The Really Wild and Exciting Adventures of the Peacenik Vogon, Part Three
Created | Updated Mar 24, 2005
Last time on TRWAEOTPV:
I crash-landed, along with Zaphod, Ford, and Zig/Zag (Zaphod's cojoined twin sons), into the middle of a lake on the Planet Earth. There we met a paunchy human named Alice Gray who was weird enough to let us stay at her apartment after the ship sank. Upon learning of her father’s untimely demise –he was beaned by a ghetto blaster at a rock concert- she joined our half-baked search for a UFO repairman. She concluded the preceding chapter by asking if anyone present could drive an RV…
Credence Clearwater Revival blared from the surround speakers as our vehicle hurtled down the ribbon of highway. The sky was blue, the rolling hills were covered with lovely green grass, and the fluffy white clouds hovering above us were reflected by a sparkling brook.
In other words, the entire scenario was sickeningly idyllic. I sat morosely on the RV’s tweed-covered couch/hideaway bed, wishing that I had gone down with the ship. If I had been bored before, now I was all but comatose. The only noteworthy stimuli occurring within the immediate vicinity was Alice singing loudly along to Credence, getting most of the words wrong.
“Oh, come on ‘round the bend! Come on and try again! Yeaaaaaahhhh!” she wailed.
The trip had started out interestingly enough. We’d been forced to move quickly and grab every scrap of clothing and every single dollar we could lay our hands on. With all of that stuffed into Alice’s green suitcase, which was probably large enough accomodate a portable black hole, we hustled over to the RV. There was no room in the apartment driveway for the RV- Alice’s family minivan took up half the available space as it was. Instead, it was parked across the street, at a dentist’s office. Huffing and puffing, she lugged her enormous load a few steps and set it down. Then she picked it up again and hauled it a few more steps. Then she set it down. She repeated the process some twenty times until finally, half an hour later, she got to the parking lot.
“Ha…ha… hurry!” she panted. “My stepmom should be home any minute!” She dropped the bag at the RV door, an act which broke the suitcase’s zipper. Every item in the bag spilled out across the pavement. She growled in consternation and pointed to Zig and Zag. “You two! Put all that stuff back in the case while I get the door unlocked,” she ordered.
They looked at her as if she had asked them to pull a truck uphill with their teeth.
She gestured wildly. “We haven’t got time for staring contests! Come on! I need help!”
The boys still didn’t get it. Obviously, they needed motivation, which I was altogether willing to supply. I sighed, grabbed both their heads, and smacked them together. “Get with the program!” I bellowed. My prompt would have gone swimmingly, had they not both been knocked out by the force of my blow. Finally, I just went ahead and did what I should have done to begin with. I made Ford and Zaphod retrieve the bag’s contents while I acted in a supervisory capacity.
Alice fetched the spare keys from the battery compartment and was about to unlock the door when suddenly a pair of headlights blinked into view, a few miles down the road. “Oh, no!” Frantically, she began working over the lock.
“What now?” I demanded wearily.
“My stepmum! That’s her car coming!” she shouted, going to work on the deadbolt.
Zaphod squinted, peering into the distance. “You sure?” he asked, dropping a handful of socks into the suitcase.
“Positive! Her car is the only one in town with blue headlights. Pick up that pouch there!” she yelled, pointing to the one she meant.
The door came open, and everybody scrambled inside (except Zig and Zag, of course. I had to drag them in). Alice was the last to go, and as she peered over her shoulder to see how close the car was, she noticed something. “Arrgh! You didn’t get the pouch! Are you insane?” Before we could stop her, she jumped out of the door to snatch it up. I dropped onto the couch, from which I did not move for several hours. The tension built as the car came nearer and Alice still did not return. As the action built up to a heart-stopping climax… I fell asleep. Suspense can keep some people awake indefinitely, but as far as Vogons are concerned, nothing short of having just been shot by a Kill-O-Zap rifle can interrupt their internal clocks.
