Douglas Adams. The Hitch Hikers Guide to Galaxy

Fantazy. 1990.

Based on the famous Radio series

Douglas  N.  Adams was born in Cambridge in 1952. He was educated at Brentwood School, Essex  and  St.  John's  College, Cambridge where he read English. After graduation he spent several years contributing material to radio and television  shows as  well  as  writing, performing and sometimes directing stage revues in London, Cambridge and on the Edinburgh Fringe. He has also  worked  at  various  times  as  a  hospital  porter, barn builder, chicken shed cleaner, bodyguard,  radio  producer  and script editor of Doctor Who.

He is not married, has no children, and does not live in Surrey.

for Jonny Brock and Clare Gorst

and all other Arlingtonians

for tea, sympathy, and a sofa

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end  of  the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green  planet  whose  apedescended  life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most  of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many  solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely  concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean,  and  most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that  they'd  all  made  a  big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place.  And  some  said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever  have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one  man  had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it  would  be  to  be  nice  to people for a change, one girl sitting on  her  own  in  a  small  cafe  in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong  all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be  made  a  good  and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would  have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone  about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and  some  of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or heard of by any Earthman.

Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.

in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out  of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor - of which no Earthman had  ever heard either.

Not only is it  a  wholly  remarkable  book,  it  is  also  a  highly successful one - more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling  than  Fifty  More  Things  to  do  in  Zero  Gravity,  and   more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's  Guide  has  already  supplanted  the  great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository  of  all  knowledge  and wisdom, for though it  has  many  omissions  and  contains  much  that  is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older,  more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has  the  words  Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday,  the  story  of  its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how  these  consequences  are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.

It begins with a house.

1

The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village.  It stood on its own and looked over a broad spread of West Country  farmland. Not a remarkable house by any means -  it  was  about  thirty  years  old, squattish, squarish, made of brick, and had four windows set in the  front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to  please  the eye.

The only person for whom the house was in any way special was  Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.  He had lived in it for about three years, ever since  he  had  moved  out  of London because it made him nervous and irritable. He was about  thirty  as well, dark haired and never quite at ease with  himself.  The  thing  that used to worry him most was the fact that people always  used  to  ask  him what he was looking so worried about. He worked in local  radio  which  he always used to tell his friends was  a  lot  more  interesting  than  they probably thought. It was, too - most of his friends worked in advertising.

It hadn't properly registered with Arthur that the council wanted  to knock down his house and build an bypass instead.

At eight o'clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered  blearily  round  his  room,  opened  a window, saw a bulldozer, found  his  slippers,  and  stomped  off  to  the bathroom to wash.

Toothpaste on the brush - so. Scrub.

Shaving mirror - pointing at the  ceiling.  He  adjusted  it.  For  a moment it reflected  a  second  bulldozer  through  the  bathroom  window. Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent's  bristles.  He  shaved  them off, washed, dried, and stomped off  to  the  kitchen  to  find  something pleasant to put in his mouth.

Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee. Yawn.

The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment  in  search of something to connect with.

The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one.

He stared at it.

"Yellow," he thought and stomped off  back  to  his  bedroom  to  get dressed.

Passing the bathroom he stopped to drink a large glass of water,  and another. He began to suspect that he was hung over. Why was he hung  over? Had he been drinking the night before? He supposed that he must have been. He caught a glint in the shaving mirror. "Yellow," he thought and  stomped on to the bedroom.

He stood and thought. The pub, he  thought.  Oh  dear,  the  pub.  He vaguely  remembered  being  angry,  angry  about  something  that   seemed important. He'd been telling people about it, telling people about  it  at great length, he rather suspected: his clearest visual recollection was of glazed looks on other people's faces. Something about a new bypass he  had just found out about. It had been in the pipeline for months only  no  one seemed to have known about it. Ridiculous. He took a  swig  of  water.  It would sort itself out, he'd decided, no one wanted a bypass,  the  council didn't have a leg to stand on. It would sort itself out.

God what a terrible hangover it had earned him though. He  looked  at himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stuck  out  his  tongue.  "Yellow,"  he thought. The word yellow wandered through his mind in search of  something to connect with.

Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path.

Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words  he  was  a carbon-based life form descended from an ape.  More  specifically  he  was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously  enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a  direct  male-line  descendant  of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations  and  racial  mixing  had  so juggled his genes that he had no  discernible  Mongoloid  characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry  were  a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.

He was by no means a great warrior: in fact he was a nervous  worried man. Today he was particularly nervous and worried because  something  had gone seriously wrong with his job - which was to see  that  Arthur  Dent's house got cleared out of the way before the day was out.

"Come off it, Mr Dent,", he said, "you can't win you know. You  can't lie in front of the bulldozer indefinitely." He tried  to  make  his  eyes blaze fiercely but they just wouldn't do it.

Arthur lay in the mud and squelched at him.

"I'm game," he said, "we'll see who rusts first."

"I'm afraid you're going to have  to  accept  it,"  said  Mr  Prosser gripping his fur hat and rolling it round  the  top  of  his  head,  "this bypass has got to be built and it's going to be built!"

"First I've heard of it," said Arthur, "why's it going to be built?"

Mr Prosser shook his finger at him for a bit, then stopped and put it away again.

"What do you mean, why's it got  to  be  built?"  he  said.  "It's  a bypass. You've got to build bypasses."

Bypasses are devices which allow some people to drive from point A to point B very fast whilst other people dash from point B to  point  A  very fast. People living at point C, being a point  directly  in  between,  are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people of point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point  B  that so many people of point A are so keen to get there. They often  wish  that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted  to be.

Mr Prosser wanted to be at  point  D.  Point  D  wasn't  anywhere  in particular, it was just any convenient point a very long way  from  points A, B and C. He would have a nice little cottage at point D, with axes over the door, and spend a pleasant amount of time at point E, which  would  be the nearest pub to point D. His wife of course wanted climbing roses,  but he wanted axes. He didn't know why - he just liked axes. He flushed  hotly under the derisive grins of the bulldozer drivers.

He shifted  his  weight  from  foot  to  foot,  but  it  was  equally uncomfortable on each. Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn't him.

Mr Prosser said: "You were quite entitled to make any suggestions  or protests at the appropriate time you know."

"Appropriate time?" hooted Arthur. "Appropriate  time?  The  first  I knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday. I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no he'd come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped  a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me."

"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available  in  the  local  planning office for the last nine month."

"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to  see  them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone  out  of  your  way  to  call attention to them had  you?  I  mean  like  actually  telling  anybody  or anything."

"But the plans were on display..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a torch."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of  a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the  door saying Beware of the Leopard."

A cloud passed overhead. It cast a shadow over Arthur Dent as he  lay propped up on his elbow in the cold mud. It  cast  a  shadow  over  Arthur Dent's house. Mr Prosser frowned at it.

"It's not as if it's a particularly nice house," he said.

"I'm sorry, but I happen to like it."

"You'll like the bypass."

"Oh shut up," said Arthur Dent. "Shut up and go away, and  take  your bloody bypass with you. You haven't got a leg to stand  on  and  you  know it."

Mr Prosser's mouth opened and closed a couple of times while his mind was for a moment filled with inexplicable but terribly attractive  visions of Arthur Dent's house being consumed with fire and Arthur himself running screaming  from  the  blazing  ruin  with  at  least  three  hefty  spears protruding from his back. Mr Prosser was often bothered with visions  like these and they made him feel very nervous. He stuttered for a  moment  and then pulled himself together.

"Mr Dent," he said.

"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.

"Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much  damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?"

"How much?" said Arthur.

"None at all," said Mr Prosser, and stormed nervously  off  wondering why his brain was filled with a thousand hairy horsemen  all  shouting  at him.

By a curious coincidence, None at all is exactly how  much  suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed.

Arthur Dent had never, ever suspected this.

This friend of his had first arrived on the planet some fifteen Earth years previously, and he had worked  hard  to  blend  himself  into  Earth society - with, it must be said, some success. For instance he  had  spent those fifteen years pretending to be an  out  of  work  actor,  which  was plausible enough.

