VEET VOOGAJIG AND BIROS

Veet Voogajig was a quiet young student at the University of Maximegalon who pursued a brilliant career studying Ancient Philology, Transformational Ethics and the Wave Harmonic Theory of Historical Peception, and then, after a night of drinking Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed with what happened to all the ballpoint pens he'd bought over the years.

There followed a long period of painstaking research during which he visited all the major centres of Biro loss throughout the Galaxy and eventually came up with a quaint little theory which quite caught the public imagination at the time.

And as theories go, this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voogajig suddenly claimed to have found this planet, and to have worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book, and finally went into tax exile, which is the usual fate for those who are determined to make a fool of themselves in public.

When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voogajig had claimed for this planet, they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying. There did remain the the question of both the mysterious 60,000 Altairian dollars paid yearly into his Brantisvogan bank account, and of course Zaphod's highly profitable second-hand Biro business...