*******************(I love asterisks!)
I woke up shortly before the point at which the chapter began. Since I woke to discover we were merrily driving down the road rather than inside a penitentiary, I assumed the escapade had turned out in our favor. I persisted in that assumption until Alice began to sing. Her voice was nothing to complain about, but did it have to be so incessant? I put up with her for about an hour –actually it only felt that long- and at last I simply could take it no longer. “Alice, I’ve had enough of Credence being stuck in Lodi and rolling-rolling-rolling down the river! Turn off that music, NOW!”
She shrugged, got out of her seat, and shut off the CD player.
I relaxed.
She strapped herself back into the chair opposite my couch and started humming the Immigrant Song. “Aaaaah-aaaaah-aaaaaaah, AAAAH! Aaaah-aaaaah-aaaaaaah, AAAAH! Come from the land of the ice and snow…”
I hauled my bulk off the couch. Alice cringed, sure I was about to dash her brains out. She was visibly relieved when she saw me address Ford, who was in the front passenger seat, and Zaphod, who was driving. “Attention, gentlemen,” I announced. Ford and one of Zaphod’s heads turned around to see what I wanted. “I am going to proceed to the nearest accessible pane of glass and bang my head against it.” I followed through on my promise by stomping to the door and bashing my head repeatedly into the frosted glass that made the upper half of the door.
“What the- Pythia, has your cheese fallen off your cracker?!” Ford asked frantically.
As is my bent to do, I ignored him.
“Do you want to bust that window out or something?”
I noticed that frosted design spelled out the word “Welcome” in cursive letters.
Zaphod’s first head concentrated on driving. His second head and third arm tried to attract my focus. “Pythia, don’t make me pull this thing over.”
I felt a bolt give, but pretended that I hadn’t. “I like the thonking sound my head makes when it smacks into hard surfaces,” I murmured without missing a beat.
The other bolt gave, and the door went swinging open. Utter pandemonium broke loose. Alice tried to grab my utility belt, Zaphod slammed on the brakes, and Ford, being invaluable in emergencies, began to scream at the top of his lungs. Of all the people present in the room, I was the most calm, staring at certain death about five feet below my face. The word “roadkill” flashed into my mind once or twice, but otherwise I maintained my composure.
Thump.
“****!” Zaphod hollered as the open door smacked a hitchhiker on the side of the road. I got a fleeting glimpse of him as he passed through my periphery, but saw nothing distinguishable except his thumb, still awkwardly thrust outward for a ride.
The RV slowed and stopped. Alice yanked me out of the way as Zaphod and Ford scrambled out of their seats to check the status of the guy we knocked down. Unfortunately for Alice, I landed in her lap, nearly breaking her legs and the chair she was sitting on. She looked at me in pain. I looked back, intending to make it clear I had no intention of moving. What would I have done, anyway, had I elected to get up and go? I saw no point in joining the boys. The fellow they were so keen on gaping at could only be dead, in which case there was nothing more to do for him, or painfully alive, in which case he might decide to file a lawsuit against us. Had the boys not been so quick to rush off, I would have advised them to start the RV up again and evacuate the vicinity pronto, for neither alternative sounded appetizing to me.
“ZIG! ZAG!” Zaphod called, for some reason terribly upset about having killed someone.
They rushed out of the RV’s back bedroom to answer his call. I ignored them too, content to watch Alice make funny faces.
A few minutes later, Ford and Zaphod carried the hitchhiker inside and unloaded him onto the couch. I groaned inwardly, "There goes my cushy seat for the rest of the trip. Why didn’t they just leave him be? Isn’t there a public service that scrapes dead animals off the road in this part of the Galaxy?"
Zig and Zag piled in after their dad and sat on the dining area seats. I noticed each of my companions looked pale and distressed, besides Alice. She was distressed as the others, but more red in the face than they were. I got up to get a better look at the dead guy. He looked to be pushing fifty, tallish, dark-haired, and uneasy. Come to think of it, he too was pale, but usually dead people are.
Out of habit, I searched his pockets for anything of value.
“Pythia!” Ford snapped. “Stop that!”
I decided to spoil my untarnished record of ignoring Ford and turned on him. “‘Stop that, Pythia!’ Make me!”
He hauled back and punched me one.
For a split second, I couldn’t make myself believe he’d done it, for it had honestly never occurred to me that he had it in him. A split second after that, I had him in a headlock, forcing him to inhale the aromatic delights of my armpit.
