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Ford was sitting at a control panel putting the finishing touches to his write-up of a recent Xaphrphrian hedgehog-throwing tournament when Arthur struck.

"Ford?"

"Yes," he answered, not looking up from his screen. The tricky thing about Xaphrphrian sports in general was the culture's lack of such concepts as "rules" or "competition". Many philosophers' pensions owed their vastness to frequent debates on exactly what profound statement about the beauty and futility of life this actually stood for.

"Do you remember telling me you couldn't get me pregnant?" The harmonics of Arthur's voice could have cut glass.

"Vaguely." The tricky thing about Xaphrphrian hedgehog-throwing in particular was the culture's lack of hedgehogs.

"Okay."

He looked up to see Arthur clenching and unclenching his fists.

"Is there any chance," Arthur continued, "and I ask only for information, that you were... How can I put this? Lying through your teeth?"

"Arthur." Ford's voice was firm. Personally, he thought the Xaphrphrians were just stupid. That was probably why philosophers retired young and he didn't even have a pension, vast or otherwise. "Don't be any more gormless than you have to be. We discussed this."

"We did?" asked Arthur.

"At length."

"At length?"

"People can't be held accountable for things said in moments of extreme sexual duress. Like when you called me-"

"That was once!" Arthur protested, the vivid red of anger in his cheeks quickly replaced by the equally vivid red of embarrassment. "And you said you wouldn't bring that up again."

"Actually, you said I wouldn't bring that up again; I said all right, as long as you dressed up in th-"

"Ford! Pregnant?"

"No," Ford said.

Arthur glared. It was the glare that had seen his house - quickly followed by his world - destroyed to make way for a bypass. It was the glare that had had Vogon missiles fired at it, simian-authored scripts for Hamlet proffered to it and H'Lian advice on sexual technique given to it. In short, it wasn't much of a glare, but it was the only glare he had. Ford would never admit it, but there was something endearing about the way he clung to it like a child with the broken remains of a favoured toy.

"Maybe," Ford said.

Arthur glared.

"A little," Ford said.

Arthur glared.

"Look, it's nothing like what you put your females through." It was lucky for Ford that he'd never quite got the hang of dramatic irony, otherwise even he might have quailed at his attempt to be the more indignant participant of the conversation. "It's only a month, and it doesn't come out the way it came in." He felt a twinge deep inside himself. Morning sickness? No, that was Arthur's department. Guilt? Of course not. Indigestion? No, he'd hardly eaten a th- Wait. Morning sickness.

Ford blinked.

"Arthur, where's my copy of the Guide?"

Arthur drew himself up to his full height, which probably wouldn't have impressed Ford even if he had been paying attention. "Don't you dare fob me off with that damned book rather than telling me yourself."

Ford held his breath as he started to root through a pile of dirty socks in the corner of the room. By rights, Marvin should have taken them to be washed by now, but neither man had ever really felt like labouring the point when the robot could be somewhere else and they could be having sex.

"Here it is," he said, moving away from the sock pile to take a couple of desperate gasps of air.

"Ford! Did you get me pregnant? I need to know!"

"Just a moment..."

"I'm not interested in this if it's just going to be another one of your- your ego trips disguised as information tangential - and that's if I'm lucky - to the situation in hand! Did you get me pregnant?"

===

The indomitable Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of pregnancy:

"No good will come of it. Really. We mean it. The galaxy has enough problems without you adding to them."

Under extreme pressure from the editors, their lawyers and some dangerously sharp knives, this section was expanded to include the following:

"Among sexually reproducing races, homosexual acts carry the lowest risk of resulting in pregnancy, valued at approximately 0.00003%. This value may seem surprisingly high to many races, but surprisingly low to the Xaphrphrians, a race so stupid the cry of "Sorry! Wrong genitalia!" has been incorporated into their mating rituals. Heterosexual act carry a much higher risk, and as such have been banned on a number of the more civilised words. By far and away the highest risk, however, is in xenosexual acts, with a risk of 132% calculated for those couples who neglect prophylactics. The mathematically dubious nature of this risk is due to the high likelihood that all parties involved will become pregnant.

"Mathematicians, it seems, enjoy a joke just as much as the more conventionally sentient life-forms."

===

Ford's protective layer of cheerful disinterest began to crack. Buried as it was under another 73 layers of the same, this wasn't immediately apparent to anyone but Ford. "Don't worry," he said, grinning in an even more unnerving fashion than usual, "I'll make an honest man of you yet."

Arthur frowned. A suspicious nature was a necessary part of spending any time around Ford, and his was trying really rather hard to make itself known. "Let me see the book."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I wouldn't want to upset you," said Ford, not for the first time in their relationship lying through his teeth, "not in your delicate condition."

Arthur made a clumsy lunge for the book, which Ford threw over his shoulder wearing an expression of wounded innocence that wouldn't have fooled a Xaphrphrian village idiot.

"Please, Arthur, think of the baby. You're lunging for two, now."

Arthur watched through a thin red mist of anger as Ford turned, picked up the Guide and stalking out of the room. It would have given him no small amount of pleasure to know that the father of his unborn child had gone to lock himself in the toilet, where he would spend the next half hour sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up to his chin, keening in a pitch too high for Arthur to hear. The fact that he wasn't, however, to know this, was just about the only good thing Ford had going for him at that moment.

He muttered a curse and stormed off to find a sympathetic ear.

After reviewing his options, he muttered another curse and stormed off to find Marvin.

