ASIM_issue_54 (28 page)

His desperation increased. At any moment the Captain might return and pass him in the darkness. The unlit channels of interstellar space were filled with treacherous rocks and dangerous currents of sand, interspersed by great sargasso ponds of silence studded with the massive lightless corpses of long dead stars. Skilled though the Captain was, to navigate such routes without a guiding light would be impossible.

But
he
—he knew himself now, through the miracle of that touch.

After all, his physical connection with the Captain should have been an impossible thing. His sentience, also, and the framework of their minds, were like photons that had travelled together across the great oceans of darkness between distant islands of light, always running in parallel, somehow never quite destined to achieve that elusive singularity of union on which only poets and lovers had ever spoken with any authority.

It had taken all of time itself to happen. Positive and negative, their encounter had been a simple, asymptotic accident.

* * *

Breathless, running out of time and much weakened by his efforts, Hesp merged his hands within the dark, colourless matter and began to press the iron framework tightly together. It felt good to be surrounded by simple stuff once more. Iron and magnetism, gravity, circumstances—crush and press
harder
, press and spin …

At first his efforts achieved nothing, nothing but frustration and the fear of failure—something he was familiar with. As he was also familiar with nothing.

And then …

He felt resistance, something pushing back. There was a faint subzero Kelvin stirring against his exterior. He felt … warmth, real
warmth
, for the first time in over a billion years.

At length, this tiny pressure pool of radiation evolved into a subtle glow. He strained against it. He pushed at it with aching arms, as his feet slid into vacuum and the force he used bent the space around him.

He cried, hot tears of effort. It was going to work—

The nebula suddenly erupted into a blazing, glorious luminosity. It assumed a spherical shape and began to spin.

A pale beam of light cut the sky like a sword. It flashed across his eyes, bathing Hesp weakly in a white sunshine, the long forgotten heat of tight wavelengths pulsing fire upon his face. He inhaled sweet energy, and the memories he had archived of his life.

In the spectacular illumination of that kaleidoscopic instant there flashed the thermodynamic echoes of the ghosts who walked behind him. He saw them only for a moment before this new brilliance caught and dismembered them. A solar system close to where he had anchored his new star lit up at once with an explosion of colour and potential: dust and darkness were abruptly blasted from the faces of cold, dead worlds as fresh scouring winds of stellar radiation swept across their startled, frozen skies.

Encouraged, he pushed a little while longer—just to make sure—and the embryonic star spun wildly on its axis before he managed to steady it.

The crushing oppression of the last thirty billion years seemed suddenly to evaporate; he floated in awe of a cosmos freshly revealed to overwhelmed senses.

This was something he had never expected to see again.

The young light shot out into the universe, straight as an arrow.

He hoped that one day—in some distant future—the Captain would see him in their distant past, and remember.

…Jacob Edwards

One perfectly ordinary day in 2010, which quite improbably turned out to be 10 October (42 Day),
Hitchhiker’s Guide
aficionado Max Mooney uncovered the following item at a garage sale in Brisbane, Australia. It appears to be an unused fragment of radio script, discarded (presumably) in favour of the well-known scene in which Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are called upon to enjoy the Vogon Captain’s poetry.

Is this excerpt spurious? Or was it destined for fame until one of Douglas Adams’ infamous last-minute rewrites? Sadly, many of the people best connected with the original radio series have passed away: Adams himself; producer Geoffrey Perkins; Richard Vernon (Slartibartfast); Peter Jones (The Book); and also David Tate (Vogon Guard), any of whom might have given testimony as to the authenticity (or otherwise) of Max Mooney’s discovery.

The physical script itself offers no clues other than being typewritten and roughly of the correct vintage. (Ordinary, typed pages, that is, not the carbon paper ‘snappies’ upon which Adams would type when writing or revising during an actual recording session.
¹
) Although unable to establish whether or not his find truly belongs to the Hitchhiker’s canon, Max Mooney has decided to offer it up for public scrutiny.

If genuine, the ‘nine lines’ fragment would have been slated for recording as part of the
Hitchhiker
’s pilot, which came to life on 28 June 1977 under the one-off auspices of Simon Brett, and was broadcast to an unsuspecting radio audience on 8 March 1978.

