should be concise, sincere and, for maximum clarity and points,
delivered through a megaphone.
Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins.
Curiously enough, the more the obsession with the game grows in the higher
dimensions, the less it is actually played, since most of the competing teams
are now in a state of permanent warfare with each other over the
interpretation of these rules. This is all for the best, because in the long
run a good solid war is less psychologically damaging than a protracted game
of Brockian Ultra-Cricket.
Chapter 20
As Arthur ran darting, dashing and panting down the side of the mountain
he suddenly felt the whole bulk of the mountain move very, very slightly
beneath him. There was a rumble, a roar, and a slight blurred movement, and a
lick of heat in the distance behind and above him. He ran in a frenzy of fear.
The land began to slide, and he suddenly felt the force of the word
"landslide" in a way which had never been apparent to him before. It had
always just been a word to him, but now he was suddenly and horribly aware
that sliding is a strange and sickening thing for land to do. It was doing it
with him on it. He felt ill with fear and shaking. The ground slid, the
mountain slurred, he slipped, he fell, he stood, he slipped again and ran. The
avalance began.
Stones, then rocks, then boulders which pranced past him like clumsy
puppies, only much, much bigger, much, much harder and heavier, and almost
infinitely more likely to kill you if they fell on you. His eyes danced with
them, his feet danced with the dancing ground. He ran as if running was a
terrible sweating sickness, his heart pounded to the rhythm of the pounding
geological frenzy around him.
The logic of the situation, i.e. that he was clearly bound to survive if
the next foreshadowed incident in the saga of his inadvertent persecution of
Agrajag was to happen, was utterly failing to impinge itself on his mind or
exercise any restraining influence on him at this time. He ran with the fear
of death in him, under him, over him and grabbing hold of his hair.
And suddenly he tripped again and was hurled forward by his considerable
momentum. But just at the moment that he was about to hit the ground
astoundingly hard he saw lying directly in front of him a small navy-blue
holdall that he knew for a fact he had lost in the baggage-retrieval system at
Athens airport some ten years in his personal time-scale previously, and in
his astonishment he missed the ground completely and bobbed off into the air
with his brain singing.
What he was doing was this: he was flying. He glanced around him in
surprise, but there could be no doubt that that was what he was doing. No part
of him was touching the ground, and no part of him was even approaching it. He
was simply floating there with boulders hurtling through the air around him.
He could now do something about that. Blinking with the noneffort of it he
wafted higher into the air, and now the boulders were hurtling through the air
beneath him.
He looked downwards with intense curiosity. Between him and the shivering
ground were now some thirty feet of empty air, empty that is if you discounted
the boulders which didn't stay in it for long, but bounded downwards in the
iron grip of the law of gravity; the same law which seemed, all of a sudden,
to have given Arthur a sabbatical.
It occurred to him almost instantly, with the instinctive correctness that
self-preservation instils in the mind, that he mustn't try to think about it,
that if he did, the law of gravity would suddenly glance sharply in his
direction and demand to know what the hell he thought he was doing up there,
and all would suddenly be lost.
So he thought about tulips. It was difficult, but he did. He thought about
the pleasing firm roundness of the bottom of tulips, he thought about the
interesting variety of colours they came in, and wondered what proportion of
the total number of tulips that grew, or had grown, on the Earth would be
found within a radius of one mile from a windmill. After a while he got
dangerously bored with this train of thought, felt the air slipping away
beneath him, felt that he was drifting down into the paths of the bouncing
boulders that he was trying so hard not to think about, so he thought about
Athens airport for a bit and that kept him usefully annoyed for about five
minutes - at the end of which he was startled to discover that he was now
floating about two hundred yards above the ground.
He wondered for a moment how he was going to get back down to it, but
instantly shied away from that area of speculation again, and tried to look at
the situation steadily.
He was flying, What was he going to do about it? He looked back down at
the ground. He didn't look at it hard, but did his best just to give it an
idle glance, a
s it were, in passing. There were a couple of things he couldn't
help noticing. One was that the eruption of the mountain seemed now to have
spent itself - there was a crater just a little way beneath the peak,
presumably where the rock had caved in on top of the huge cavernous cathedral,
the statue of himself, and the sadly abused figure of Agrajag.
The other was his hold-all, the one he had lost at Athens airport. It was
sitting pertly on a piece of clear ground, surrounded by exhausted boulders
but apparently hit by none of them. Why this should be he could not speculate,
but since this mystery was completely overshadowed by the monstrous
impossibility of the bag's being there in the first place, it was not a
speculation he really felt strong enough for anyway. The thing is, it was
there. And the nasty, fake leopard-skin bag seemed to have disappeared, which
was all to the good, if not entirely to the explicable.
He was faced with the fact that he was going to have to pick the thing up.
Here he was, flying along two hundred yards above the surface of an alien
planet the name of which he couldn't even remember. He could not ignore the
plaintive posture of this tiny piece of what used to be his life, here, so
many light-years from the pulverized remains of his home.
Furthermore, he realized, the bag, if it was still in the state in which
he lost it, would contain a can which would have in it the only Greek olive
oil still surviving in the Universe.
Slowly, carefully, inch by inch, he began to bob downwards, swinging
gently from side to side like a nervous sheet of paper feeling its way towards
the ground.
It went well, he was feeling good. The air supported him, but let him
through. Two minutes later he was hovering a mere two feet above the bag, and
was faced with some difficult decision. He bobbed there lightly. He frowned,
but again, as lightly as he could.
If he picked the bag up, could he carry it? Mightn't the extra weight just
pull him straight to the ground?
Mightn't the mere act of touching something on the ground suddenly
discharge whatever mysterious force it was that was holding him in the air?
Mightn't he be better off just being sensible at this point and stepping
out of the air, back on to the ground for a moment or two?
If he did, would he ever be able to fly again?
ADAMS, Douglas - Life, the Universe, and Everything Page 12