by Eoin Colfer
Arthur was delighted to have something to be interested in. ‘What is that?’
Ford squinted at him. ‘That’s more sarcasm, is it?’
‘No. It’s a genuine question born of ignorance.’
‘Well, in that case, happy to enlighten you, buddy. It’s a cigarette.’
‘Oh.’ Arthur felt his interest waning.
‘But not just any cigarette,’ continued Ford, holding the roll-up as though it were a grail of the rather holy kind.
‘Got a wide-bore death ray inside it?’
‘Course not.’
‘How about a matter transporter?’
‘You know, that would be useful. But no.’
‘So, it’s just strands of tobacco wrapped in paper, then?’
‘Tobacco? Paper? Honestly, Arthur, you humans only use ten per cent of your brains, and you fill that fraction with tea-related information. This is a Falian albino marsh worm. Deceased obviously. Spends its life absorbing hallucinogenic gas from the vents. Then dies and turns stiff-ish.’
Arthur glanced upwards. A death ray had just sliced off the top floor, without even slowing down. A rather large airplane pinwheeled through the patch of sky above and Arthur fancied he could hear someone singing ‘Kumbaya’.
‘Is this a long story? Only I imagine our minutes are numbered. And the number is a single number. Between one and three maybe.’
‘No, nearly at the good bit. Hitchhikers call these joysticks. One puff and you feel blissfully happy. Love everybody, forgive your enemies, all that stuff. Two puffs make you curious about just about everything, including the horrible death that is probably coming your way for you to have lit this baby in the first place. This is going to be great, you tell yourself. I am about to experience an energy shift to a new plane of existence. What will it be like? Will I make new friends? Do they have beer?’
‘Third puff?’ asked Arthur, fulfilling his role in the storytelling partnership.
Ford rummaged in his satchel for a light. ‘After the third puff, your brain explodes and you feel a little peckish.’
‘Ah,’ said Arthur, wondering how many hitchhikers had expired before they figured out the third puff thing.
‘Here we go,’ said Ford, pulling out a plastic lighter with the legend THE DOMAIN OF THE KING in blinking lights on the shaft. ‘One puff or two?’
Arthur had never been much of a smoker. Whenever he tried a cigarette, he felt so guilty about what he was doing to the lungs his parents gave him that it made him feel quite ill. Once, at a teenage party, Arthur did attempt to lounge about on the patio toying with a Silk Cut Blue, but ended throwing up on the hostess in an effort to not throw up on her chihuahua. He still shuddered at the memory and looked around to see if anyone from that party was pointing at him.
‘Not for me, thanks. Dicky tummy.’
‘Okay, pal,’ said Ford, sparking the lighter. ‘Blissful happiness, here I come.’
‘I’ll say so long now then, Ford. I wouldn’t have missed a minute.’
‘Really?’
‘No. Not really. There were a few minutes I could have done without.’
The minute when Fenchurch disappeared, for example.
Ford had taken a single puff from the joystick when a giant jelly cactus popped into existence in the centre of the lobby. It wobbled for a moment, then turned into a huge bloodshot eye. The eye cast itself wildly about the room, then rolled back and became a quartet of Pom Pom Squids, playing thousands of kazoos in perfect harmony.
‘Beautiful,’ said Ford, wiping a tear from his eye. ‘That makes me so… There aren’t the words.’
The squids hit a high note then disappeared in a flurry of rainbow-gilded bubbles, which popped musically to become a white spaceship, a glittering teardrop with a few celery stalk fins.
‘The Heart of Gold,’ breathed Arthur. ‘You have got to be joking.’
Guide Note: This spaceship was so essentially cool that one look at its brochure could skip a teenage male a couple of decades into the future, straight into the middle of his own mid-life crisis. The Heart of Gold was powered both by conventional engines and the revolutionary Infinite Improbability Drive, which allowed the ship to be everywhere at once until it decided which where it wanted to be. Coincidences, déjà vu and increased amounts of junk mail were all side effects of the Heart of Gold’s unconventional drive field.
Ford ground the tip of the joystick on the sole of his shoe, then popped the cigarette into his satchel. He jumped to his feet. ‘Let’s go, Arthur. Don’t look so surprised. The Earth gets destroyed and we get rescued by Zaphod. That’s the way it always goes, give or take a few details and half a dozen light years. What a trip. A cosmic trip.’