Zaphod was trying to pry him loose. Zig and Zag were cheering and taking bets. Alice was grinning because I wasn’t sitting on her anymore. The dead guy was moaning.
The dead guy was moaning.
I forgot about that idiot Ford and took a listen. It sounded like the dead guy was saying, “Lay off, buggers. Let a man sleep once in a while.”
I poked him. “Say what?”
The man let his eyes slit open. It quickly became apparent that he was not dead, because when he saw me, he freaked out as if I had handed him a lit stick of dynamite.
Ford pushed me away and started talking quietly to the very-not-dead guy, who calmed slightly. I turned to Zaphod and tried to ask what on Vogsphere was going on, but he was too busy staring at Ford. Next I turned to Alice to see if some human thing was going on that I didn’t know about, but she too was staring, although not with the same look on her face. She looked as if she was staring at an old picture found in the sock drawer, a portrait of some smiling person whose name you cannot remember no matter how long you strain to dredge it up.
The hitchhiker staggered to his feet and went to the back bedroom. I took the chance to reclaim my spot and sat on the couch. Ford glared at me.
“What did I do now?” I asked. “Can’t a Vogon sit where she pleases?”
“Give it over,” he replied. I didn’t know what he meant, but then I realized that I still had the very-not-dead guy’s wallet.
“Just a second,” I requested, opening it up to see what was in it.
A credit card, twenty years expired. A cancelled library card. A faded five pound note (which I pocketed). A fossilized stick of gum. A driver license, again twenty years expired.
I read the name printed on the driver license.*
“Eh-ar-tee-ehch-eh-rrr D-ee-en-tee. What kind of a name is that?”
Ford snatched the wallet away. “A mispronounced one, you dolt.” He pointed to each letter as he sounded the name out. “Arr-thhh-urrr Dehhnnnnt. Arthur Dent.”
I looked blankly at the row of characters. “I reiterate my initial query,” I said.
Ford gaped at me for a few minutes before deciding to check on Arthur Dent. Most folks think that Vogons are stupid because they use a limited vocabulary. I think we are highly intelligent for the same reason.
To Be Continued…
* Babel fishes can translate written words as well as spoken words of any language.
I crash-landed, along with Zaphod, Ford, and Zig/Zag (Zaphod's cojoined twin sons), into the middle of a lake on the Planet Earth. There we met a paunchy human named Alice Gray who was weird enough to let us stay at her apartment after the ship sank. Upon learning of her father’s untimely demise –he was beaned by a ghetto blaster at a rock concert- she joined our half-baked search for a UFO repairman. She concluded the preceding chapter by asking if anyone present could drive an RV…
Credence Clearwater Revival blared from the surround speakers as our vehicle hurtled down the ribbon of highway. The sky was blue, the rolling hills were covered with lovely green grass, and the fluffy white clouds hovering above us were reflected by a sparkling brook.
In other words, the entire scenario was sickeningly idyllic. I sat morosely on the RV’s tweed-covered couch/hideaway bed, wishing that I had gone down with the ship. If I had been bored before, now I was all but comatose. The only noteworthy stimuli occurring within the immediate vicinity was Alice singing loudly along to Credence, getting most of the words wrong.
“Oh, come on ‘round the bend! Come on and try again! Yeaaaaaahhhh!” she wailed.
The trip had started out interestingly enough. We’d been forced to move quickly and grab every scrap of clothing and every single dollar we could lay our hands on. With all of that stuffed into Alice’s green suitcase, which was probably large enough accomodate a portable black hole, we hustled over to the RV. There was no room in the apartment driveway for the RV- Alice’s family minivan took up half the available space as it was. Instead, it was parked across the street, at a dentist’s office. Huffing and puffing, she lugged her enormous load a few steps and set it down. Then she picked it up again and hauled it a few more steps. Then she set it down. She repeated the process some twenty times until finally, half an hour later, she got to the parking lot.
“Ha…ha… hurry!” she panted. “My stepmom should be home any minute!” She dropped the bag at the RV door, an act which broke the suitcase’s zipper. Every item in the bag spilled out across the pavement. She growled in consternation and pointed to Zig and Zag. “You two! Put all that stuff back in the case while I get the door unlocked,” she ordered.
