And Another Thing...

by Eoin Colfer

  And Another Thing…

  Douglas Adams’s

  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

  Part Six of Three

  EOIN COLFER

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2009

  1

  Copyright © Eoin Colfer and Completely Unexpected Productions Limited, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Lyric from ‘History’ by Tenacious D reprinted by permission of Time For My Breakfast and by permission of Buttflap Music.

  ‘My Way’ English words by Paul Anka. Original French words by Gilles Thibault. Music by Jacques Revaux and Claude Francois.

  Copyright © 1967 societe Des Nouvelles and Editions Eddie Barclay

  Copyright © 1969 Chrysalis Standards, Inc. Copyright renewed

  All rights for the USA administered by Chrysalis Standards, Inc., Editions Jeune Musique, Warner Chappell Music France, Jingoro Co. and Architectural Music Co.

  All rights reserved

  Used by permission

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193299-6

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About Eoin Colfer

  About Douglas Adams

  A Rough Guide to the Science of Hitchhiker’s

  Listen to the first chapter of And Another Thing…

  For Jackie, Finn & Seán, who miss me when I am away but not as much as I miss them. If you want to remind yourselves what I look like there should be a picture of me at the back of this book.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Douglas Adams for dismantling my perspective and rebuilding it in another dimension. Thanks and love to Jackie for all of her ideas, guidance, research and input into the writing of this book and all the others over the past ten years. Much gratitude to Sophie and Ed for putting this project together and to Polly and Jane for their kind support. Thanks to Alex and Leslie, my eagle-eyed editors, who have probably fixed these acknowledgements. And, finally, thanks to my old friend Ted Roche, who introduced me not only to Hitchhiker’s but also to Whitesnake. Debts that can never be repaid.

  The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying ‘And another thing…’ twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument

  – Douglas Adams

  We have travelled through space and time, my friends, to rock this house again

  – Tenacious D

  Foreword

  If you own a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy then one of the last things you would be likely to type into its v-board would be the very same title of that particular Sub-Etha volume as, presumably, since you have a copy, then you already know all about the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor. However, presumption has been the runner-up in every major Causes of Intergalactic Conflict poll for the past few millennia, first place invariably going to Land-Grabbing Bastards with Big Weapons and third usually being a toss-up between Coveting Another Sentient Being’s Significant Other and Misinterpretation of Simple Hand Gestures. One man’s ‘Wow! This pasta is fantastico!’ is another’s ‘Your momma plays it fast and loose with sailors.’

  Let us say, for example, that you are on an eight-hour layover in Port Brasta without enough credit for a Gargle Blaster on your implant, and if upon realizing that you know almost nothing about this supposedly wonderful book you hold in your hands, you decide out of sheer brain-fogging boredom to type the words ‘the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy’ into the search bar on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, what results will this flippant tappery yield?

  Firstly, an animated icon appears in a flash of pixels and informs you that there are three results, which is confusing as there are obviously five listed below, numbered in the usual order.

  Guide Note: That is if your understanding of the usual numerical order is from small to large and not from derivative to inspired, as with Folfangan Slugs who judge a number’s worth based on the artistic integrity of its shape. Folfangan supermarket receipts are beauteous ribbons, but their economy collapses at least once a week.

  Each of these five results is a lengthy article, accompanied by many hours of video and audio files and some dramatic reconstructions featuring quite well-known actors.

  This is not the story of those articles.

  But if you scroll down past article five, ignoring the offers to remortgage your kidneys and lengthen your pormwrangler, you will come to a line in tiny font that reads ‘If you liked this, then you might also like to read…’ Have your icon rub itself along this link and you will be led to a text only appendix with absolutely no audio and not so much as a frame of video shot by a student director who made the whole thing in his bedroom and paid his drama soc. mates with sandwiches.

  This is the story of that appendix.

  Introduction

  So far as we know… The Imperial Galactic Government decided, over a bucket of jewelled crabs one day, that a hyperspace expressway was needed in the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy. This decision was rushed through channels ostensibly to pre-empt traffic congestion in the distant future, but actually to provide employment for a few ministers’ cousins who were forever mooching around Government Plaza. Unfortunately the Earth was in the path of this planned expressway, so the remorseless Vogons were dispatched in a constructor fleet to remove the offending planet with gentle use of thermonuclear weapons.