"Is this about the socks?" the robot - who, interrupted in the middle of a monologue about the crippling stupidity of all other so-called sentient life-forms, was typically pleased to see him - intoned dully.

"No."

Arthur closed his eyes and counted to ten. He reflected that he should never have left his bed this morning, although that, of course, was the problem. "I'm- That is to say- Ford- I'm pregnant." Not even the robot could fail to appreciate the gravity of this situation.

"Are you certain it isn't indigestion?"

Arthur gritted his teeth, then forced them apart so he could answer. "Yes."

"I ask because organisms as stupid as you are often get confused."

Arthur gritted his teeth some more.

"Why do you only use one tenth of your brain?" Marvin seemed as genuinely interested as he was about anything, which is to say, not very. "Is it because the other 90% is even worse?"

Arthur's tooth enamel began to feel the sort of strain that enables dentists to buy new cars.

"Is it Ford's?"

"Yes!" squeaked Arthur, shocked into speaking.

"Why? If you really had to breed, surely it wasn't beyond you to find a sperm donor with some positive genetic traits?"

"Because Ford's my- He's- I'm in l- And anyway, Ford does have positive traits and I didn't- Oh, Hell!" Arthur stormed off again.

"I'm not getting you down, am I?"

===

It is unlikely that Arthur would have been any better able to answer Marvin had he paid more attention to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's entry on relationships and how to avoid them. He might, however, have been better equipped to deal with certain future difficulties.

The section - originally entitled "Relationships" until the compiler, the imminent deadline and the need to justify certain essentials on his expense account had persuaded the editor that since the zarking Guide was responsible for the breakdown of every single relationship he, the compiler, had ever attempted, the zarking Guide could take what it was given and like it - contains the following among its more helpful items of advice:

"Yet another method of ensuring the reader dies alone and unfulfilled is to withhold sex from your partner. Calling this stupid is like calling Vogons unpleasant: a potentially life-endangering understatement."

===

Withholding sex was not going as Arthur had planned.

"I said, okay."

"I said," Arthur repeated, decisiveness writ large in the manful set of his brow, "no." He lent against a control panel, comfortable as a goldfish in an inferno.

"And I said," Ford repeated, indifference writ large in the complete lack of any setting at all of his brow, "okay." At Arthur's behest, he was standing at the opposite side of the control room.

"Okay."

"Okay."

"You do realise this is no to any form of sex, don't you?"

"Yes."

"And no touching."

"Okay."

"And no running your tongue along the bottom of my earlobe because you think that'll make me change my mind."

"Okay."

"It won't, you know."

"Okay."

"You seem remarkably calm about this, Ford."

Ford smiled a smile only a shark could love. "If you feel that's what's best for our baby."

Arthur blinked. It was such a successful manoeuvre he decided to repeat it. Then and only then could he bring himself to speak. "I don't care about-" He stopped, unable to face the shocked (and, he correctly assumed, faked) gasp that he just knew would follow any declarations of insouciance about Ford's bloody spawn. "I mean, you can- We can- You know-"

"Make wild, passionate love?" Ford helpfully supplied.

"-if you just let me look at the damned book."

"So you can read one of my ego trips disguised as information that is tangential - if you're lucky - to the situation in hand?"

If he didn't know better, he'd think that was sarcasm.

"Yes."

Arthur waited patiently as Ford ran off to vomit again. Bloody Ford bloody Prefect and his bloody sympathy morning sickness. What with that and the sympathy pains and the sympathy bump, Ford was making a bigger drama of the whole thing than Arthur. He was never this sympathetic when the Earth was destro-

Oh.

The penny finally dropped, along with the rest of Arthur's mental piggy bank.

"Ford," he said as the biped in question re-entered the room.

"Arthur?"

"Do you fancy a cup of tea?"

"We don't have any tea, Arthur. I seem to remember that was rather higher on the list of recriminations that accompanied your screaming fit-"

"I was shouting to make myself heard over the meteor storm," Arthur said, displaying a level of truthfulness characteristic of their relationship.

"-rather higher up there than the fact that I got you pregnant."

"Yes. About that..."

If Ford flinched (which he did, 62 protective layers of cheerful disinterest beneath his surface expression), Arthur didn't see it.

However much he wished he could, Arthur was unable to savour the moment.

"I can't believe you lied t-" He stopped as his brain caught up with his mouth. "You lied to me! You got me pregnant! You got you pregnant! You lied to me some more!" The volume and pitch of his voice were rising in sync. "And now I'm stuck here on this God forsaken spaceship with no one but a chronically depressed robot and a pregnant alien for company and I don't even know if- Do you even like me? And you lied to me! And there's still no bloody tea on this stinking, rotten excuse for a stinking, rotten tin can!"

"Yes," said Ford.

"What?" Bewilderment took its rightful place at the forefront of Arthur's emotional repertoire.

"Yes."

"To, uh, what?"

"To your question."

Ford was regarding him with a cool disinterest that immediately put him on edge. If he didn't know better, Arthur might think his - he smiled wickedly - might think the mother of his child was worried about something.

It was a shame that his entire mental piggy bank had already tumbled to the floor of his mind, since the only thing left to drop now was his jaw as he ran through his list of accusations and realised what Ford was saying.

"You mean-?"

Ford's blank stare tried rather unconvincingly to imply that he would roll his eyes only really, it wasn't worth the effort.

"You shouldn't surprise me like this," said Arthur, clinging to his spiritual comfort blanket of self-righteousness. "I'm pregnant."

"Yes." This time Ford did roll his eyes. "So am I."

===
Fin
===