After Douglas Adams
Largely Prologue
Nojong Hrupp, great philanthropist and visionary quintillionaire of the otherwise hopelessly impoverished world of Atreda, finds mention in Zossian’s encyclopaedia under two headings: Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and Lifestyles of the Far Too Rich And Famous For Their Own Good.
To an impartial observer, this is patently unfair. Apart from being the only life form in the known history of the universe to have chosen a black hole as a safe deposit locker, he also holds the credit for crashing the per capita income of any planet by more percentage points than a normal hypercomputer of his time could process. The latter followed on Nojong’s death, in itself a seminal event in the history of insurance scams.
And of course, apart from all this, Nojong Hrupp XI also invented the human race.
The story goes that back in the hoary days of Omberry II, a large beverages company trudged half alive to office the morning after the Lothne Drinking Festival and saw a huge untapped market in consumer poisons.
Why did suicides fail? They wondered, wishing for an easy death.
Adulteration, they reasoned, who were not granted their wish.
This last insight gained strength after the Drinking Festival’s bankrupt financiers accidentally rid themselves of dandruff by gulping ten straight shots of insecticide.
Within the space of three hours, the company’s stimulated engineers had invented forty two different formulations, tested their effects on Alteried browsing mud-moles, called for and killed another spaceship-load of Alteried browsing mud-moles as well as a team of trainee accountants from the University of Jude-Na, designed the manufacturing process, built a fully automated plant, blown up the same in a series of experiments, and in the end shipped to the warehouse two million litres whipped up in the Chief Engineer’s kitchen using a tin kettle and several thousand pages of string-relativistic-quantum-mechanical calculations.
In the short span of six months, the highly paid business analyst employing advanced sixth grade arithmetic showed that the project was financially viable.
In just another year, the marketing team completed their assignment of naming each of the forty-two recipes.
Each elegantly mass-produced vial – from the youthful Saturday Night’s Forever to the mature, apple-pie flavored Meet Your Ma - carried a measured dosage of globendula extract and a performance guarantee (If this doesn’t kill you, he will – ***phone number of local contract killer***)
For the first few weeks, product sales rose to shareholder-delighting levels. Then it all collapsed.
Apparently, the business analyst had assumed a repeat buying rate of 83%, extrapolating the data from the company’s popular beverages business.
After a failed attempt at coaxing creditors to sample their new products, the company filed for bankruptcy and announced a change in business direction – the pioneering space exploration business. In its inaugural trip, the entire board of directors flew away to an undisclosed location with a stupendous amount of cash.
That was where Nojong Hrupp came in.
He was piloting that inaugural flight.
Of course, at that point in history Hrupp was not the richest organic being this side of the Draconil worm-hole. He was not even the richest man in the Megrogg globular cluster. In fact, he was so darn poor, the only way he got around the universe was by piloting cut-rate passenger spaceships for free. After the twenty-third attempt and as many hundred lives, he learned how not to land on the nose.
Now, shortly after Hrupp had streaked past the magnetic fields of Bothyra and zoomed by the Bijniar supernova, barely managing to avoid a deadly burst of stellar flares, crisis struck.
They were out of potato chips, which caused great resentment amongst the board of directors in the back.
They were also going to crash, which gave Hrupp a strange sense of deja-vu.
In a cost-cutting measure, the engines had been programmed to turn off automatically after seventeen light years. No one knew this except the assistant clerk in the accounting department, who did not make any calls after five in the evening. The take-off had been scheduled for seven.
Miraculously, for a twenty-fourth time, Hrupp was the only person limping dazed but unhurt, out of the burning entrails of something that looked like a large eggshell recently danced upon by a troupe of square-footed Atredan giga-elephants.
Except that this time, there were not the usual fourth-generation suitcases and heirloom pillow covers that littered the morning-fresh jungle, but several thousand tonnes of pure Doster markinsite, the most valuable mineral in the known universe.
On afterthought, it was probably the weight of all that markinsite that caused the crash in the first place.
So the story goes, that somewhere between getting marooned on a blue-green planet whose native population of large, querulous lizards his crashed spaceship had rendered extinct; and his contestable death under self-induced spontaneous ignition at the Lothne Festival of Lights many centuries later, Nojong Hrupp XI invented the human race.
A second hypothesis suggests that the human race grew from the radioactive rib of a slain director.
A third theory, favored by mainstream scientists and jealous competitors, holds the human race to be a myth, a blue-green planet an optical impossibility (it would simply be yellow), and Nojong responsible for concocting the first story to divert people’s attention from all that missing markinsite.