He had made one careless blunder though, because he had skimped a bit on his preparatory research. The information he had gathered had  led  him to choose the name "Ford Prefect" as being nicely inconspicuous.

He was not conspicuously tall, his features  were  striking  but  not conspicuously handsome. His  hair  was  wiry  and  gingerish  and  brushed backwards from the temples. His skin seemed to be  pulled  backwards  from the nose. There was something very slightly odd  about  him,  but  it  was difficult to say what it was. Perhaps it was that his  eyes  didn't  blink often enough and when you talked to him for any length of time  your  eyes began involuntarily to water on his behalf. Perhaps it was that he  smiled slightly too broadly and gave people the unnerving impression that he  was about to go for their neck.

He struck most of the friends he had made on Earth as  an  eccentric, but a harmless one -  an  unruly  boozer  with  some  oddish  habits.  For instance he would often gatecrash university parties, get badly drunk  and start making fun of any astrophysicist he could find till  he  got  thrown out.

Sometimes he would get seized with oddly distracted moods  and  stare into the sky as if hypnotized until someone asked him what he  was  doing. Then he would start guiltily for a moment, relax and grin.

"Oh, just looking for flying saucers," he  would  joke  and  everyone would laugh and ask him what sort of flying saucers he was looking for.

"Green ones!" he would reply with a wicked grin, laugh wildly  for  a moment and then suddenly lunge for the nearest bar  and  buy  an  enormous round of drinks.

Evenings like this usually ended badly. Ford would  get  out  of  his skull on whisky, huddle into a corner with some girl and explain to her in slurred phrases that honestly the colour  of  the  flying  saucers  didn't matter that much really.

Thereafter, staggering semi-paralytic down the night streets he would often ask passing policemen if  they  knew  the  way  to  Betelgeuse.  The policemen would usually say something like, "Don't you  think  it's  about time you went off home sir?"

"I'm trying to baby, I'm trying to," is what Ford invariably  replied on these occasions.

In  fact  what  he  was  really  looking  out  for  when  he   stared distractedly into the night sky was any kind of flying saucer at all.  The reason he said green was that green was the traditional  space  livery  of the Betelgeuse trading scouts.

Ford Prefect was desperate that any flying saucer at all would arrive soon because fifteen years was a  long  time  to  get  stranded  anywhere, particularly somewhere as mindboggingly dull as the Earth.

Ford wished that a flying saucer would arrive soon  because  he  knew how to flag flying saucers down and get lifts from them. He  knew  how  to see the Marvels of the Universe for less than thirty  Altairan  dollars  a day.

In fact, Ford  Prefect  was  a  roving  researcher  for  that  wholly remarkable book The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Human beings are  great  adaptors,  and  by  lunchtime  life  in  the environs of Arthur's house had settled  into  a  steady  routine.  It  was Arthur's accepted role to lie squelching  in  the  mud  making  occasional demands to see his lawyer, his mother or a good book; it was Mr  Prosser's accepted role to tackle Arthur with the occasional new ploy  such  as  the For the Public Good talk, the March of Progress talk, the They Knocked  My House Down Once You  Know,  Never  Looked  Back  talk  and  various  other cajoleries and threats; and it was the bulldozer drivers' accepted role to sit around drinking coffee and experimenting with union regulations to see how they could turn the situation to their financial advantage.

The Earth moved slowly in its diurnal course.

The sun was beginning to dry out the mud Arthur lay in.

A shadow moved across him again.

"Hello Arthur," said the shadow.

Arthur looked up and squinting into the sun was startled to see  Ford Prefect standing above him.

"Ford! Hello, how are you?"

"Fine," said Ford, "look, are you busy?"

"Am I busy?"  exclaimed  Arthur.  "Well,  I've  just  got  all  these bulldozers and things to lie in front of because they'll  knock  my  house down if I don't, but other than that... well, no not especially, why?"

They don't have sarcasm on Betelgeuse, and Ford Prefect often  failed to notice it unless  he  was  concentrating.  He  said,  "Good,  is  there anywhere we can talk?"

"What?" said Arthur Dent.

For a few seconds Ford seemed to ignore him, and stared fixedly  into the sky like a rabbit trying to get run over by a car.  Then  suddenly  he squatted down beside Arthur.