  Two survivors managed to hitch a ride on a Vogon ship: Arthur Dent, a young English employee of a regional radio station whose plans for the morning did not include having his home pla
net blasted to dust beneath his slippers. Had the human race held a referendum, it would have been quite likely that Arthur Dent would have been voted least suitable to carry the hopes of humankind into space. Arthur’s university yearbook actually referred to him as ‘most likely to end up living in a hole in the Scottish highlands with only the chip on his shoulder for company’. Luckily Arthur’s Betelgeusean friend, Ford Prefect, a roving researcher for that illustrious interstellar travel almanac The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was more of an optimist. Ford saw silver linings where Arthur saw only clouds and so between them they made one prudent space traveller, unless their travels led them to the planet Junipella where the clouds actually did have silver linings. Arthur would have doubtless steered the ship straight into the nearest cloud of gloom and Ford would have almost certainly attempted to steal the silver, which would have resulted in the catastrophic combustion of the natural gas inside the lining. The explosion would have been pretty, but as a heroic ending it would lack a certain something, i.e. a hero in one piece.

  The only other Earthling left alive was Tricia McMillan, or Trillian to use her cool, spacey name, a fiercely ambitious astrophysicist cum fledgling reporter who had always believed that there was more to life than life on Earth. In spite of this conviction, Trillian had nevertheless been amazed when she was whisked off to the stars by Zaphod Beeblebrox, the maverick two-headed Galactic President.

  What can one say of President Beeblebrox that he has not already had printed on T-shirts and circulated throughout the Galaxy free with every uBid purchase? ZAPHOD SAYS YES TO ZAPHOD was probably the most famous T-shirt slogan, though not even his team of psychiatrists understood what it actually meant. Second favourite was probably: BEEBLEBROX. JUST BE GLAD HE’S OUT THERE.

  It is a universal maxim that if someone goes to the trouble of printing something on a T-shirt then it is almost definitely not a hundred per cent untrue, which is to say that it is more than likely fairly definitely not altogether false. Consequentially, when Zaphod Beeblebrox arrived on a planet, people invariably said ‘yes’ to whatever questions he asked and when he left they were glad he was out there.

  These less than traditional heroes were improbably drawn to each other and embarked on a series of adventures, which mostly involved gadding around through space and time, sitting on quantum sofas, chatting with gaseous computers and generally failing to find meaning or fulfilment in any corner of the Universe.

  Arthur Dent eventually returned to the hole in space where the Earth used to be and discovered that the hole had been filled by an Earth-sized planet that looked and behaved remarkably like Earth. In fact this planet was an Earth, just not Arthur’s. Not this Arthur’s, at any rate. Because his home planet was at the centre of a Plural zone, the Arthur we are concerned with had found himself shuffled along the dimensional axis to an Earth that had never been destroyed by Vogons. This rather made our Arthur’s day, and his usually pessimistic mood was further improved when he encountered Fenchurch, his soulmate. Luckily this idyllic period was not cut short by bumping into any alternate Universe Arthurs who may have been wandering around, possibly in Los Angeles working for the BBC.

  Arthur and his true love travelled the stars together until Fenchurch vanished in mid-conversation during a hyperspace jump. Arthur searched the Universe for her, paying his way by exchanging bodily fluids for first-class tickets. Eventually he was stranded on the planet Lamuella and made a life for himself there as sandwich maker for a primitive tribe who believed that sandwiches were pretty hot stuff.

  His tranquillity was disturbed by the arrival of a couriered box from Ford Prefect, which contained The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Mk II in the form of a smarmy pan-dimensional black bird. Trillian, who was now a successful newswoman, had a delivery of her own for Arthur in the shape of Random Dent, the daughter conceived with the donated price of seat 2D on the Alpha Centauri red-eye.

  Arthur reluctantly took on the role of parent, but was completely out of his depth with the truculent teenager. Random stole the Guide Mk II and set a course for Earth, where she believed she could finally feel at home. Arthur and Ford followed, to find Trillian already on the planet.

  Only then is the Mk II’s objective revealed. The Vogons, irritated by the Earth’s refusal to stay ka-boomed, had engineered the bird to lure the escapees back to the planet before they destroy it in every dimension, thus fulfilling their original order.

  Arthur and Ford rushed at semi-breakneck speed to London’s Club Beta, pausing only to purchase foie gras and blue suede shoes. Thanks to the old dimensional axis/ Plural zone thing, they found Trillian and Tricia McMillan co-existing in the same space-time, both being screamed at by an emotional Random.

