And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer
Mown’s skin was emerald pale. ‘Yes. I get all the levels.’
Jeltz bobbled his head experimentally and was pleased to find it completely clear of hyper-happy fugue.
‘Think bitter thoughts,’ he advised his crew over the intercom. ‘Find something to hate and soon you will be yourself. May I suggest the Earthlings on this tiny planet below us. Surely after all the bother their extermination order has caused, they are more than deserving of your ire.’
It seemed as though they were, and soon the Business End was clanking and ka-chunking with the ominous sounds of torpedo tubes being loaded and plasma cannons being brought to bear.
‘Twinkle twinkle,’ recited Jeltz, ‘Little planetoid.’
He glanced down at Mown.
‘Rhyme?’
Mown’s teeth clicked as he thought. He knew what was expected.
‘Ahm… Soon we commit you, To the void.’
‘Excellent, my son,’ burbled Jeltz. ‘Sometimes you almost make me happy.’
The Town of Cong, Innisfree, Nano
In the banquet hall, Thor and Zaphod were up to their armpits in a congratulatory buffet, totally oblivious to the utter annihilation bearing down from above, relatively speaking. Relatively speaking, that is, with regard to the term above. The annihilation would be utter no matter what it was related to.
‘You were wonderful, sir,’ said an Ameglian Major cow, tenderizing his own hindquarters with a mallet strapped to one hoof. ‘The way you handled that big hammer.’ The cow imitated Thor’s doomstrike with the meat tenderizer. ‘Honestly, I felt chills.’
Thor tugged on a beard plait. ‘Really? You don’t think I overplayed it? Maybe a modern god should hold back a bit on the melodrama.’
Zaphod emerged from a pitcher of Gargle Blasters. ‘Rubbish, Thor old man. You totally hammered that green guy. Then the mercy at the last minute. Total genius. Textbook god stuff.’
Thor cupped his mouth and whispered in case there was a microphone somewhere. ‘I have to admit it, Zaph. You were right. With all these people adoring me, I feel more real, more alive than I have since the music days. I honestly think I can start to put the bad old days behind me.’
‘We are back, baby. Religion is the new atheism. Once we have united all the colonists in faith, there’s a whole Universe out there. Imagine how many tiny hammers we could sell.’
‘I know a guy on Asgard. He’s got a whole bunch of elves in his forge. One call from me and he’s knocking those little Mjöllnirs out.’
Zaphod plunged his arm into what was either a soya-based soup or a half-full spittoon. Either way, he slurped on his fingers with great gusto. ‘Now you’re talking, Thor. Time is a wheel and the good old days have come around again.’
‘Nice proverbial blend, sir,’ said the cow. ‘Very appropriate. How about a nice steak to top yourself off? I can do mince if you don’t like chewing.’
Zaphod ignored the animal. ‘We have to put together a big event. Defeating Wowbagger is good for a colony or two, but for reviving your career across a few galaxies, we need something of umbilical proportions.’
‘I think you mean…’ began the cow, then stopped himself, intuitively realizing that correcting the diner was no way to get oneself butchered and devoured.
Zaphod was in full entrepreneurial flow. ‘I don’t know. Let’s say there’s a plague.’
Thor wasn’t convinced. ‘Come on, Zaph. I can’t stop a plague with a hammer.’
‘Okay. A drought. You could hammer through solid rock to an underground river.’
Thor picked up the cow and popped it into his mouth, barely giving the animal time to splutter its delighted thanks.
‘I don’t know. People have pretty good geologists these days. Underground rivers are not hard to find.’
‘Something with locusts then. Or volcanoes.’ Zaphod clambered on to the table so that he could look into Thor’s eyes. ‘This is the break we’ve been waiting for. You are going to be bigger than ever, I can feel it.’
‘Do you think so? Really?’
‘Absolutely.’
The banquet hall door opened and Hillman Hunter stuck his head in through a slice of outdoors.
‘How-de-do, my ventripotent benefactors,’ he lilted. ‘All boozed up to the eyeballs and ready for business? I have the official deity contracts here.’