It is interesting to note that a large number of the votaries of this third theory have found themselves at some point of time unexpectedly feted by the School for the Criminally Imbecilic.
And that is what our story is about.
As its name suggests, the school’s mission at its founding on the (then) affluent planet Atreda had been to educate the least sentient beings in the known universe on things like what to do if you forget to breathe, why your nose is not an enemy rocket, and the like. As grammar changed over the gillennia, its original mission statement came to be increasingly misinterpreted till now the institution served as a training college and finishing school for imbecilic criminals, with the sacred intention of moulding them into terror masterminds.
At the root of this unfortunate confusion was the Atredan Parliament’s penchant for legislation, summed up by the twenty seventh president of the republic (in the happy days before the republic was outlawed) in his short inaugural speech thus: Things change.
After exhausting all possibilities in the civil and criminal domain, new laws were framed for aesthetics, politics, physics, grammar and the jungle. Shortly afterwards, in the reign of the mad emperor Hluk, the entire Atredan population was jailed for morning mouth in the same compound as several buck-toothed Extremely Irritable Monsterdragons for flying on tuesday, and society ceased to exist.
But for the School at Atreda, which always took care to be on the right side of the law, this last burst of legislation engendered a slow syntactical change till most of the known universe banned it as a distasteful blot on academia. The part that did not, lay on the other side of the Draconil worm hole, where they were too damned rich to care.
Its very attractive pay-scales also meant, however, that at any given point of time about eighty percent of Wilkeston University were applying for a vacancy professing a love for, other than their chosen subject, crime.
The school was now rumored to be housed in a disused penitentiary in a secret location in space, out of the reach of bounty hunters. Actually, it was located right in the middle of the busiest shopping district in planet Theos, disguised as a bad and outrageously expensive coffee bar where a prospective drinker asking for a café latte would get little more than a grunt from the pig filing his hooves behind the counter. The more persistent customers with a mania for coffee and no self-worth were entitled to a chemically unstable green decoction from a rapidly crumbling mud jug and a bill reflecting half the trade deficit of (now) impoverished Atreda. But ferret-eyed antisocial creatures requesting the unsmiling, gun-slinging maitre d’ for a ‘double cappuccino non smoking half decaf frappe with espresso biscuits’ were instantly whisked into the kitchen where under a trapdoor lay the celebrated school. Actually, it lay inside a time-transporter box under the trapdoor, set to five minutes in the future. This way, the student fugitives could get to know beforehand if someone from any of the thirteen trillion law enforcement agencies desperately seeking their arrest was coming by, and make their escape in good time.
The official reason for locating the school in Wilkeston, Dulinca (the charming tourist capital of Theos) rather than, as certain scholars who obviously never taught there surmised, near the extremely dangerous warp zones at the edge of the Megrogg globular cluster – is that people never look in the most obvious places for missing keys and wallets (pockets, pockets). The latter assertion is of course disproved by statistics and common sense, and the truth lies in the school’s location itself.
Wilkeston, Dulinca has the greatest spacedock in the known universe.
It also has the greatest pubs.
The school’s directors think the extra risk of getting caught is worth it.
Mostly Dialogue
At first, agent Xogge didn’t see anything strange in finding his bathroom at the Wilkeston Deluxe inhabited by two shaggy domesticated trolls. It was much worse on his overpopulated asteroid home, source of the popular tourist quip ‘space isn’t’. But when he was followed into the Ultragoogolmegagigapostmodern literature wing of the Dulinca national library by the grizzlier of the twin fifteen-foot hulks, something didn’t feel right. More so in light of the knowledge that no troll, not even a domesticated one, had learnt the alphabet beyond ‘C’ without suffering a catastrophic brain implosion.
‘Excuse me sir, but are you following me?’ Xogge finally asked the green, sprout-haired figure on the seat opposite, hunched behind a newspaper that barely covered his nose.
‘Uffgfff’ the troll answered and got busy reading the editorial page.
A sound like a torpedo going off inside a blue whale followed, and gooey globs of green blood and ick spattered across the reading hall. Xogge picked up his lathered books and walked out of the library, feeling a little depressed and in need of a bath.
At the hotel, he decided against interrogating the second troll slouched against the tiles on the far side of the bathroom, while he lay thoughtfully steaming in his bubble bath. As the bubbles rose and popped, dreadful versions of reality started suggested themselves. The trolls might have been sent by Cha-cha Goblankish, who had been trying to recover an ancestral loan from twelve generations of Xogge’s family. Or by his paranoid employer, to investigate whether he was leaking weather-related information to unscrupulous competitors. Or even by Xogge’s former girlfriend just to annoy him for being such a pig.