They looked at her as if she had asked them to pull a truck uphill with their teeth.
She gestured wildly. “We haven’t got time for staring contests! Come on! I need help!”
The boys still didn’t get it. Obviously, they needed motivation, which I was altogether willing to supply. I sighed, grabbed both their heads, and smacked them together. “Get with the program!” I bellowed. My prompt would have gone swimmingly, had they not both been knocked out by the force of my blow. Finally, I just went ahead and did what I should have done to begin with. I made Ford and Zaphod retrieve the bag’s contents while I acted in a supervisory capacity.
Alice fetched the spare keys from the battery compartment and was about to unlock the door when suddenly a pair of headlights blinked into view, a few miles down the road. “Oh, no!” Frantically, she began working over the lock.
“What now?” I demanded wearily.
“My stepmum! That’s her car coming!” she shouted, going to work on the deadbolt.
Zaphod squinted, peering into the distance. “You sure?” he asked, dropping a handful of socks into the suitcase.
“Positive! Her car is the only one in town with blue headlights. Pick up that pouch there!” she yelled, pointing to the one she meant.
The door came open, and everybody scrambled inside (except Zig and Zag, of course. I had to drag them in). Alice was the last to go, and as she peered over her shoulder to see how close the car was, she noticed something. “Arrgh! You didn’t get the pouch! Are you insane?” Before we could stop her, she jumped out of the door to snatch it up. I dropped onto the couch, from which I did not move for several hours. The tension built as the car came nearer and Alice still did not return. As the action built up to a heart-stopping climax… I fell asleep. Suspense can keep some people awake indefinitely, but as far as Vogons are concerned, nothing short of having just been shot by a Kill-O-Zap rifle can interrupt their internal clocks.
*******************(I love asterisks!)
I woke up shortly before the point at which the chapter began. Since I woke to discover we were merrily driving down the road rather than inside a penitentiary, I assumed the escapade had turned out in our favor. I persisted in that assumption until Alice began to sing. Her voice was nothing to complain about, but did it have to be so incessant? I put up with her for about an hour –actually it only felt that long- and at last I simply could take it no longer. “Alice, I’ve had enough of Credence being stuck in Lodi and rolling-rolling-rolling down the river! Turn off that music, NOW!”
She shrugged, got out of her seat, and shut off the CD player.
I relaxed.
She strapped herself back into the chair opposite my couch and started humming the Immigrant Song. “Aaaaah-aaaaah-aaaaaaah, AAAAH! Aaaah-aaaaah-aaaaaaah, AAAAH! Come from the land of the ice and snow…”
I hauled my bulk off the couch. Alice cringed, sure I was about to dash her brains out. She was visibly relieved when she saw me address Ford, who was in the front passenger seat, and Zaphod, who was driving. “Attention, gentlemen,” I announced. Ford and one of Zaphod’s heads turned around to see what I wanted. “I am going to proceed to the nearest accessible pane of glass and bang my head against it.” I followed through on my promise by stomping to the door and bashing my head repeatedly into the frosted glass that made the upper half of the door.
“What the- Pythia, has your cheese fallen off your cracker?!” Ford asked frantically.
As is my bent to do, I ignored him.
“Do you want to bust that window out or something?”
I noticed that frosted design spelled out the word “Welcome” in cursive letters.
Zaphod’s first head concentrated on driving. His second head and third arm tried to attract my focus. “Pythia, don’t make me pull this thing over.”
I felt a bolt give, but pretended that I hadn’t. “I like the thonking sound my head makes when it smacks into hard surfaces,” I murmured without missing a beat.
The other bolt gave, and the door went swinging open. Utter pandemonium broke loose. Alice tried to grab my utility belt, Zaphod slammed on the brakes, and Ford, being invaluable in emergencies, began to scream at the top of his lungs. Of all the people present in the room, I was the most calm, staring at certain death about five feet below my face. The word “roadkill” flashed into my mind once or twice, but otherwise I maintained my composure.
Thump.
“****!” Zaphod hollered as the open door smacked a hitchhiker on the side of the road. I got a fleeting glimpse of him as he passed through my periphery, but saw nothing distinguishable except his thumb, still awkwardly thrust outward for a ride.