"We've got to talk," he said urgently.

"Fine," said Arthur, "talk."

"And drink," said Ford. "It's vitally  important  that  we  talk  and drink. Now. We'll go to the pub in the village."

He looked into the sky again, nervous, expectant.

"Look, don't you understand?" shouted Arthur. He pointed at  Prosser. "That man wants to knock my house down!"

Ford glanced at him, puzzled.

"Well he can do it while you're away can't he?" he asked.

"But I don't want him to!"

"Ah."

"Look, what's the matter with you Ford?" said Arthur.

"Nothing. Nothing's the matter. Listen to me - I've got to  tell  you the most important thing you've ever heard. I've got to tell you now,  and I've got to tell you in the saloon bar of the Horse and Groom."

"But why?"

"Because you are going to need a very stiff drink."

Ford stared at Arthur, and Arthur was astonished  to  find  that  his will was beginning to weaken. He didn't realize that this was  because  of an old drinking game that Ford learned to play  in  the  hyperspace  ports that served the madranite mining belts in the star system of Orion Beta.

The game was not unlike the Earth game called Indian  Wrestling,  and was played like this:

Two contestants would sit either side of a table,  with  a  glass  in front of each of them.

Between them would be placed a bottle of Janx Spirit (as immortalized in that ancient Orion mining song "Oh don't give me none more of that  Old Janx Spirit/ No, don't you give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/  For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will  fry  and  I  may  die/ Won't you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit").

Each of the two contestants would then concentrate their will on  the bottle and attempt to tip it  and  pour  spirit  into  the  glass  of  his opponent - who would then have to drink it.

The bottle would then be refilled. The game would  be  played  again. And again.

Once you started to lose you would probably keep losing, because  one of the effects of Janx spirit is to depress telepsychic power.

As soon as a predetermined quantity  had  been  consumed,  the  final loser would have  to  perform  a  forfeit,  which  was  usually  obscenely biological.

Ford Prefect usually played to lose.

Ford stared at Arthur, who began to think that perhaps he did want to go to the Horse and Groom after all.

"But what about my house?.." he asked plaintively.

Ford looked across to Mr  Prosser,  and  suddenly  a  wicked  thought struck him.

"He wants to knock your house down?"

"Yes, he wants to build..."

"And he can't because you're lying in front of the bulldozers?"

"Yes, and..."

"I'm sure we can come to some arrangement," said Ford.  "Excuse  me!" he shouted.

Mr Prosser (who was  arguing  with  a  spokesman  for  the  bulldozer drivers about whether or not  Arthur  Dent  constituted  a  mental  health hazard, and how much they should get paid if he did) looked around. He was surprised and slightly alarmed to find that Arthur had company.

"Yes? Hello?" he called. "Has Mr Dent come to his senses yet?"

"Can we for the moment," called Ford, "assume that he hasn't?"

"Well?" sighed Mr Prosser.

"And can we also assume," said Ford, "that he's going to  be  staying here all day?"

"So?"

"So all your men are going  to  be  standing  around  all  day  doing nothing?"

"Could be, could be..."

"Well, if you're resigned to doing that anyway,  you  don't  actually need him to lie here all the time do you?"

"What?"

"You don't," said Ford patiently, "actually need him here."

Mr Prosser thought about this.

"Well no, not as such...", he said, "not exactly need..." Prosser was worried. He thought that one of them wasn't making a lot of sense.

Ford said, "So if you would just like to take it as  read  that  he's actually here, then he and I could slip off down to the pub  for  half  an hour. How does that sound?"

Mr Prosser thought it sounded perfectly potty.

"That sounds perfectly reasonable," he said in a reassuring  tone  of voice, wondering who he was trying to reassure.

"And if you want to pop off for a quick one yourself later on,"  said Ford, "we can always cover up for you in return."

"Thank you very much," said Mr Prosser who no longer knew how to play this at all, "thank you very much, yes, that's very kind..."  He  frowned, then smiled, then tried to do both at once, failed, grasped  hold  of  his fur hat and rolled it fitfully round the top of his head.  He  could  only assume that he had just won.