‘So why the joystick?’
‘One puff only, my man. Blissfully happy. I find it helps before a reunion with Zaphod.’
Arthur stumbled down the steps. ‘But what about Tricia? Isn’t she supposed to come with us?’
‘Hey, Trillian is the same person. Fate can only take one of everyone. Be happy for Tricia, she’s on another plane. Pure energy. Can’t you see the colours?’
Arthur scowled. ‘The green death-ray colours? Yes, I can see those. I would prefer to see them from a great distance, so can we please get out of here?’
‘Absolutely, Arthur. If we don’t go soon, my froody shoes will be ruined. Although the blue one might turn a nice shade of purple, which would make me enormously happy.’
Arthur gently shepherded Random towards the glowing white ship. ‘Come on. We need to leave now.’
‘Fertle,’ mumbled the girl. ‘I want my Fertle.’
‘I want my Fertle!’ chuckled Ford, playfully tickling Trillian. ‘Catchy, isn’t it?’
The white spaceship shuddered and a door opened smoothly, telescoping to the ground. Zaphod Beeblebrox, Galactic President, interplanetary fugitive and committed self-serving entrepreneur, appeared in the doorway, planetsized ego shining through his bright eyes, golden hair bouncing in shoulder-length curls. Very outer-ring, but he carried it off well.
‘Okay, let me get this straight,’ Zaphod said, tapping his temples. ‘Hello, Earthlings. I have once again come to save you.’ Then he seemed to notice the on-going planet destruction unfolding before him. ‘Hold on just a minute. This isn’t Ireland!’
Ford ran up the gangplank to embrace his semi-cousin.
‘Zaphod! I am so happy to see you.’
Zaphod blinked. ‘Happy to see me? You must be smoking something.’
They piled into the Heart of Gold and zipped up to a couple of hundred feet, employing the ship’s Dodge-O-Matic program to evade the death beams until the Infinite Improbability Drive was powered up, to blast them wherever it was they expected never to be.
Ford Prefect was the only one of the ship’s occupants who had thought to look down, and he saw a forlorn-looking H2G2-2 hovering beside Club Beta’s single remaining chandelier. It casually dodged a buzzing death ray and then, with a why bother shrug, collapsed in on itself like an origami bird being folded by invisible hands until all that was left was a diamond of blackness that zipped around the roofless hall, decapitated a rat out of sheer badness, then winked out of all existences in all times.
Good riddance, thought Ford, and went in search of a drink.
Had Ford not gone in search of a drink, he might have seen a tall, thirty-ish man, wearing a dressing gown and slippers, stumble into Club Beta, clutching his towel. The man barely had time to glance skywards in confused wonderment before an emerald death ray blasted him and his ginger companion to atoms.
Guide Note: This was one of the many deaths of Arthur Dent, now that one Arthur had managed to break the cosmic pattern and skip dimensions to be rescued. The pattern unravelled for the rest and they were picked off one by one, by improbable accidents hurriedly cobbled together by a ticked-off Fate.
One Arthur was electrocuted by malfunctioning headphones as he produced a local radio show discussing recent UFO sightings in the ar
ea (cosmic black humour).
A second Arthur woke up one morning convinced that he could fly, and no amount of persuasion could prevent him from scaling a radio tower and hurling himself off.
A third was crushed by a buffadozer during a protest to save his house. The buffadozer did not suffer any physical damage but was traumatized by the event and went on to sue the council, specifically naming a certain Mr Prosser in the suit. Prosser was subsequently given the axe.
Yet another Arthur was drowned in a freak rainstorm shortly after giving the two fingers to a truck driver who had cut him off on the motorway.
The list is almost endless. Suffice it to say, without cataloguing every single one of the various deaths, misadventure or adventure, accidental (or on purpose), occidental, dental, mental, rental, retail, foetal, faecal or decal (smothered by cling-film), to name but a few, that only one Arthur Dent survived in any dimension after the final, once and for all, no-tricky-loophole destruction of Earth. The same is true of both Ford Prefect and Trillian, but not Random or Zaphod, who were sticking to their pan-dimensional roles well enough to earn gold stars.