  Confused? Arthur was, but not for long. Once he noticed the green death rays pulsating through the lower atmosphere, all of the day’s other niggling problems seemed to lose their nigglyness – after all, confusion was not likely to slice him into a million seared pieces.

  The Vogon Prostetnic had done his job well. Not only had he lured Arthur, Ford and Trillian back to the planet Earth, but he’d also managed to trick a Grebulon captain into destroying the Earth for him, thus saving the crew several hundred Vog hours’ paperwork with the munitions office.

  Arthur and his friends sit powerless in London’s Club Beta and can only watch as the ultimate war on Earth is waged, unable to participate, unless involuntary spasming and liquefaction of bone matter counts as participation. On this occasion the weapons of destruction are death rays rather than Vogon torpedoes, but then, one planet-killing device is pretty much the same as another when you’re on the receiving end…

  1

  According to a janitor’s assistant at the Maximegalon University, who often loiters outside lecture halls, the Universe is sixteen billion years old. This supposed truth is scoffed at by a clutch of Betelgeusean beat poets who claim to have moleskin pads older than that (rat-a-tat-tat). Seventeen billion, they say, at the very least, according to their copy of the Wham Bam Big Bang scrolls. A human teenage prodigy once called it at fourteen billion based on a complicated computation involving the density of moon rock and the distance between two pubescent females on an event horizon. One of the minor Asgardian gods did mumble that he’d read something somewhere about some sort of a major-ish cosmic event eighteen billion years ago, but no one pays much attention to pronouncements from on high any more, not since the birth of the gods debacle, or Thorgate as it has come to be known.

  However many billions it actually is, it is billions and the old man on the beach looked as though he’d counted off at least one of those million millions on his fingers. His skin was ivory parchment and, viewed in profile, he closely resembled a quavering uppercase S.

  The man remembered having a cat once, if memories could be trusted as anything more than neuron configurations across trillions of synapses. Memories could not be touched with one’s fingers, could not be felt like the surf flowing over his gnarled toes could be felt. But then what were physical feelings if not more electrical messages from the brain? Why believe in them either? Was there anything trustworthy in the Universe that one could hug and hold on to in the midst of a butterfly storm, other than a Hawaliusian wind staunch?

  Bloody butterflies, thought the man. Once they’d figured out the wing fluttering a continent away thing, millions of mischievous Lepidoptera had banded together and turned malicious.

  Surely that could not be real, he thought. Butterfly storms?

  But then more neurons poured across even more synapses and whispered of improbability theories. If a thing was bound never to happen, then that thing would resolutely refuse not to happen as soon as possible.

  Butterfly storms. It was only a matter of time.

  The old man wrenched his focus from this phenomenon before some other catastrophe occurred to him and began its rough slouch to be born.

  Was there anything to trust? Anything to take comfort from?

  The setting suns lit
crescents on the wavelets, burnished the clouds, striped the palm leaves silver and set the china teapot on his veranda table twinkling.

  Ah, yes, thought the old man. Tea. At the centre of an uncertain and possibly illusory Universe there would always be tea.

  The old man traced two natural numbers in the sand with a walking stick fashioned from a discarded robot leg and watched as the waves washed them away.

  One moment there was forty-two and the next there wasn’t. Maybe the numbers were never there and perhaps they didn’t even matter.

  For some reason this made the old man cackle as he leaned into the incline and plodded to his veranda. He settled with much creaking of bone and wood into a wicker chair that was totally sympathetic to the surroundings, calling to his android to bring some biscuits.

  The android brought Rich Tea.

  Good choice.

  Seconds later the sudden appearance of a hovering metal bird caused a momentary lapse in dunking concentration and the old man lost a large crescent of his biscuit to the tea.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ grumbled the man. ‘Do you know how long I have been working on that technique? Dunking and sandwiches. What else are left to a person?’

  The bird was unperturbed.

  ‘An unperturbed bird,’ said the old man softly, enjoying the sound of it. He closed the bad eye that hadn’t worked properly since he’d fallen out of a tree as a giddy boy, and examined the creature.

  The bird hovered, its metallic feathers shimmering crimson in the sun’s rays, its wings beating up tiny maelstroms.

  ‘Battery,’ it said in a voice that reminded the old man of an actor he had once seen playing Othello at London’s Globe Theatre. Amazing what you can get from a single word.

  ‘You did say “battery”?’ asked the man, just to confirm. It could possibly have been ‘flattery’, or even ‘hattery’. His hearing was not what it used to be, especially on initial consonants.