"So," continued Ford Prefect, "if you would just like  to  come  over here and lie down..."

"What?" said Mr Prosser.

"Ah, I'm sorry," said Ford,  "perhaps  I  hadn't  made  myself  fully clear. Somebody's got to lie in front of the bulldozers haven't  they?  Or there won't be anything to stop them driving into  Mr  Dent's  house  will there?"

"What?" said Mr Prosser again.

"It's very simple," said Ford, "my client, Mr Dent, says that he will stop lying here in the mud on the sole condition that you  come  and  take over from him."

"What are you talking about?" said Arthur, but Ford nudged  him  with his shoe to be quiet.

"You want me," said Mr Prosser, spelling  out  this  new  thought  to himself, "to come and lie there..."

"Yes."

"In front of the bulldozer?"

"Yes."

"Instead of Mr Dent."

"Yes."

"In the mud."

"In, as you say it, the mud."

As soon as Mr Prosser realized that he was  substantially  the  loser after all, it was as if a weight lifted itself off his shoulders: this was more like the world as he knew it. He sighed.

"In return for which you will take Mr Dent with you down to the pub?"

"That's it," said Ford. "That's it exactly."

Mr Prosser took a few nervous steps forward and stopped.

"Promise?"

"Promise," said Ford. He turned to Arthur.

"Come on," he said to him, "get up and let the man lie down."

Arthur stood up, feeling as if he was in a dream.

Ford beckoned to Prosser who sadly, awkwardly, sat down in  the  mud. He felt that his whole life was  some  kind  of  dream  and  he  sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.  The  mud  folded itself round his bottom and his arms and oozed into his shoes.

Ford looked at him severely.

"And no sneaky knocking  down  Mr  Dent's  house  whilst  he's  away, alright?" he said.

"The mere  thought,"  growled  Mr  Prosser,  "hadn't  even  begun  to speculate,"  he  continued,  settling  himself  back,  "about  the  merest possibility of crossing my mind."

He saw the bulldozer driver's union  representative  approaching  and let his head sink back and closed his eyes. He was trying to  marshal  his arguments for proving that he did  not  now  constitute  a  mental  health hazard himself. He was far from certain about this - his mind seemed to be full of noise, horses,  smoke,  and  the  stench  of  blood.  This  always happened when he felt miserable and put upon, and he had never  been  able to explain it to himself. In a high dimension of which we know nothing the mighty Khan bellowed with rage, but Mr Prosser only trembled slightly  and whimpered. He began to fell little pricks of  water  behind  the  eyelids. Bureaucratic  cock-ups,  angry  men  lying  in  the  mud,   indecipherable strangers handing out inexplicable humiliations and an  unidentified  army of horsemen laughing at him in his head - what a day.

What a day. Ford Prefect knew that it didn't matter a pair of dingo's kidneys whether Arthur's house got knocked down or not now.

Arthur remained very worried.

"But can we trust him?" he said.

"Myself I'd trust him to the end of the Earth," said Ford.

"Oh yes," said Arthur, "and how far's that?"

"About twelve minutes away," said Ford, "come on, I need a drink."

2

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about  alcohol.  It says  that  alcohol  is  a  colourless  volatile  liquid  formed  by   the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect  on  certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It  says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

It says that the effect of a Pan  Galactic  Gargle  Blaster  is  like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round  a  large gold brick.

The Guide also tells you on  which  planets  the  best  Pan  Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterwards.

The Guide even tells you how you can mix one yourself.

Take the juice from one bottle of that Ol' Janx Spirit, it says.

Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V - Oh that Santraginean sea water, it says. Oh those Santraginean fish!!!

Allow three cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the  mixture  (it must be properly iced or the benzine is lost).

Allow four litres of Fallian marsh  gas  to  bubble  through  it,  in memory of all those happy Hikers who have died of pleasure in the  Marshes of Fallia.

Over the back  of  a  silver  spoon  float  a  measure  of  Qualactin Hypermint extract, redolent of all the heady odours of the dark  Qualactin Zones, subtle sweet and mystic.

Drop in the  tooth  of  an  Algolian  Suntiger.  Watch  it  dissolve, spreading the fires of the Algolian Suns deep into the heart of the drink.

