And Another Thing...

by Eoin Colfer

Genres: Science Fiction; Satire; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

And Another Thing...will be the sixth novel in the now improbably named Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy

An Englishman's continuing search through space and time for a decent cup of tea . . . Arthur Dent's accidental association with that wholly remarkable book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has not been entirely without incident. Arthur has travelled the length, breadth and depth of known, and unknown, space. He has stumbled forwards and backwards through time. He has been blown up, reassembled, cruelly imprisoned, horribly released and colourfully insulted more than is strictly necessary. And, of course, he has comprehensively failed to grasp the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Arthur has, though, finally made it home to Earth. But that does not mean he has escaped his fate. For Arthur's chances of getting his hands on a decent cuppa are evaporating along with the world's oceans. Because no sooner has he arrived than he finds out that Earth is about to be blown up...again.

And Another Thing...by Eoin Colfer is the rather unexpected, but very welcome, sixth instalment of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. It features a pantheon of unemployed gods, everyone's favourite renegade Galactic President, a lovestruck green alien, an irritating computer and at least one very large slab of cheese.

Release date: October 12, 2009

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

EOIN COLFER

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, 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 on your implant for a Gargle Blaster, 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 him, 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.

So far as we know…The Imperial Galactic Government decided, over a bucket of jeweled 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 preempt 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 planet blasted to dust beneath his slippers. Had the human race held a referendum, it’s quite likely that Arthur Dent would have been voted least suitable to carry the hopes of mankind 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 reporter 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 traveler, 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 have lacked 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 favorite 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 percent 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 fulfillment 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 center 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 soul mate. Luckily this idyllic period was not cut short by Arthur and Fenchurch 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 traveled 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 Mark 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 Mark 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 was the Mark 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 destroyed 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 coexisting 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…

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 anymore, 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 but more electrical messages from the brain? Why believe in them either? Was there anything trustworthy in the Universe that one could hug and hold onto like a Hawaliusian wind staunch in the midst of a butterfly storm, apart from 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 cannot 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 pot on his veranda table twinkling.

Ah, yes, thought the old man. Tea. At the center 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, and called 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 is 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 the tone of a single word.

“You did say battery?” said 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.

“Battery,” said the bird again, and suddenly reality cracked and fell to pieces like a shattered mirror. The beach disappeared, the waves froze, crackled, and evaporated. The last thing to go was the Rich Tea.

“Bugger,” muttered the old man as the final crumbs dissipated on his fingertips, then he sat back on a cushion in the room of sky that suddenly surrounded him. Someone would be coming soon, he was sure of it. From the dim caverns of his old memories, the names Ford and Prefect emerged like gray bats to associate themselves with the impending disaster.

Whenever the Universe fell apart, Ford Prefect was never far behind. Him and that accursed book of his. What was it called? Oh, yes. The Pitchforker’s Pride Is a Fallacy.

That, or something very close to it.

The old man knew exactly what Ford Prefect would say.

Look on the bright side, old mate. At least you’re not lying down in front of a bulldozer, eh? At least we’re not being flushed out of a Vogon air lock. A room of sky is not too shabby, as it happens. It could be worse, a lot worse.

“It will be a lot worse,” said the old man with gloomy certainty. In his experience, things generally got worse, and on the rare occasion when things actually seemed to get better, it was only as a dramatic prelude to a cataclysmic worsening.

Oh, this room of sky seemed harmless enough, but what terrors lurked beyond its rippling walls? None that were not terrible, of that the old man was certain.

He poked a finger into one of the wall’s yielding surfaces and was reminded of tapioca pudding, which almost made the old man smile, until he remembered that he had hated tapioca ever since a bullying head boy had filled his slippers with the stuff back in Eaton House Prep.

“Blisters Smyth, you sneaky shit,” he whispered.

His fingertip left a momentary hole in the clouds, and through it the old man caught a glimpse of a double-height sash window beyond, and outside the window, could that be a death ray?

The old man rather feared that it was.

All this time, he thought. All this time and nothing has happened.

 

Ford Prefect was living the dream. Providing the dream included residence in one of Han Wavel’s ultraluxury, five-supergiant-rated, naturally eroded hedonistic resorts, filling one’s waking hours with permanent damage amounts of exotic cocktails, and liaisons with exotic females of various species.