Pig.
Clouds of ignorance and head-bursting hangovers lifted from Xogge’s memory in synchrony with his rapidly depleting bathtub bubbles. His mind span across the years, to childhood days on the blustery beaches of Tralek, ancient seat of the Omberry line – watching spaceship after spaceship arc across the sky, firing their reverse thrusters in preparation for landing at the great spacedock of Wilkeston; then forwarded twenty years to PhD fieldwork with his unfortunately missing guide in the warp zones near the Megrogg globular cluster; then jumped ahead six decades to a wailing pig in a seedy and outrageously expensive coffee bar.
A hopelessly inebriated pig, it had seemed to him then, in a coffee bar that while seedy and overpriced, was otherwise perfectly agreeable (sofa, TV, vultures).
‘If it makes you that upset you shouldn’t be selling it, you know.’ Xogge saw himself suggesting, in a moment of unsettling ignorance and guilt.
The pig stared at a small vial in its hand and sniffled. Xogge looked down.
Meet your Ma it spelt, in large floral script next to the beaming likeness of the original artist’s mother in law in what seemed like heaven’s scullery.
And an inch below that, in a muted but self-assured fine print:
If this doesn’t kill you, he will – Consargo Mondolivia, a.k.a. ‘The Big Adam’s Apple’ *998769.
Xogge’s eyes fell on a row of similar bottles by the side of the counter.
Hjung Mflet, Gornk Pidd, a hieroglyph, 34-45-67, Jjn Lngchr, Pa-cha-Goblankish, and the oddly named Carlos Ramirez Sanchez stamped their back-up guarantees on each elegantly mass produced vial.
‘This is all that remains of the first batch’ apologized the terribly sodden pig, clicking its hooves in apology. ‘This is all that the great man could salvage from the smouldering remains of The Uncrashable Pothnick.’
It fished out a soggy kerchief from the front pocket of a ridiculously small waistcoat and blew its nose.
‘I’m sorry,’ it apologized again. ‘Whenever I look at that vial, I am reminded of my mother. Who knows what galaxy she might be in.’
The subject’s concern reflected its faith in the popular romance that reasonably well behaved pigs after their death went to a secret galaxy where slop grew on treetops and streets were made of slush. Historians consider this story and its associated slogan Think of all the bacon you can sell to have been created by the mad emperor Hluk to justify his astronomical space exploration budget to the finance minister of Halore, principal donor planet.
At any rate, it was a belief very popular with pigs, and even those that did not subscribe to this view alluded to it from time to time to reaffirm their identity.
‘What are these vials for and how did they get to be here?’
‘The boss’ personal collection,’ explained the mournful son, ‘It came from comrade Nojong Hrupp XI as a free gift with the markinsite. A gift to the school for educating the human race.’
The last pronouncement was followed by a gentle sigh and the pig dropping dead. For some inexplicable reason, Xogge had forgotten this last bit, which made the whole episode appear decidedly sinister in the soapy confines of his bathtub.
All he remembered after that was being pecked on the skull by a rather assertive vulture and the complete disappearance of his entire host on the sudden and unannounced arrival of a party of fanatical Theosian coffee drinkers.
With a shudder of cold realization Xen Xogge looked at the massively slumbering troll opposite him. There was no doubt about it. He was being tailed by a vigilante squad of the school for the criminally imbecilic.
While its presence on Wilkeston was risky for the institution, it was even riskier for strangers who stumbled upon its deadly secrets.
The mad emperor Hluk, famous for his aphorisms (before Parliament decreed coinage a prerogative of the royal mint), once famously said: Danger is a double edged sword. Since he died in a sheathing accident soon after, his injunction was often misinterpreted as stressing that it was dangerous for a sword to have two edges.
For intelligence agent Xen Xogge, both were truisms. He cut himself on butter knives, and was now presumably somewhere on the school’s hit list.
Jumping out of his bath with the amphibious agility that comes to life forms about to lose their former, he rummaged through the assortment of stolen toiletries, forged bills and forgotten banknotes in his travel bag and fished out a card containing the number that one calls before dying, during an interplanetary war, or increasingly, in the decadent environs of Wilkeston, right after a shopping orgy: the insurance company.
