And Another Thing...

by Eoin Colfer

  That will be the first thing he checks from now on. Who are these people we are about to obliterate?

  ‘You will find a way,’ said the face in the mirror, a face that looked almost kindly without the drool cup.

  Mown never left his quarters without his drool cup now. The last thing he wanted to look was kindly, which could be seen as a symptom of evolution. As a matter of fact, Mown had added a foot crimper to his wardrobe after the Twinkletoes comment on the bridge. It didn’t do to be too sprightly on a Vogon deck.

  ‘One day we will dance,’ he said to his reflection.

  ‘One day we will sing,’ said the face in the mirror, and then, ‘It was the right thing to do, what you did back there. Right and good.’

  His father’s voice erupted from the speaker over Mown’s bed.

  ‘Constant! I have some planetary council or other on the line claiming that because of their leap year system, we haven’t given enough notice of their enforced destruction. I need you to take a look at it.’

  ‘Right away, Daddy,’ said Mown, stashing the mirror and strapping the foot crimper across his toes. ‘I’m on my way.’

  ‘That’s my good little Utter Bastard,’ said Jeltz, and hung up.

  Not yet I’m not, thought Mown, hobbling to the door. Not just yet.

  Nano

  Arthur Dent was beginning to understand his daughter’s feelings of isolation.

  ‘I see now what you were talking about,’ he told her one morning before work. ‘We don’t fully belong anywhere. Earth was our planet, but it’s gone now. And even though we called it home, Earth hadn’t been our home for decades. We both lived full lives away from its surface. Me on my island, you in Megabrantis. We are cosmic nomads, which would be a great name for a band, by the way, interstellar drifters with no one to cling to in this eternity of displacement but each other.’

  And Random said, ‘What will you put on my sandwiches today, Daddy? Bearing in mind that I’m trying to be a vegetarian now and beef is not vegetarian.’

  ‘That beef snuck on to the sandwich,’ said Arthur lamely, and he realized that Random was not as unrelentlessly unhappy as she had been. Perhaps the daily attrition in Hillman Hunter’s office was giving his daughter a focus for her ire and maybe Arthur should be grateful for the relatively pleasant teenager who presented herself at the breakfast table most mornings, instead of trying to drag her down into the ichor of his wounded psyche.

  ‘Coleslaw?’

  Random kissed his cheek. ‘Lovely. No crusts.’

  ‘Crusts? Of course not. What are we, barbarians? How could I call myself a sandwich maker?’

  And so on and so forth. By the time Arthur had finished his protestations and moved on to listing his sandwich-maker credentials, Random had stuffed her lunch into the satchel lent to her by Ford and left for work.

  Arthur stuck to a couple of weeks of stay-at-home Daddy and then began looking for excuses to go on a trip.

  ‘Just you and me,’ he told Ford. ‘It’ll be like the old days but without the exploding planets and the other people who were with us in the old days.’

  ‘No can do, mate,’ Ford had responded, trying his best to seem regretful, which was difficult for him with a volcanic mud mask covering his features and two delightful masseuses twanging his hamstrings. ‘There are an inordinate amount of spas on this little planet and I need to sample them all. I owe it to the hitchhikers out there.’

  Arthur glanced at the price list. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be surviving on thirty Altarian dollars a day?’

  ‘The Altarian stock market fluctuates quite a bit,’ said Ford, perhaps blushing a little under the mud. ‘One day thirty dollars can buy you a house in the suburbs with a two-child garage and three point four wives. The next you’d be lucky to have enough for a tube of anti-hangover leeches. I’m covering high- and low-end tourism, just to be safe.’

  And so Arthur was forced to explore alone.

  Alone. That was the dreaded word. He, Arthur Dent, was a lone man, alone and lonely. On loan from another dimension. A low no one with no one to lean on.

  All of which sounded a little pessimistic and self-absorbed, even to someone who had recently received a package addressed to: Self-Absorbed Pessimist, Nano. So Arthur decided to dress up his trip as paternal duty.

  ‘I am travelling to Cruxwan to vet this university for you,’ he told Random. She would argue, but he intended to knock down her points pre-emptively. ‘Now I know what you’re going to say, but what kind of father would I be if I let my only daughter loose in the Universe without checking it out first. Your mother and Wowbagger will be back from their cruise in a few days. Also, Ford will stay with you until I get back. It’s only a dozen jumps, so it shouldn’t take more than a week. Two at the most. Anyway, in virtual terms you’re a hundred years old, so a couple of weeks without me shouldn’t trouble you. I’m leaving you all my contact numbers and a supply of frozen sandwiches, so everything should be fine. Any questions?’