* * *

VOGON: So, Earthlings, I offer you a simple choice. Think carefully for you hold your very lives in your hands. Now choose! Either die in the vacuum of space, or …

FORD: Wait for it.

VOGON: … recite me a poem!

ARTHUR: I beg your pardon?

VOGON: Vogonic nanometer should do nicely. That’s nine lines, not counting the title. You have thirty seconds. Oh, and it has to be about my cat.

F/X: [
THERE COMES A FLATULENT THOUGH PLEASURABLE YOWL
]

ARTHUR: Ah, right, yes … Nine lines …

FORD: Nice title.

ARTHUR: Ah …

VOGON: Twenty-five seconds.

FORD: Come on, Arthur!

ARTHUR: Oh, Toasty Vogon, thy star-spungled poose so fat, thurdwurst furblursts in this whole univoose or … or …

FORD: That.

ARTHUR: Cowed, you meow me, kowtow on my towel fleas …

FORD: Nice.

ARTHUR: … how now how your, er …

FORD: Brown jowls.

ARTHUR: … churn foul chicken cowfees.

VOGON: Fifteen seconds.

ARTHUR: Stoop zarniwooping with hairballs chinstructed, your, ah …

FORD: Gloophoopy!

ARTHUR: Yes, gloophoopy nose slarting up, airspinducted, you …

FORD: Fly, Toasty Vogon, you critlittered spacecat!

F/X: [
THERE COMES ANOTHER YOWL, MORE PAINED
]

FORD: Sorry, I shouldn’t wave my arms around.

VOGON: Five seconds.

ARTHUR: [
Getting desperate
] … yet sky-green you die with each line’s epi-petithet. Oh!

F/X: [
THERE COMES A THIRD YOWL, LIKE A TORTURED BOWEL MOVEMENT
]

FORD: So
that’s
why you’re yowling, for owlspowling, hoot-given …

VOGON: Time’s up.

ARTHUR: Shet.

VOGON: [
After an expectant silence
] And that was your poem, was it?

ARTHUR: Er, well …

VOGON In Vogonic nanometer? About my cat?

FORD: Yes. Yes, that was it. ‘Nine Lines’, we call it. Well done, Arthur. That was …

VOGON: It was ten.

FORD: What?

VOGON: Your poem was ten lines. Not bad, otherwise, but totally anathematic to cats. Rather insensitive of you, actually. Guard! Take the prisoners to number three airlock and throw them out.

* * *

That Arthur and Ford recite a ‘nonsense poem’ tallies well with Adams’ fondness for Lewis Carroll (remembering that, in homage to Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark’, the original
Hitchhiker’s
was broadcast as a series of ‘fits’). Textually, however, there are some problems. ‘Zarniwooping’ seems rather to predate the character Zarniwoop, who isn’t mentioned until Fit the Seventh (recorded 20 November, broadcast 24 December 1978). ‘Gloophoopy’ is surely an agglutinative compounding of the one hit wonder word ‘hoopy’, first heard in Fit the Eighth (recorded 19 May 1979, broadcast 21 January 1980). Even ‘slarting up’ smacks of anachronistic portmanteau. But then again, perhaps these were merely sounds that Adams had pinging around his brain, just waiting to be called upon. (The Vogon Captain’s poem, as broadcast, does, after all, contain the line, ‘and hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindle werdles’.
²
)

One person with a keen ear for authenticity is Susan Sheridan (Trillian), who, although not making her
Hitchhiker’s
debut until Fit the Second (recorded 23 November 1977, broadcast 15 March 1978), has been kind enough to give her thoughts on the appellant text:

Douglas could’ve written it. Except the Vogon captain didn’t have a cat. Or did he? Not that that matters of course—random characters appear at any time. No, the big error is the absence of sound effects. A few caterwauls wouldn’t satisfy Douglas. Where’s the FX of Ford whacking said cat with his arm? No, I can’t accept this as genuine.
³

Douglas Adams certainly was fond of special effects. The original scripts are littered with them and the audio-obsessed Adams clearly conceptualised his radio serial as being innovative generally in its use of sound.
⁴
But if Susan Sheridan is correct in asserting that three feline F/X are insufficient to establish credibility, could it be instead that the ‘nine lines’ script, instead of predating the broadcast version, was penned as a possible improvement but then never used?