Related Reading:
Someone’s Out to Get Me by Arthur Dent, 2803
He Believed He Could Fly by Mrs A. Dent, 1107
The last remaining Arthur Dent sat in his usual place on the floor of the Heart of Gold’s flight deck, bumping his head repeatedly on a familiar shelf, and yet he did not feel comforted. It may have been the green death rays flashing past the view screens, or it may have been that somewhere, deep in his primal essence, in the stardust that made up his atoms, Arthur realized that he was the last Arthur Dent in the Universe. Truly alone in the magnitude of stuff.
All Arthur could have verbalized was that he missed his towel and would have paid a large sum of money to have somebody with soft bosoms hug him and tell him that things were going to be all right.
Trillian and Random were pretty depressed by the whole destruction of their home planet thing too and huddled together underneath the refrigerator. Ford Prefect, however, was positively ebullient, thanks to the single puff on his petrified worm.
‘This is great!’ he enthused, clapping Zaphod on the shoulder. ‘Look at those death beams. Did you ever think you would live to see a Grebulon death lattice from the inside?’
‘Grebulons, wow. Those guys are vicious,’ responded his cousin with equal enthusiasm (Zaphod was basically a one-puff man all the time). ‘What a light show. Do you remember those thermonuclear warheads at Magrathea?’
‘I do,’ said Ford fondly. ‘They were something. Foxy beggars, with their little jinks and turns, but we shook ’em.’
‘We sure did, cousin. And we’re going to shake these Grebu-guys too.’
Trillian winced as a ray scorched the spaceship’s port fin. ‘Can we just get out of here?’
Zaphod spun like a disco dancer and shot Trillian with two finger guns. ‘Pow pow, cutie. Miss me? Bet you did… so would I.’
‘Later, Zaphod. Can the ship take us to safety?’
‘Not so simple. We can’t shoot through the lattice without being sliced up like Halitoxican party grevlova. We have to let the Improbability Drive run a few numbers and get its head around the problem.’
‘The computer has a head now?’
Zaphod danced a little Betelgeusean foreplay jig. ‘Finally someone makes a head comment. I was starting to think you guys were all on the joysticks.’
‘Sorry, Zaphod,’ Arthur snapped. ‘We’re a little distracted by impending violent death.’
‘Sure, the computer’s got a head,’ continued Zaphod, ignoring Arthur’s thread of the conversation. ‘Come on, people. Don’t you notice anything different about me?’
They got it at the same time.
‘Goosnargh,’ said Ford.
‘What the…’ said Trillian.
‘Blooming’eck,’ said Arthur, sounding a little like a Cockney rat.
Zaphod Beeblebrox had, perched rakishly on his shoulders, a single head.
Guide Note: Zaphod Beeblebrox’s two heads and three arms have become as much a part of Galaxy lore as the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast’s cranial spigot, or Eccentrica Gallumbits’s third breast. And though Zaphod claims to have had his third arm fitted to improve his chances at ski-boxing, many media pundits believe that the arm was actually fitted so that the President could simultaneously fondle all of Eccentrica’s mammaries. This attention to erotic detail resulted in Miss Gallumbits referring to Zaphod in Street Walkie-Talkie Weekly as the ‘The best bang since the Big One’, a quote which was worth at least half a billion votes in the presidential election and twice as many daily hits on the private members’ section of the Zaphod Confidential Sub-Etha site.
The origin of Zaphod’s second head is shrouded in mystery and seems to be the one thing the President is reluctant to discuss with the media, other than to claim that two heads are better than none, a comment which was taken as a direct jibe by Counsellor Spinalé Trunco of the Headless Horsemen tribe of Jaglan Beta. Zaphod’s response to this accusation was, ‘Of course it’s a jibe, baby. Dude’s got zero heads. Come on!’ Early images do represent Zaphod with two heads, but in many shots they do not appear to be identical. In fact, in one vidcap, which has famously come to be known as the ‘I’m With Stupid’ shot, Zaphod’s left head appears to be that of a sallow female, attempting to bite the right head’s ear. A Betelgeusean woman later surfaced, claiming to be the original owner of the ‘sallow female’ head. Loolu Softhands told Beebleblog that ‘Zaphod wanted us to be together, like, all the time, so we conjoined. After a couple of months he found out that he liked the two-headed thing more than he liked me. So we went out for a few Blasters one night and I woke up back on my own body. Bastard.’