Xogge dialed the numbers on his holographic phone speedily and waited for a rude holo-insurer to abuse him the time of day. After four minutes the machine purred to life.
Our numbers have changed. Please call 234-540-####.
Redialing as directed. Please stay on the line.
Our numbers have changed. Please call 1435-2432-####
Redialing as directed. Please stay on the line.
The number you have dialed does not exist.
‘Digger off!’ Xogge exclaimed, startling the honeymooning octopus couple in the room adjacent through the thin walls of the Wilkeston Deluxe’s budget rooms.
Connecting to helpline number. Please wait.
A squat bearded female crackled into existence on the near wall.
‘You have reached the helpline number. This is customer service agent Cyncretia. How do you do, agent Xogge?’
‘Very well, thank you. I was wondering if…’
‘I’m sorry, we can’t have dinner together.’
‘What? That’s not what I was saying…’
‘Can’t do naughty things on the holographic screen either. So please don’t bother asking.’
‘Wait a minute…’
‘For a list of other things that you can’t ask me to do please refer to clause 1.4.3.1 of your policy document. I am now going to attend some other calls. Please stay on the line as you might not be able to reconnect afterwards. Your call is being charged at the rate of 1.35 gignabunts a minute.’
Xogge gritted his teeth. Client service levels had dipped alarmingly in the last generation, primarily as a reaction to over-reaching freebies in the previous, exemplified by Hrupp Corporation’s industry-busting exchange schemes of planets for toasters (in an infinite universe, there could conceivably be no dearth of the former).
In the bitter aftermath of bankruptcy companies carefully staffed their call centres with escaped convicts, hoping to dissuade irate customers with thinly veiled threats.
‘Thank you for holding on. Who might you be,?’ Cyncretia had returned to the screen, evidently with no recollection of Xogge.
‘Policy # 24533234231. Xogge, Xen. You were speaking to me a minute ago.’
‘Ah yes, the dinner guy. What can I do for you?’
‘I am on Theos. Dulinca. Wilkeston.’
‘Nice shopping. I bought a stocking there once for my grandma.’
‘Very nice,’ agreed Xogge, ‘but the thing is, I’m in a bit of a soup. With the School for the Criminally Imbecilic. A vigilante squad, I think.’
‘You’re having dinner with the school for the criminally imbecilic?’
‘No. I’m in trouble. They’re after me.’
‘Why would you be in trouble if you’re having dinner with them?’ Cyncretia was beginning to lose her temper, which had thus far been checked by generous helpings of frozen ammonia dessert.
‘They’re after me!’ Xogge sputtered at the holograph which gave a Pavlovian flinch.
‘Are you saying that you’re being tracked by a vigilante squad of the school for the criminally imbecilic?’
‘That’s right. Now I want my LIPS to be deployed outside Room # 401 of the Wilkeston Deluxe.’
LIPS, or Life Insurance Protection Squad, was a standard benefit that came with every policy these days. After Nojong Hrupp XI’s demise bankrupted five million insurance companies on either side of the Draconil worm hole, fugitive underwriters realized that it often worked out cheaper to just ensure that the policy holder never died.
The most famous illustration of this benefit was when Wothland Wye, poet laureate and serial killer, was lifted up from his electric chair in full view of Alterie’s entire TV-watching population of three bears in an abandoned hut, and transported to safety by a Local Unit of Contract Killers for You (a fictionalized and largely untrue version of which event was popularized by the rambunctious Halorian action flick LUCKY LIPS).
It was this feature that Xogge was trying to invoke in his moment of peril.
Cyncretia gestured rudely.
‘You want me to stuff the policy up my … that’s outrageous!’ Xogge frothed as the fine print on his policy flashed on the holographic interface
This policy will be deemed invalid if the insured party engages in acts of unjustifiable violence against Alteried browsing mud moles, has sex with his antiparticle self, attends any of the twelve thousand Lothne Festivals, professes patriotism, or is pursued by a vigilante squad of the school for the criminally imbecilic.
The interface blipped off into darkness before coming alive briefly for a minute to Thank you for calling the Eternal Life Insurance Company, and dying with a determination that belied its name.
It was at this moment that ten masked gunmen and a pig broke down the door of #401 and stood with their hands on their hips, looking very upset.
‘Zaranava Gloop!’ squeaked the pig angrily, ‘Where is the vial?’
The mountain of a troll cowered behind a broken cistern in Xogge’s bathroom. Water from the shattered plumbing was showering on his giant backside and bouncing off in elegant fountains.