And the best bit: The expense of this whole self-indulgent and possibly life-shortening package would be taken care of by his Dine-O-Charge card, which had no credit limit thanks to a little creative computer tinkering on his last visit to the Hitchhiker’s Guide offices.

If a younger Ford Prefect had been handed a blank page and asked to, in his own time, write a short paragraph detailing his dearest wishes for his own future, the only word he might have amended in the above was the adverb possibly. Probably.

The resorts of Han Wavel were so obscenely luxurious that it was said a Brequindan male would sell his mother for a night in the Sandcastle Hotel’s infamous vibro-suite. This is not as shocking as it sounds, as parents are accepted currency on Brequinda and a nicely moisturized septuagenarian with a good set of teeth can be traded for a mid-range family moto-carriage.

Ford would perhaps not have sold either parent to finance his sojourn at the Sandcastle, but there was a bicranial cousin who was often more trouble than he was worth.

Every night, Ford rode the fleshevator to his penthouse, croaked at the door to grant him entry, then made time to look himself in the bloodshot eyes before passing out facedown in the basin.

This is the last night, he swore nightly. Surely my body will revolt and collapse in on itself.

What would his obituary say in the Hitchhiker’s Guide? Ford wondered. It would be brief, that was for sure. A couple of words. Perhaps the same two words he had used to describe Earth all those years ago.

Mostly harmless.

Earth. Hadn’t something rather sad happened on Earth that he should be thinking about? Why were there some things he could remember and others that were about as clear as a hazy morning on the permanently fogbound Misty Plains of Nephologia?

It was generally at about this maudlin stage that the third Gargle Blaster squeezed the last drop of consciousness from Ford’s overjuiced brain and he would giggle twice, squawk like a rodeo chicken, and execute a near perfect forward tumble into the nearest bathroom receptacle.

 

And yet every morning when he lifted his head from the en suite basin (if he was lucky), Ford found himself miraculously revitalized. No hangover, no dragon breath, not even a burst blood vessel in either sclera to bear witness to the previous night’s excesses.

“You are a froody dude, Ford Prefect,” he invariably told himself. “Yes, you are.”

There is something fishy going on here, his rarely-heard-from subconscious insisted.

Fishy?

So long and thanks for all the…

Wasn’t there something about dolphins? Not fish, true, but they inhabited the same…habitat.

Think, you idiot! Think! You should be dead a hundred times over. You have consumed enough cocktails to pickle not only yourself but several alternate versions of yourself. How are you still alive?

“Alive and froody,” Ford would say, often winking at himself in the mirror, marveling at how lustrous his red hair had become. How pronounced his cheekbones. And he seemed to be growing a chin. An actual chiseled chin.

“This place is doing me good,” he told his reflection. “All the photo-leech wraps and the irradiated colono-lemming treatments are really boosting my system. I think I owe it to Ford Prefect to stay another while.”

And so he did.

 

On the last day, Ford charged an underwater massage to his credit card. The masseur was a Damogranian pom-pom squid with eleven tentacles and a thousand suckers that pummeled Ford’s back and cleaned out his pores with a series of whiplash tapotement moves. Pom-pom squids were generally hugely overqualified for their work in the spa industry, but were tempted away from their umpteenth doctorates by the lure of high salaries, plankton-rich pools, and the chance of massaging a talent scout for the music industry and maybe getting themselves a record deal.

“Have you done any talent scouting, friend?” asked the squid, though he didn’t sound hopeful.

“Nope,” replied Ford, bubbles streaming from his Plexiglas helmet, face shining orange in the pleasant glow of rock phosphorescence. “Though I once owned a pair of blue suede shoes, which should count for something. I still own one; the other is closer to mauve, due to it being a copy.”

The squid nipped at passing plankton as he spoke, which made conversation a little disjointed.

“I don’t know if…”

“If what?”

“I hadn’t finished.”

“It’s just that you stopped speaking.”

“There was a glint. I thought it was lunch.”

“You eat glints?”

“No. Not actual glints.”

“Good, because glints are baby gloonts, and they’re poisonous.”

“I know. I was merely saying that…”

“More glints?”

“Precisely. You’re sure you’re not a talent scout then, or an agent?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, for Zark’s sake,” swore the squid, a little unprofessionally. “Two years I’ve worked here. Talent scouts and agents coming out of your suckers…they promised. Not one. Not bloody one. I was studying advanced kazoo, you know.”