Zaphod nodded reassuringly at his client. ‘It’s okay, I had a look. Standard god duties.’
‘Holy days?’
‘Thirty-two. And two more for each child conceived with a mortal.’
Thor was impressed. ‘That’s a sweet deal.’
Zaphod laid a hand on the god’s giant shoulder. ‘It’s a sweet deal for them and don’t you forget it.’
Hillman shallied forward, weaving from side to side, touching his temple every so often.
‘How does a fella approach his god?’ he wondered aloud. ‘I’m just trying out a few moves.’
‘I like the head-touching bit,’ said Thor. ‘But lose the wibbly-wobbly thing.’
‘You can do the wibbly-wobbly thing for me, if you like,’ said Zaphod. ‘Surely I deserve some adoration too?’
Hillman hoisted himself up on to the table, passing the contracts over.
‘You’re a great chap altogether, Mr Beeblebrox. Whatever we need, you bring it in your wonderful ship. Sometimes I think that if you’d never arrived, we wouldn’t need anything.’
Even Zaphod couldn’t miss the barb in that statement, but he decided to ignore it.
‘Hey, Hilly. What’s this in pencil at the bottom of the page? Did you just write this in?’
Hillman did his number-one leprechaun act. ‘Ah, sure bejaysus, don’t be worrying about that. It’s only a protection clause. It merely says that the presiding god, Thor in this case, is responsible for protecting the planet from alien attack. You know, big lasers or nukes or the like.’
‘Not a problem,’ said Zaphod magnanimously. ‘We’re not likely to need planet protection way out here in the nebula for a couple of hundred years, are we?’
Hillman’s fingers twiddled a jig and he rolled an eye skywards.
‘Oh, you never know,’ he said.
The Business End
Prostetnic Jeltz had his seat winched up to cup his behind, then let the hydraulic column take his weight. There was a hiss as he sat back, which he always claimed came from the chair.
‘My seat is a little damp,’ he grumbled.
‘I am so sorry, Prostetnic,’ burbled Constant Mown, as fixed a fixture at Jeltz’s elbow as the elbow itself. In fact, when Mown was not hovering at kidney level, Jeltz felt a vacuum of absence in the side of his head.
I am becoming too reliant on that boy, he thought. Time to ship him off somewhere unpleasant.
‘My chair is supposed to be extremely damp, if not downright sopping. You know how I hate to squeak.’
‘I shall see to it, at once.’
Jeltz stopped him with a raised finger. ‘Halt. Work first, damp chair later. I am prepared to chafe in order to get this job done.’
‘That’s the spirit, sir. You’re the kroompster.’
The bridge bubbled with slow, jerky activity as the Vogons geared up for business as quickly as their ungainly bodies would allow.
Guide Note: A recent Maximegalon poll rated Vogon agility on a par with the Ardnuffs of Razorhead IV. The Vogons were delighted to be on a par with anyone until they found out that the Ardnuffs were gigantic zygodactylous monopods who live on a moon with barely enough gravity to keep them from pogo-ing off into space. The Vogons were thrown a couple of consolatory bones by two other Maximegalon statistics which rated them in the top five for most travelled race and a clear number one for most recognizable silhouette.
Related Reading:
The Complete Maximegalon Statistix Volumes 1–15,000
and
The Quick Guide to the Complete Maximegalon Statistix Volumes 1–25,000
Jeltz fixed one eye on the main screen, a
Unblighted. Not for long.
‘Finally,’ murmured Jeltz. ‘Finally, at last and ultimately inevitably.’
‘Finally,’ echoed Constant Mown, and it was an echo; faint and wavering.
‘What is the ship telling us, Constant?’
