Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [23]
He sighed.
This, he realized, was about as close to home as he was likely to get. Which meant that he was about as far from home as he could possibly be. Glumly he slapped the brochure shut and wondered what on earth he was going to do next.
He allowed himself a hollow laugh at what he had just thought. He looked at his old watch and shook it a bit to wind it. It had taken him, according to his own time scale, a year of hard traveling to get here. A year since the accident in hyperspace in which Fenchurch had completely vanished. One minute she had been sitting there next to him in the SlumpJet; the next minute the ship had done a perfectly normal hyperspace hop and when he had next looked she was not there. The seat wasn’t even warm. Her name wasn’t even on the passenger list.
The spaceline had been wary of him when he complained. A lot of awkward things happen in space travel, and a lot of them make a lot of money for lawyers. But when they asked him what Galactic Sector he and Fenchurch were from and he said ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, they relaxed completely in a way that Arthur wasn’t at all sure he liked. They even laughed a little, though sympathetically, of course. They pointed to the clause in the ticket contract that said that the entities whose lifespans had originated in any of the Plural zones were advised not to travel in hyperspace and did so at their own risk. Everybody, they said, knew that. They tittered slightly and shook their heads.
As Arthur left their offices he found he was trembling slightly. Not only had he lost Fenchurch in the most complete and utter way possible, but he felt that the more time he spent away out in the Galaxy the more it seemed that the number of things he didn’t know anything about actually increased.
Just as he was lost for a moment in these numb memories a knock came on the door of his motel room, which then opened immediately. A fat and disheveled man came in carrying Arthur’s one small case.
He got as far as “Where shall I put-” when there was a sudden violent flurry and he collapsed heavily against the door, trying to beat off a small and mangy creature that had leapt snarling out of the wet night and buried its teeth into his thigh, even through the thick layers of leather padding he wore there. There was a brief, ugly confusion of jabbering and thrashing. The man shouted frantically and pointed. Arthur grabbed a hefty stick that stood next to the door expressly for this purpose and beat at the boghog with it.
The boghog suddenly disengaged and limped backward, dazed and forlorn. It turned anxiously in the corner of the room, its tail tucked up right under its back legs, and then stood looking nervously up at Arthur, jerking its head awkwardly and repeatedly to one side. Its jaw seemed to be dislocated. It cried a little and scraped its damp tail across the floor. By the door, the fat man with Arthur’s suitcase was sitting and cursing, trying to staunch the flow of blood from his thigh. His clothes were already wet from the rain.
Arthur stared at the boghog, not knowing what to do. The boghog looked at him questioningly. It tried to approach him, making mournful little whimpering noises. It moved its jaw painfully. It made a sudden leap for Arthur’s thigh, but its dislocated jaw was too weak to get a grip and it sank, whining sadly, down to the floor. The fat man jumped to his feet, grabbed the stick, beat the boghog’s brains into a sticky, pulpy mess on the thin carpet, and then stood there breathing heavily as if daring the animal to move again, just once.
A single boghog eyeball sat looking reproachfully at Arthur from out of the mashed ruins of its head.
“What do you think it was trying to say?” asked Arthur in a small voice.
“Ah, nothing much,” said the man. “Just its way of trying to be friendly. This is just our way of being friendly back,” he added, gripping the stick.
“When’s the next flight out?” asked Arthur.
“Thought you’d only just arrived,” said the man.
“Yes,” said Arthur. “It was only going to be a brief visit. I just wanted to see if this was the