For a moment no one spoke, while the octopus couple in the adjacent room audibly slithered out of their window into the relative safety of the shopping mall below (an unwise decision, as unscrupulous Halorian flea merchants subsequently cheated them of their holiday savings).
Then addressed party remonstrated, ‘I say, couldn’t we be a little more civil about the whole thing? The water’s freezing. But the vial’s here all right. Nicely crushed.’
He opened his right palm to reveal the pulverized shards of an elegantly mass-produced vial.
‘You troll!’ oinked the pig furiously ‘You sub-pig! You were asked to find the missing vial, not grind it!’
‘You flunked the practicals again,’ announced one of the gunmen calmly, taking off his hood to reveal the chiseled features of a Halorian rock sloth, ‘Now take the day off and go shopping.’
Then turning to agent Xogge, he smiled pleasantly.
‘Hello, agent Xogge. I’m afraid we’ve used you as an experimental Alteried browsing mud-mole. – so please accept our apologies and this lump of markinsite.’ He held out a pretty little box decorated with pink tassels.
‘You were slipped one of the vials that day in the barista. Consargo junior had to knock you out for a bit for that – our apologies. And two of our best troll students, including Zaranava here – who’s actually a half-Atredan climing toad, that’s where he gets his brains from – were asked to find it.’ The pig explained, grinning porcinely.
‘Both flunked, you see. The first unfortunately will not be there next term.’ The rock sloth grimly regretted.
‘But we believe Zaranava can and will be a most ingenious criminal someday,’ the pig squealed in hopeful ecstasy, ‘it’s the single most ambitious project we have undertaken.’
‘But now that you know where we operate, we’ll have to kill you.’ The Halorian announced, with ever increasing regret.
‘It’s sad it always has to end this way,’ concurred the pig, ‘But in return, you may ask us any question and we will be glad to answer. You will not die curious.’
‘Except maybe about how a hypercomputer operates, which even the engineers who make them don’t understand when they are sober.’ Corrected a third speaker, who had taken to crime after attempting to file a complicatedly disorienting Atredan tax return.
Xogge weighed his options. The somber stillness of life’s last moments enveloped him like a shroud. He did not hear the frenetic haggling thirty feet to his left and below, where conscienceless Halorian flea merchants were peddling their dangerously bad wares. Nor did he delight that exact moment, like the occupants of #501 above him, in the winning shot that Grimzwud Dmpsy had just struck for the Theosian team in the interplanetary bat-ball championship. The only sound that rang in his ear was the irritating jingle from an insurance company commercial that he could not forget. Then he saw light. A full square of it. Two feet to his left.
‘Tell me, gentlemen,’ he asked slowly, ‘the true story of the human race, of Nojong Hrupp and all that missing markinsite.’
‘Ah, that!’ laughed the pig, ‘I’m afraid the last time I narrated it you saw me dead right after. Funny how roles reverse. Anyway, the answer is simple. The human race is a myth.’
‘Which nevertheless lends credence to Hluk’s aphorism that a lie well kept becomes truth.’ Added the rock sloth sagely, blowing into the barrel of his matter destructor gun.
‘A blue-green planet?’ chortled the Atredan tax defaulter, ‘It would simply be yellow!’
The whole congregation of criminals roared with laughter. By the time they wiped away their merry tears, Xen Xogge had slipped out through the window.
‘Track him down!’ squeaked the pig, stung by his quarry’s betrayal. The masked gunmen jumped out of the window and fell flat into a flea merchant’s magical duo-dimensional cage.
‘Digger the lot!’ cursed the pig, and flipped open his communicator. ‘Dr. Carlos? Professor Goblankish here. Do we have any maps for the Megrogg globular cluster?’
Wholly Epilogue
Nojong Hrupp, great philanthropist and visionary quintillionaire of the otherwise hopelessly impoverished world of Atreda, finds mention in Zossian’s encyclopaedia under two headings. Even the great Gladius Omberry has to contend with only one (Sadomasochists found dead in harness). But the burning question of whether he ever crashed on a blue-green planet and invented the mythical human race is lost in the mists of time. Or more appropriately, in the intricate web of lies, legend and deceit that he wove around himself to evade taxes.
It is now generally understood that the human race is a myth. More so after an eminent professor of Wilkeston University proved a bipedal monkey to be an integral root of the equation x2 = -45, and therefore a mathematical impossibility.
Of more interest to historians is the conundrum of what happened to all that markinsite. That secret, alas, remains with the school for the criminally imbecilic.
