He had the most astounding collection of teeth.

They looked as if each came from a completely different animal, and they were ranged around his mouth at such bizarre angles it seemed that if he ever actually tried to chew anything he’d lacerate half his own face along with it, and possibly put an eye out as well.

Each of his three eyes was small and intense and looked about as sane as a fish in a privet bush.

“I was at a cricket match,” he rasped.

This seemed on the face of it such a preposterous notion that Arthur practically choked.

“Not in this body,” screeched the creature, “not in this body! This is my last body. My last life. This is my revenge body. My kill-Arthur-Dent body. My last chance. I had to fight to get it too.”

“But …”

“I was at,” roared Agrajag, “a cricket match! I had a weak-heart condition, but what, I said to my wife, can happen to me at a cricket match? As I’m watching, what happens?

“Two people quite maliciously appear out of thin air just in front of me. The last thing I can’t help but notice before my poor heart gives out in shock is that one of them is Arthur Dent wearing a rabbit bone in his beard. Coincidence?”

“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 Band-Aids.

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 farther.

Agrajag advanced still farther.

“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 particular 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 again 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 that leaped 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 bedroom 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 your started your vendetta against me! What about the time when 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 Agrajag in a broken voice, “you go there all right. Oh, zark!” He tottered, and stared wildly about him at his huge Cathedral of Hate. “I’ve brought you here too soon!”

He started to scream and bellow, “I’ve brought you here too zarking soon!”

Suddenly he rallied, and turned a baleful, hating eye on Arthur.

“I’m going to kill you anyway!” he roared. “Even if it’s a logical impossibility I’m going to zarking well try! I’m going to blow this whole mountain up!” He screamed, “Let’s see you get out of this one, Dent!”

He rushed in a painful waddling hobble to what appeared to be a small black sacrificial altar. He was shouting so wildly now that he was really carving his face up badly. Arthur leaped down from his vantage place on the carving of his own foot and ran to try to restrain the three-quarters-crazed creature.

He leaped upon him, and brought the strange monstrosity crashing down on top of the altar.

Agrajag screamed again, thrashing wildly for a brief moment, and turned a wild eye on Arthur.

“You know what you’ve done?” he gurgled painfully; “you’ve gone and killed me again. I mean, what do you want from me, blood?”

He thrashed again in a brief apoplectic fit, quivered and collapsed, smacking a large red button on the altar as he did so.

Arthur started with horror and fear, first at what he appeared to have done, and then at the loud sirens and bells that suddenly shattered the air to announce some clamoring emergency. He stared wildly around him.

The only exit appeared to be the way he had come in. He pelted toward it, throwing away the nasty fake leopard-skin bag as he did so.

He dashed randomly, haphazardly through the labyrinthine maze; he seemed to be pursued more and more fiercely by klaxons, sirens, flashing lights.

Suddenly, he turned a corner and there was a light in front of him.

It wasn’t flashing. It was daylight.

Chapter 17

Although it has been said that on Earth alone in our Galaxy is Krikkit (or cricket) treated as a fit subject for a game, and that for this reason the Earth has been shunned, this only applies to our Galaxy, and more specifically to our dimension. In some of the higher dimensions they feel they can more or less please themselves, and have been playing a peculiar game called Brockian Ultra Cricket for whatever their transdimensional equivalent of billions of years is.

“Let’s be blunt, it’s a nasty game” (says The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), “but then anyone who has been to any of the higher dimensions will know that they’re a pretty nasty heathen lot up there who should just be smashed and done in, and would be, too, if anyone could work out a way of firing missiles at right angles to reality.”