  Random had thought for a moment then asked: ‘What kind of sandwiches?’

  So now Arthur was seated in a lovely wraparound gel seat in business class of a hyperspace liner, which looked alarmingly like a set of male genitalia from the outside, but was quite pleasant inside once one banished the memory of the two hyperspace boosters and passenger tube. His seat had been purchased with space points from an account he’d opened in his pre-Lamuella days.

  The Fenchurch days.

  This is good, he told himself. I am doing something positive instead of moping around at home interfering with Random’s career. Now I can interfere with her education instead.

  Arthur allowed himself to be stripped to his flightard, oiled and slid into the chair. The gel seat folded around him and he selected The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from the touch menu. Arthur had the little icon rub itself along a link to Cruxwan. There were three thousand articles.

  Plenty to keep me going for the entire journey, he thought.

  Once all the passengers were on board, the pneumatic doors hissed closed and Arthur was relieved to find that he was the only one in his row. He would not consider himself a flight snob, but sometimes an oiled man in a flightard likes to climb out of his seat unobserved.

  They took off and Arthur watched Nano recede into space through the Ship-O-Cam box in his seat. Soon the entire nebula was little more than a shawl of cosmic gauze thrown over a network of stars.

  Shawl of cosmic gauze, thought Arthur. If Ford could write like that, he might actually make some money.

  A little blue engine icon appeared in the corner of his cushion and Arthur sucked deep on the sedastraw.

  Hyperspace. I have missed you.

  The jump was smoother than he remembered.

  Must be these new seats.

  The sensation reminded him a little of the softness of crashing into snowdrifts on a sledge that he had enjoyed as a boy, but without the shock of cold. This sensation was warm and welcoming. Arthur felt a tinge of loss at the corner of his good mood. Hyperspace could take things away too, especially if you were from a Plural zone.

  Arthur Dent relaxed and watched the Universe folding around him. Outside the cocoon of his chair swam asteroids, space creatures and the faces of a million other travellers. The Hitchhiker’s Guide identified them all with little colour-coded v-labels, but the travellers were gone and replaced by new ones before Arthur could read a single word.

  After a dreamlike first jump, the ship swung out of hyperspace, jittering to one side like a stone skimming on a lake. Seatbelt lights flashed for a few seconds, then winked out.

  I think I’ll just go to the loo, thought Arthur. Before the next jump.

  Obviously the seat could have recycled his recyclings, but Arthur felt that there were some things that should not be done in public into a glorified plastic bag.

  He deflated the chair a little and sat up woozily, and was mildly surprised to find the chair beside him occupied. The newcomer was chatting to h
im with some familiarity as though they had met before. Arthur’s eyes had not yet cleared but the voice was one he knew, and so was the tilt of the head and the sheaf of hair tucked behind one ear.

  Fenchurch?

  Arthur rubbed his eyes free of hyperdoze and looked again. It was Fenchurch, chatting animatedly as though they had never been apart.

  This cannot be true. I am dreaming.

  But he was not. It was Fenchurch, returned to him. She was exactly the same except for the blue mottling on her upper brow and the sloping ridge of bone in the centre of her forehead.

  Almost the same. Maybe two dimensions down. Her Arthur is gone and so is my Fenchurch.

  Fenchurch finished her story and laughed her tinkling laugh with the distinctive inhale at the end that always reminded Arthur of his mum’s hoover.

  If I know Fenchurch, she’s not finished talking yet, thought Arthur, still fighting his way out of a bemused fugue. There are more stories to come.

  He was right. Fenchurch tapped him on the forearm, tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and opened her mouth.

  ‘And another thing…’ she said.

  What other thing? Arthur wanted to ask. And what thing came before the other thing? Tell me about all the things in order.

  He wanted to say these words to this exotic yet familiar Fenchurch, but when he raised his hands to cradle her face, he saw that his fingers were transparent.

  What? Oh, no. No.

  Nausea swelled inside him, a barbed boil of static that flowed through his limbs and wrapped his brain in fog.

  The Plural zone, he realized. People from a Plural zone should never travel in hyperspace. They could end up anywhere.

  Arthur saw Fenchurch reach for him. Her beautiful mouth formed his name and then she was zooming away from him in a multicoloured elastic tunnel.

  She’s not zooming away, Arthur realized. It’s me. I’m the one zooming.