The Vogon bureaucruiser was a marvellous vehicle, providing you worked on the inside. If you worked on the outside as a panel scraper or engine plunger, then it was possible to be driven blind or even mad by its sheer symmetrophobia. Most craft give a nod, however brief and unfriendly, towards beauty. Vogon ships did not nod towards beauty. They pulled on ski masks and mugged beauty in a dark alley. They spat in the eye of beauty and bludgeoned their way through the notions of aesthetics and aerodynamics. Vogon cruisers did not so much travel through space as defile it and toss it aside. But on the inside, a Vogon ship was packed with more hitech gizmology than you would find in your average hi-tech gizmology research facility. Even a well-kitted-out Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax battle bus would have pulled over to let a Vogon cruiser pass, and the Business End was top of the range, the sweetest ship in the pound. She might not win any pageants but she could tell you how many boghogs were biting each other’s thighs on the opposite side of the Universe. And also how many tics those hogs were ferrying around on their backs. And possibly the blood type of the tics. Then she could kill the tics with micro-smart bombs.
Constant Mown dragged himself away from his coveted position at the prostetnic’s elbow, and lurched towards the main instrument display panel. There was no need for him to lurch, he could easily have swanned gracefully, but Mown was reminded every day what the Vogons do to species who have the audacity to evolve.
As he lurched, Mown kept a careful watch on the bridge’s other constants in case any of them should try to usurp his position as chief groveller. Shafting one’s superiors was accepted practice in the corps. All it would take was one tasty sliver of information fed to the prostetnic and Mown could find himself stepped on and demoted to the plunger squad. Mown did not think he could handle a life in the mulligrubs looking at this ship from the outside.
The panel covered an entire wall on the ship’s port side and consisted of dozens of overlapping gas screens, all displaying constantly updating scan feeds. Mown searched the screens for something, anything, that could save the Earthlings. There was no point in lying as the readouts were pretty much idiot-proof, which was a prudent move on the part of the designer as many of the crew were idiots. It was easier to be a Vogon if you were an idiot.
There must be something, thought Mown. I don’t want to kill these people. I want to ask them about country music. And maybe hug an Australian lady. They’re so outdoorsy.
He glanced at the readings. The Earthlings were on Nano, no doubt about it. The computer registered over two thousand humanoids on the surface, at least ten per cent of them Earthlings. DNA and brain-wave scans confirmed their origin.
‘Well?’ huffed Jeltz. ‘Give me the good news, Constant.’
‘Earthlings. Two hundred plus. Five in utero.’
‘Twinkle twinkle,’ crooned the prostetnic. ‘Plot me a torpedo solution, gunner.’
‘Wait!’
Mown had blurted it out before he could stop himself.
An almost comical silence descended on the bridge. It seemed to Mown that even the instruments toned down their bleeping and squelching. From the corner of his eye, it looked as though the planet had stopped moving.
‘Wait? Did you say wait, Constant?’ Jeltz’s voice was smoother than a glassy ocean and more dangerous than a glassy ocean with a couple of spannerhead sharks lurking below the surface, really hungry sharks who had a thing about landlubbers coming into their environment.
Both of Jeltz’s eyes were drilling into Mown now. ‘Why would you say wait? Don’t you want us to complete our mission?’
Mown felt acid churn in his stomach, and not in a good way.
One word. He had said one word and his career, his life, was over.
‘I didn’t mean wait, as such.’
‘So you didn’t say wait?’
‘Yes. Yes, I said wait.’
‘So you said wait, but that was not what you meant?’
‘Yes, Prostetnic. Exactly.’
‘This is disturbing, Constant. I expect my crew to mean what I want them to say.’
‘I do mean what I say,’ said Mown miserably.
‘So you meant wait?’
‘No, Daddy! I didn’t.’
The ultimate transgression! Grasping at familial bonds for clemency. Vogons had only one loyalty: the job.
Prostetnic Jeltz’s torso bubbled with swallowed anger and his ear actually tooted.
‘Well then, my son. If you don’t mean what you say, and you will not say what you mean, I don’t have much use for you on this ship. Not inside it, at any rate.’
Mown fell to his knees and begged. ‘One chance, Prostetnic? One chance is traditional.’
Jeltz’s bottom lip jutted out like a sun-seal lying on its belly. One chance was traditional. He himself had been given one chance to redeem himself by his mentor, Field Prostetnic Turgid Rowls.
