Really Wild Things

Chapter 31

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time.

One of these supposedly relates the experiences of one Veet Voojagig, a quiet young student at the University of Maximegalon, who pursued a brilliant academic career studying anciet philology, transformational ethics and the wave harmonic theory of historical perception, and then, after a night of drinking Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed with the problem of what had happened to all the ball-point pens or biros he'd bought over the past few years.

There followed a long time of painstaking research during which he visited all the major centres of biro loss throughout the galaxy and eventually came up with a quaint little theory that quite caught the public imagination at the time. Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to biro life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended biros would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely biroid lifestyle, responding to highly biro-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the biro equivalent of the good life.

And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voojagig suddenly claimed to have found this planet, and to have worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book, and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make a fool of themselves in public.

When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for this planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.

There did, however, remain the question of both the mysterious 60,000 Altairan dollars paid yearly into his Brantisvogan bank account, and of course Zaphod Beeblebrox's highly profitable second-hand biro business.

* * *

"You've been lying to me for twenty years," yelled Ford Prefect.

He had been saying this almost continuously for the last twenty minutes.

"I have not been lying," yelled Zaphod Beeblebrox.

He had been saying this almost continuously for the last twenty minutes.

Since these two lines are the sum total of their conversation, the author will leave that as the summary. Those who would prefer a more complete narrative can read those two lines of dialogue over and over again for twenty minutes, then continue from this point on.

While Ford and Zaphod were engaged in such a spirited debate, they were not in the mood to provide explanations to Arthur and Fenchurch, neither of whom had heard about the biros or why they were so important. It was left to Arthur and Fenchurch to get the story from Trillian.

"Basically," Trillian said, "Zaphod's always insisted there was no planet of biros. Yet here we are."

She gestured towards the visiscreen that Eddie had tuned to the planet below. The ship's sensors had tapped into the planet's Tri-D broadcasts and showed an extraordinary world.

Biros in swimming pools, biros lounging on beaches, biros on couches making witty commentary on chat shows, biros racing each other on enormous pieces of paper.

Arthur nodded as he watched. "I always knew something like this was going on. I've always had enormous difficulty holding onto biros."

"No," said Trillian, "that was just your own clumsiness. The pens we had on Earth weren't alive. They couldn't have transported themselves here."