Ford couldn’t resist a lead-in like that. “Advanced kazoo? How advanced can kazoo studies be?”

The squid was wounded. “Pretty advanced when you can play a thousand of them at the same time. I was in a quartet. Can you imagine?”

Ford gave it a go. He closed his eyes, enjoyed the whup-pop of the suckers on his back, and imagined four thousand kazoos playing in perfect subaquatic harmony.

Sometime later the squid enveloped Ford in half a dozen tentacles and gently flipped him over. Ford opened one eye to read the squid’s badge.

I am Barzoo, read the tag. Use me as you will.

And underneath in smaller print:

I am allergic to rubber.

“So, Barzoo. What kind of stuff did you play?”

The masseur got his tentacles a-pumping before he answered, whipping up a flurry of currents.

“Old songs mostly. Covers. You ever hear of Hotblack Desiato?”

I have heard that name, Ford realized, but he couldn’t quite pin the memory down. Every day things got a little fuzzier.

“Hotblack Desiato. Wasn’t he dead for a while?”

Barzoo cocked his head, thinking about this. The squid’s beak hung open, ignoring the tiny streaks of plankton flashing by.

“Hey, if you can’t remember, don’t worry about it. I’m having a few memory problems myself in this place. Little things like how long I’ve been here, what my purpose in life is, which feet to put my shoes on. Stuff like that.”

The squid did not respond and its tentacles rested heavily on Ford’s torso, like old rope.

Ford hoped that Barzoo had not suddenly died, and if the squid had passed on to the energy stage, would the suckers lose their suck or go into some kind of death-suck mode? Ford had no desire to spend the rest of his holiday having tentacles surgically removed from his torso.

Then Barzoo blinked.

“Hey, buddy,” sighed Ford, bubbles spiraling from his helmet. “Welcome back. For a second there, I thought…”

“Battery,” said the squid, beak clicking on the T’s. “Battery.”

I never noticed before, thought Ford. But that squid looks a lot like a bird.

Then the underwater massage cave dissolved and Ford Prefect found himself deposited in a room composed of blue sky.

A familiar figure sat in the opposite corner.

“Ah,” said Ford, remembering.

Guide Note: Remembering is generally a two-stage process involving dialogue between the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain. The subconscious opens proceedings by throwing up the relevant memory, an act which releases a spurt of self-congratulatory endorphins.

Well done, matey, says the conscious. That memory is really useful right now, and I couldn’t remember where I’d put it.

You and me, pal, says the subconscious, delighted to have its contribution acknowledged for once, we’re in this together.

Then the conscious reviews the memory in its in-tray and sends a message down to the sphincter telling it to prepare for the worst.

Why did you remind me of this? the conscious rails against the subconscious. This is awful. Terrible. I didn’t want to remember this. Why the Zark do you think I shoved it to the back of my brain?

That’s the last time I help you out, the subconscious mutters and retreats to the darker sections of itself where nasty thoughts are housed. I don’t need you, it tells itself. I can make myself another personality out of these things you’ve discarded. And so the seeds of schizophrenia are sown with kernels of childhood bullying, neglect, low self-esteem, and prejudice.

Luckily, Betelgeuseans don’t have much of a subconscious, so that’s all right then.

“Ah,” said Ford again, followed quickly by “Crap.”

He stepped gingerly across the floor of sky, noticing with a jolt of surprise that one of his legs flickered slightly for a moment.

I’m not real, he realized, which was enough to stick a pin in his permanently buoyant mood, but he recovered quickly, something that the room’s other occupant didn’t seem to have managed just yet.

“Look on the bright side, old mate,” he called to the Earthman. “At least you’re not lying down in front of a bulldozer, eh? At least we’re not being flushed out of a Vogon air lock, remember that? A room of sky is not too shabby, as it happens. It could be worse, a lot worse.”

And it shortly will be if I’m right about what’s going on here, thought Ford, but he didn’t voice this opinion. Arthur looked as though he’d had quite enough bad news for one day.

 

Interplanetary news reporter Trillian Astra spent a few anxious moments in the press bathroom before heading into the auditorium for possibly the biggest interview of her life. In the course of a celebrated career, Trillian had spent a year. . .