Life, the Universe, and Everything [42]
"Yes," said Arthur.
"Coincidence?" screamed the creature, painfully thrashing its broken wings, and opening a short gash on its right cheek with a particularly nasty tooth. On closer examination, such as he'd been hoping to avoid, Arthur noticed that much of Agrajag's face was covered with ragged strips of black sticky plasters.
He backed away nervously. He tugged at his beard. He was appalled to discover that in fact he still had the rabbit bone in it. He pulled it out and threw it away.
"Look," he said, "it's just fate playing silly buggers with you. With me. With us. It's a complete coincidence."
"What have you got against me, Dent?" snarled the creature, advancing on him in a painful waddle.
"Nothing," insisted Arthur, "honestly, nothing."
Agrajag fixed him with a beady stare.
"Seems a strange way to relate to somebody you've got nothing against, killing them all the time. Very curious piece of social interaction, I would call that. I'd also call it a lie!"
"But look," said Arthur, "I'm very sorry. There's been a terrible misunderstanding. I've got to go. Have you got a clock? I'm meant to be helping save the Universe." He backed away still further.
Agrajag advanced still further.
"At one point," he hissed, "at one point, I decided to give up. Yes, I would not come back. I would stay in the netherworld. And what happened?"
Arthur indicated with random shakes of his head that he had no idea and didn't want to have one either. He found he had backed up against the cold dark stone that had been carved by who knew what Herculean effort into a monstrous travesty of his bedroom slippers. He glanced up at his own horrendously parodied image towering above him. He was still puzzled as to what one of his hands was meant to be doing.
"I got yanked involuntarily back into the physical world," pursued Agrajag, "as a bunch of petunias. In, I might add, a bowl. This particularly happy little lifetime started off with me, in my bowl, unsupported, three hundred miles above the surface of a particularly grim planet. Not a naturally tenable position for a bowl of petunias, you might think. And you'd be right. That life ended a very short while later, three hundred miles lower. In, I might add, the fresh wreckage of a whale. My spirit brother."
He leered at Arthur with renewed hatred.
"On the way down," he snarled, "I couldn't help noticing a flashy-looking white spaceship. And looking out of a port on this flashy-looking spaceship was a smug-looking Arthur Dent. Coincidence?!!"
"Yes!" yelped Arthur. He glanced up again, and realized that the arm that had puzzled him was represented as wantonly calling into existence a bowl of doomed petunias. This was not a concept which leapt easily to the eye.
"I must go," insisted Arthur.
"You may go," said Agrajag, "after I have killed you."
"No, that won't be any use," explained Arthur, beginning to climb up the hard stone incline of his carved slipper, "because I have to save the Universe, you see. I have to find a Silver Bail, that's the point. Tricky thing to do dead."
"Save the Universe!" spat Agrajag with contempt. "You should have thought of that before you started your vendetta against me! What about the time you were on Stavromula Beta and someone ..."
"I've never been there," said Arthur.
"... tried to assassinate you and you ducked. Who do you think the bullet hit? What did you say?"
"Never been there," repeated Arthur. "What are you talking about? I have to go."
Agrajag stopped in his tracks.
"You must have been there. You were responsible for my death there, as everywhere else. An innocent bystander!" He quivered.
"I've never heard of the place," insisted Arthur. "I've certainly never had anyone try to assassinate me. Other than you. Perhaps I go there later, do you think?"
Agrajag blinked slowly in a kind of frozen logical horror.
"You haven't been to Stavromula Beta ... yet?" he whispered.
"No," said Arthur, "I don't know anything about the place. Certainly never been to it, and don't have any plans to go."
"Oh, you go there all right," muttered