The appearance (or otherwise) of a cat might here be of some interest. Subsequent to completing the first series of
Hitchhiker’s
, Douglas Adams pulled a stint as script editor of
Doctor Who
, where a young John Nathan-Turner was employed as Production Unit Manager. Years later, when Nathan-Turner became Producer of the show, Colin Baker portrayed a Doctor with cats prominently displayed on the collar of his garishly patterned coat. Was this Baker’s own predilection (as lore would have it), or could it have been JNT’s tribute to Toasty Vogon, Adams’ very own Cheshire cat? Sadly, John Nathan-Turner is no longer with us, and both Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant (Peri) have declined to comment.

One person who remains uniquely placed to pass judgement on the ‘nine lines’ treatment is Bill Wallis, who was called in at the last minute to play Vogon Captain Prostetnic Jeltz in Fit the First
⁵
—a role he subsequently reprised in Fit the Second. (Please note that in the following critique, handwritten on the back of Ronald Searle’s
A Bigger Slash
, the word ‘eclat’ is merely an interpretation. Although it does have an alliterative ring.)

It seems to me that the VOGON is very likely from the fertile synapses of old Adams’s brain functions. Arthur, however, is having far too much fun—evidence of another hand. It’s not the eclat Adams quality of exhibitionism … but I am biased: I never liked young Douglas; and I failed to find the HGTTG of the least interest; utterly boring—apart from the Vogon, with whom I am sympathetic—and it heralded a period of comedy writing that it took some time to dispel.
⁶

So the Vogon may be genuine but Arthur not? Might it be that Adams penned this piece while in an inappropriately jolly mood, accidentally affording Arthur more enjoyment than the character would receive until later in the series? Unfortunately, Simon Jones (Arthur) and Geoffrey McGivern (Ford) have proven to be unavailable for comment. Mark Wing-Davey (Zaphod), though amenable to discussing
Hitchhiker’s
in general, went strangely silent when asked about the ‘nine lines’ fragment.
⁷

Are we seeing here, then, an indifference brought on by a spurious script, or is there instead something more sinister being swept well under the rug? For a more detailed appraisal, we may turn to comedic novelist Tom Holt, a scholar who knows his Vogons from his Vogans:

It is well established that Adams wrote late and fast, and relied heavily on his editors and producers to keep him honest. Crucial, I think, to the analysis of this fragment is the fact that episode 1 of series 1 was produced by Simon Brett; thereafter, Geoffrey Perkins took over for the rest of the season. Significantly, the scene in question leads directly on from the episode cliffhanger. It thus falls exactly on the fracture line, as it were, between Brett and Perkins.

Once this key element has been noted, everything else falls into place. Even the most superficial textual analysis must reach the conclusion that this fragment was written in a hurry—by two people. Logically, those two disparate voices must be Adams and Brett. Anyone familiar with Brett’s own scriptwriting style (the later episodes of ‘After Henry’, for example) must inevitably recognise both the trademark timing-of-interruptions 5 and the infelicities of slight overemphasis (overdoing the joke, if you like) that are quintessential Brett footprints. Because of the cliffhanger situation, and assuming (as I think we can) that at the time the script was written, Brett anticipated that he would be producing episode 2, it’s logical to assume that the first scene of episode 2 existed, in draft form at the very least, when episode 1 was recorded.

Anyone familiar with Perkins’ extensive work as a light entertainment writer and producer will testify to his tighter, slightly more limited approach. With this in mind, we can confidently hypothesize that Perkins felt uncomfortable with both the length and the excessive reliance on inherently absurd word-sound humour resulting from a last-minute Adams/Brett collaboration. He will have insisted on a rewrite resulting in a smoother, calmer, shorter scene. This will, of course, have necessitated going back to the already-recorded first episode, editing out the introduction to the cliffhanger and re-recording (essentially, replacing ‘recite me a poem’ with ‘tell me how good my poem was’). This would, of course, have had to be done in a tearing hurry, to meet broadcast schedule commitments.