Sprinkle Zamphuor.

Add an olive.

Drink... but... very carefully...

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy sells rather  better  than  the Encyclopedia Galactica.

"Six pints of bitter," said Ford Prefect to the barman of  the  Horse and Groom. "And quickly please, the world's about to end."

The barman of the  Horse  and  Groom  didn't  deserve  this  sort  of treatment, he was a dignified old man. He pushed his glasses up  his  nose and blinked at Ford Prefect. Ford  ignored  him  and  stared  out  of  the window, so the barman looked instead at Arthur who shrugged helplessly and said nothing.

So the barman said, "Oh yes sir? Nice weather for  it,"  and  started pulling pints.

He tried again.

"Going to watch the match this afternoon then?"

Ford glanced round at him.

"No, no point," he said, and looked back out of the window.

"What's that, foregone conclusion then  you  reckon  sir?"  said  the barman. "Arsenal without a chance?"

"No, no," said Ford, "it's just that the world's about to end."

"Oh yes sir, so you said," said the barman, looking over his  glasses this time at Arthur. "Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did."

Ford looked back at him, genuinely surprised.

"No, not really," he said. He frowned.

The barman breathed in heavily. "There you are sir,  six  pints,"  he said.

Arthur smiled at him wanly and shrugged again. He turned  and  smiled wanly at the rest of the pub just in case any of them had heard  what  was going on.

None of them had, and none of  them  could  understand  what  he  was smiling at them for.

A man sitting next to Ford at the bar looked at the two  men,  looked at the six pints, did a swift burst of mental arithmetic,  arrived  at  an answer he liked and grinned a stupid hopeful grin at them.

"Get off," said Ford, "They're ours," giving him a  look  that  would have an Algolian Suntiger get on with what it was doing.

Ford slapped a five-pound  note  on  the  bar.  He  said,  "Keep  the change."

"What, from a fiver? Thank you sir."

"You've got ten minutes left to spend it."

The barman simply decided to walk away for a bit.

"Ford," said Arthur, "would you please tell me what the hell is going on?"

"Drink up," said Ford, "you've got three pints to get through."

"Three pints?" said Arthur. "At lunchtime?"

The man next to ford grinned and nodded happily. Ford ignored him. He said, "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

"Very deep," said Arthur, "you should send that in  to  the  Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you."

"Drink up."

"Why three pints all of a sudden?"

"Muscle relaxant, you'll need it."

"Muscle relaxant?"

"Muscle relaxant."

Arthur stared into his beer.

"Did I do anything wrong today," he said, "or has  the  world  always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?"

"Alright," said Ford, "I'll try to explain. How long  have  we  known each other?"

"How long?" Arthur thought. "Er, about five  years,  maybe  six,"  he said. "Most of it seemed to make some sense at the time."

"Alright," said Ford. "How would you react if I  said  that  I'm  not from Guildford after all,  but  from  a  small  planet  somewhere  in  the vicinity of Betelgeuse?"

Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way.

"I don't know," he said, taking a pull of beer. "Why - do  you  think it's the sort of thing you're likely to say?"

Ford gave up. It really wasn't worth bothering at  the  moment,  what with the world being about to end. He just said:

"Drink up."

He added, perfectly factually:

"The world's about to end."

Arthur gave the rest of the pub another wan smile. The  rest  of  the pub frowned at him. A man waved at him to stop smiling at  them  and  mind his own business.

"This must be Thursday," said Arthur musing to himself,  sinking  low over his beer, "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

3

On this particular Thursday, something was moving quietly through the ionosphere many miles above the surface of the planet; several  somethings in fact, several dozen huge yellow chunky  slablike  somethings,  huge  as office buildings, silent as birds.  They  soared  with  ease,  basking  in electromagnetic rays from the  star  Sol,  biding  their  time,  grouping, preparing.

The planet beneath them  was  almost  perfectly  oblivious  of  their presence, which was just how they wanted  it  for  the  moment.  The  huge yellow somethings went unnoticed  at  Goonhilly,  they  passed  over  Cape Canaveral without a blip, Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them - which was a pity because it was exactly the sort  of  thing  they'd been looking for all these years.