The RV slowed and stopped. Alice yanked me out of the way as Zaphod and Ford scrambled out of their seats to check the status of the guy we knocked down. Unfortunately for Alice, I landed in her lap, nearly breaking her legs and the chair she was sitting on. She looked at me in pain. I looked back, intending to make it clear I had no intention of moving. What would I have done, anyway, had I elected to get up and go? I saw no point in joining the boys. The fellow they were so keen on gaping at could only be dead, in which case there was nothing more to do for him, or painfully alive, in which case he might decide to file a lawsuit against us. Had the boys not been so quick to rush off, I would have advised them to start the RV up again and evacuate the vicinity pronto, for neither alternative sounded appetizing to me.
“ZIG! ZAG!” Zaphod called, for some reason terribly upset about having killed someone.
They rushed out of the RV’s back bedroom to answer his call. I ignored them too, content to watch Alice make funny faces.
A few minutes later, Ford and Zaphod carried the hitchhiker inside and unloaded him onto the couch. I groaned inwardly, "There goes my cushy seat for the rest of the trip. Why didn’t they just leave him be? Isn’t there a public service that scrapes dead animals off the road in this part of the Galaxy?"
Zig and Zag piled in after their dad and sat on the dining area seats. I noticed each of my companions looked pale and distressed, besides Alice. She was distressed as the others, but more red in the face than they were. I got up to get a better look at the dead guy. He looked to be pushing fifty, tallish, dark-haired, and uneasy. Come to think of it, he too was pale, but usually dead people are.
Out of habit, I searched his pockets for anything of value.
“Pythia!” Ford snapped. “Stop that!”
I decided to spoil my untarnished record of ignoring Ford and turned on him. “‘Stop that, Pythia!’ Make me!”
He hauled back and punched me one.
For a split second, I couldn’t make myself believe he’d done it, for it had honestly never occurred to me that he had it in him. A split second after that, I had him in a headlock, forcing him to inhale the aromatic delights of my armpit.
Zaphod was trying to pry him loose. Zig and Zag were cheering and taking bets. Alice was grinning because I wasn’t sitting on her anymore. The dead guy was moaning.
The dead guy was moaning.
I forgot about that idiot Ford and took a listen. It sounded like the dead guy was saying, “Lay off, buggers. Let a man sleep once in a while.”
I poked him. “Say what?”
The man let his eyes slit open. It quickly became apparent that he was not dead, because when he saw me, he freaked out as if I had handed him a lit stick of dynamite.
Ford pushed me away and started talking quietly to the very-not-dead guy, who calmed slightly. I turned to Zaphod and tried to ask what on Vogsphere was going on, but he was too busy staring at Ford. Next I turned to Alice to see if some human thing was going on that I didn’t know about, but she too was staring, although not with the same look on her face. She looked as if she was staring at an old picture found in the sock drawer, a portrait of some smiling person whose name you cannot remember no matter how long you strain to dredge it up.
The hitchhiker staggered to his feet and went to the back bedroom. I took the chance to reclaim my spot and sat on the couch. Ford glared at me.
“What did I do now?” I asked. “Can’t a Vogon sit where she pleases?”
“Give it over,” he replied. I didn’t know what he meant, but then I realized that I still had the very-not-dead guy’s wallet.
“Just a second,” I requested, opening it up to see what was in it.
A credit card, twenty years expired. A cancelled library card. A faded five pound note (which I pocketed). A fossilized stick of gum. A driver license, again twenty years expired.
I read the name printed on the driver license.*
“Eh-ar-tee-ehch-eh-rrr D-ee-en-tee. What kind of a name is that?”
Ford snatched the wallet away. “A mispronounced one, you dolt.” He pointed to each letter as he sounded the name out. “Arr-thhh-urrr Dehhnnnnt. Arthur Dent.”
I looked blankly at the row of characters. “I reiterate my initial query,” I said.
Ford gaped at me for a few minutes before deciding to check on Arthur Dent. Most folks think that Vogons are stupid because they use a limited vocabulary. I think we are highly intelligent for the same reason.
To Be Continued…
* Babel fishes can translate written words as well as spoken words of any language.