Zaphod has never refuted Miss Softhands’s story, leading to speculation that his second head is a narcissistic affectation, an allegation President Beeblebrox claims not to understand.
Related Reading:
Head to Head with Mr President by Loolu Softhands
It’s Just One Boob After Another by Eccentrica Gallumbits
Ford embraced his cousin.
‘You finally took it off,’ he said, while simultaneously chewing his lip, which is not easy. ‘Removing a head sounds like the action of an imbecile, but for some reason I am totally in favour of it.’
Arthur knew the reason. His friend was still riding the worm.
‘Are you sure that was a great idea, Zaphod? Didn’t that head do stuff?’
Zaphod raised a single finger, the way a person might if they were about to make a significant announcement. ‘Shut your mouth, monkey. I am talking to my cousin.’
‘I thought we were past that, Zaphod. Haven’t we been through enough?’
Zaphod reared backwards. ‘Oh. Hey, Arthur. Is that you, buddy? My other head had better eyesight. Plus I didn’t recognize you without the pool garment.’
‘Dressing gown.’
‘Whatever. Important information only at this point, I think. Death rays and so forth.’
‘Is it important that we know where your other head is?’ shouted Arthur, keeping his syntax as stripped back as possible.
Zaphod clapped his hands. ‘Oh, yeah. Yessir. You are all going to love this.’
He crab-danced to the low crescent bank of computer controls. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, here he is, give him a big hand because your lives are in his hands.’
‘Death rays!’ howled Arthur, as the Dodge-O-Matic sent the ship into a tight pirouette. ‘Can we get on with it?’
Ford cradled Arthur’s cheeks in his palms. ‘Life is about moments, Arthur,’ he said seriously. ‘That’s the secret. Moments are longer than you think. If you add up all the good moments, then, you know – it’s, like, ages.’
It really infuriated Arthur that there might be something in that reasoning.
‘Very well, Ford. Do you think it might be possible for the ladies to see Zaphod’s other head?’
‘Don’t patroni
ze us,’ said Random.
‘Of course not, sweetie.’
‘Screw you.’
Zaphod stamped a silver boot heel. ‘Can we get back to my moment? The head, remember?’ He tapped a short, sequential code into the computer.
‘Not much of a code, is it?’ commented Arthur. ‘One two three?’
Zaphod scowled at him. ‘Eyesight and numbers. I am s-o-o-o bad at life’s minor things. I’m more of a forward-thrusting, back-lit, great-discovery-making champion of the boudoir. Head number two takes care of the little-man stuff. Or as I call him… Left Brain, because he was on the left, and he’s the brainy one.’
‘Show us the head!’ shouted Arthur.
Zaphod thumbed a red button and a crystal sphere emerged from a bucket of gel in the console, rising smoothly to float at a median eye level.
‘The gel is full of things, you know,’ Zaphod explained with standard vagueness. ‘Stuff that’s good for the things that need to be done.’
‘Please shut up, brother,’ said Zaphod’s second head, which rested on a cushion of wires and fuses inside the sphere. ‘You’re embarrassing yourself. And me.’
Left Brain resembled Zaphod almost exactly, apart from some styling differences. Where the Galactic President was flamboyantly highlighted and may or may not have been wearing eyeliner, Left Brain’s hair was close-cropped with a severe parting and his eyes shone with laser-sharp intelligence and strength of purpose.
‘The gel is an electrolytic compound that feeds my organic cells and powers the anti-grav field around the sphere.’
‘And the speakers, LB,’ said Zaphod. ‘A man’s gotta have sounds.’
‘Yes, ZB,’ sighed Left Brain. ‘The speakers. Now don’t you have someone to wink at in the mirror?’
Zaphod leaned heavily on the console. ‘Some days I think maybe separating was a mistake. But since Left Brain took over the ship from Eddie, we haven’t exploded once. Not one time. And the causing wars thing is way down. That’s good, right?’
‘Now that the ship is not being run by my imbecilic predecessor, our life expectancy has risen by eight hundred per cent.’
Random, a politician, nodded appreciatively at the statistic.