Guide Note: On Jeltz’s virgin voyage at the elbow, he had mistakenly obtained Turgid Rowls’s thumbprint on a BD140565 instead of a BD140664, which caused more of a furore than might be expected, as a BD140565 was a confiscation of atmosphere order and a BD140664 was a late movie rental charge. In essence, a student from Blagulon Gamma had a sleep-in and forgot to return King of the Firefly Warlords II, and the next thing he knew he was waking up on a dying planet with thirty seconds to live.
Old Turgid Rowls wasn’t too hard on me, thought Jeltz. In fact, we had a good laugh about the whole thing.
‘Very well, Mown. One chance.’
Mown’s blood pump slowed down a few sloshes per minute. ‘Qualifier?’
‘Yes. I need a rhyme for violent obsession. And not just an end rhyme, I want internal too.’
Mown tapped invisible words in the air. ‘Ah… soya rant… hessian…’
‘Quickly, boy. Quickly.’
‘Okay… violent obsession… um… cryo-plant impression.’
‘Explain.’
‘It’s an art form on Brequinda. A type of mime where the artist impersonates frozen shrubs.’
‘Not really? If you think you can… Really?’
‘Really. Look it up… If you like, Prostetnic.’
Guide Note: Cryo-Plant Impression was an actual competition category in the Brequindan Arts’ Fair. The record holder for consecutive wins was a young actor, Mr E. Mowt, who claimed his secret was to sleep in the foliage during the winter. He was denied an eighth title when wood poachers fed him into a shredder.
Jeltz digested this nugget and ran through the poem in his mind. It could work. It was probably buffa-pucky, but the poem was leaning towards the absurd anyway.
‘Very well, Constant, on your feet. You have your one chance. Now use it to tell me why you ordered my gunner to hold on the torpedoes.’
Mown’s blood pump cranked up again and he stumbled to the readouts. They hung over him like a crackling tidal wave. He searched for something, anything, that could justify his involuntary command.
There was nothing on the screens but heartbeats and blood pressure and tumours and calcium deficiencies. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then he noticed a strangely impenetrable blip inside one of the structures. Mown zoomed in and checked for vitals, but every ray he sent in was bounced back without so much as a smeg of information encoded in the beams.
Salvation.
Mown scuttled back to his sub-ulnar position with renewed confidence.
‘Prostetnic.’
‘This had b
‘This is good, Prostetnic. I can explain my actions.’
‘That’s just fabby, Mown. So you ordered my gunner to hold the Unnecessarily Painful Slow Death torpedoes because…’
‘Because torpedoes won’t be enough, sir.’
‘You are milking this, Mown.’
‘They won’t be enough because we have an immortal on the surface. Class one.’
‘You’re certain?’
‘Absolutely. There can be no mistake. The scans are bouncing off him, sir.’
We will have to retreat, thought Mown, resisting the urge to skip with delight (delight being expressly forbidden on board the Business End and skipping being generally impossible). We have no defence against a god.
‘A god,’ said Jeltz, clapping his hands.
Clapping his hands in terror, Mown hoped.
‘This is the chance we have been waiting for!’
The chance to run away as quickly as we can get the drives fired up, thought Mown, the optimist.
‘Gunner, fire at will in the general direction of that immortal.’
Mown cleared his throat. ‘Sir. Our torpedoes cannot harm a god.’
Jeltz attempted a crafty grin, dousing Mown with half a jug of spittle. ‘Harm, no; distract, yes.’
‘Distract?’
Jeltz smugly indulged this parrotry. ‘Yes, son. Distract this god, whoever he is, from the secret experimental weapon we are about to carefully load into a tube.’
‘Experimental weapon?’ Mown squeaked.
Jeltz winked. ‘Secret experimental weapon,’ he said.
Nano
Arthur Dent had picked himself out a nice outfit from Nu Top Man and was quite enjoying the simple pleasure of wearing grown-up clothes, though he felt certain that with Random at his elbow the enjoyment of simple pleasures was destined to be short-lived.
‘This place is not exactly the political centre of the Galaxy,’ he told Random. ‘But at least there’s no running and screaming.’
‘Not yet, there isn’t,’ responded his daughter. ‘I’m sure you’ll bring doom down on us all presently. It’s your destiny to be a cosmic Jonah.’