  The Galaxy swirled around him and he was naked in it without protection from the cold and radiation, and yet he did not die or suffer, simply fumed as the hyperspace anomaly drew him further away from his life. Eventually the sheer volume of stuff and perspective grew too terrifying and so Arthur closed his eyelids, which made absolutely no difference as they were transparent, and so he tried to focus on the one place where he had ever known true peace. He bore down mentally, conjuring every bamboo stalk in his hut and every white rock breaching the ocean on his stretch of sand. He did not think of the nebulae swirling past or the red stars spewing their flares into space. He did not think about these things so much that soon they were all he could not think about.

  After a time, which could not be measured even with a top-class digital watch, Arthur decided that he felt solid again. He strained his ears and heard waves crash, stuck out his tongue and tasted salt.

  Could it be? he wondered.

  Arthur Dent opened his eyes to find himself sitting on a beach very much like the one from his virtual life. There were differences in the curve of the coastline, but it was as near as made no difference; there was even a small hut just past the scrub line.

  Is this possible? he wondered. Or even probable, whatever that really means, if it means anything.

  He squinted against the glare of late evening sunrays and could not help but notice a squat yellow shape on the distant horizon.

  What? Surely not.

  Arthur would have added: It can’t be! but that particular phrase had given up its right to bear an exclamation mark since he’d met Zaphod Beeblebrox. Nothing couldn’t be and if it shouldn’t be then it generally was.

  A pootle-tink bird sidled alongside him.

  ‘Bloody Vogons,’ it said from the side of its beak. ‘They’ve been here a few days. Apparently someone forgot to file planning permission for that hut.’

  ‘Typical,’ said Arthur, then closed his eyes and wished he was somewhere else with someone else.

  Guide Note: Arthur Dent’s almost incredible bad luck created a providence vacuum which led to unbelievably good fortune for a being on the other side of the Universe. A certain Mr A. Grajag, a little-known sportscaster from Un Hye, was successfully resuscitated after six months of near flat lines on his hospital monitor following a space collision with a uBid cargo ship. He awoke to a cocktail reception from the planetary lotto committee to celebrate his numbers coming up as opposed to his number being up. At the same moment, his childhood sweetheart, who had recognized Mr Grajag from his stint on Celebrity Coma, burst into his hospital room declaring her long-nurtured and genuine love. The pair went on to marry and had two well-adjusted children who had no wish to follow their father into showbusiness, preferring to study law and medicine.

  Had Arthur Dent known about the Grajags it may have cheered him up a little.

  But not much.

  The End of One of the Middles

  EOIN COLFER is the author of the internationally bestselling Artemis Fowl series which has been translated into forty languages, most of them human. Other titles include The Wish List, The Supernaturalist and Half Moon Investigations, which was made into a hit TV series by the BBC. His books have won several awards, including the British Children’s Book of the Year, the German Children’s Book of the Year and a Betelgeusean Bloater award for shortest newcomer, which he keeps in his shed as it is radioactive and scares the children.

  And Another Thing is Eoin’s first book for adults, and he found the experience very similar to that of writing for young adults apart from less usage of the phrases it wasn’t my fault and none of you people get me.

  WHO IS THIS

  EOIN COLFER

  PERSON ANYWAY?

  18 MILLION COPIES

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  ‘Fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek … laugh-out-loud’ – Sunday Times

  ‘Wickedly brilliant’

  – Independent

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  ‘Fast, funny and very exciting’ – Daily Mail

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  DOUGLAS ADAMS was born in 1952 and created all the various and contradictory manifestations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: radio series, novels, TV series, computer game, stage adaptation, comic book and bath towel.

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published thirty years ago on 12 October 1979 and its phenomenal success sent the book straight to number one in the UK bestseller list. In 1984 Douglas Adams became the youngest author to be awarded a Golden Pan. His series has sold over 15 million books in the UK, the US and Australia, and it was also a bestseller in German and many other languages.

  The feature film starring Martin Freeman and Zooey Deschanel, with Stephen Fry as the Guide, was released in 2005 using much of Douglas’s original script and ideas. Douglas lived with his wife and daughter in Islington, North London, and briefly in California, where he died in 2001.

  CELEBRATING 30 YEARS

  OF A WHOLLY REMARKABLE BOOK

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  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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  Life, the Universe and Everything

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  ZZ9 also offer a range of Guide-related merchandise, available to members by post, which includes towels, T-shirts and our famous two-headed, three-armed Beeblebears. ZZ9 organises meetings around the UK (and occasionally other countries), and has members all over the world. On subscribing, members receive one year’s membership and four copies of the magazine.