The only place they registered at all was on  a  small  black  device called a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic which winked away  quietly  to  itself.  It nestled in the darkness inside a leather satchel which Ford  Prefect  wore habitually round his neck. The contents of  Ford  Prefect's  satchel  were quite interesting in fact and would have made any Earth  physicist's  eyes pop out of his head, which is why he always concealed them  by  keeping  a couple of dog-eared scripts for plays he pretended he was auditioning  for stuffed in the top. Besides the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic and the  scripts  he had an Electronic Thumb - a short squat black rod, smooth and matt with  a couple of flat switches and dials at one end; he also had a  device  which looked rather like a largish  electronic  calculator.  This  had  about  a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches  square  on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the  reasons  why  the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words Don't Panic printed on  it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this  device  was  in fact that most remarkable of all books ever  to  come  out  of  the  great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitch  Hiker's  Guide  to  the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro  sub  meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal  book  form,  an interstellar  hitch  hiker  would  require  several  inconveniently  large buildings to carry it around in.

Beneath that in Ford Prefect's satchel were a few biros,  a  notepad, and a largish bath towel from Marks and Spencer.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on  the subject of towels.

A towel, it says,  is  about  the  most  massively  useful  thing  an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical  value  - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the  cold  moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant  marble-sanded  beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep  under  it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world  of  Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for  use in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off  noxious  fumes or to avoid the  gaze  of  the  Ravenous  Bugblatter  Beast  of  Traal  (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your  towel  in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off  with  it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value.  For  some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a  hitch  hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he  is  also  in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin  of  biscuits,  flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet  weather  gear,  space  suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the  hitch  hiker any  of  these  or  a  dozen  other  items  that  the  hitch  hiker  might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that  any  man  who can hitch the length and  breadth  of  the  galaxy,  rough  it,  slum  it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and  still  knows  where  his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in  "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really  knows  where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware  of,  meet,  have  sex  with;  hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

Nestling quietly on top of the towel in Ford Prefect's  satchel,  the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic began to wink more quickly. Miles above the  surface of the planet the huge yellow somethings began  to  fan  out.  At  Jodrell Bank, someone decided it was time for a nice relaxing cup of tea.

"You got a towel with you?" said Ford Prefect suddenly to Arthur.

Arthur, struggling through his third pint, looked round at him.

"Why? What, no... should I have?" He had given  up  being  surprised, there didn't seem to be any point any longer.

Ford clicked his tongue in irritation.

"Drink up," he urged.

At that moment the dull  sound  of  a  rumbling  crash  from  outside filtered through the low murmur of the  pub,  through  the  sound  of  the jukebox, through the sound of the man next to  Ford  hiccupping  over  the whisky Ford had eventually bought him.

Arthur choked on his beer, leapt to his feet.

"What's that?" he yelped.

"Don't worry," said Ford, "they haven't started yet."

"Thank God for that," said Arthur and relaxed.

"It's probably just  your  house  being  knocked  down,"  said  Ford, drowning his last pint.

"What?" shouted Arthur. Suddenly  Ford's  spell  was  broken.  Arthur looked wildly around him and ran to the window.

"My God they are! They're knocking my house down. What the hell am  I doing in the pub, Ford?"

"It hardly makes any difference at this stage," said Ford, "let  them have their fun."

"Fun?" yelped Arthur. "Fun!" He quickly checked  out  of  the  window again that they were talking about the same thing.

"Damn their fun!" he hooted and ran out of the pub furiously waving a nearly empty beer glass. He made  no  friends  at  all  in  the  pub  that lunchtime.

"Stop, you vandals! You home  wreckers!"  bawled  Arthur.  "You  half crazed Visigoths, stop will you!"

Ford would have to go after him. Turning quickly  to  the  barman  he asked for four packets of peanuts.

"There you are sir," said the barman, slapping  the  packets  on  the bar, "twenty-eight pence if you'd be so kind."

Ford was very kind - he gave the barman another five-pound  note  and told him to keep the change. The barman looked at it and  then  looked  at Ford. He suddenly shivered: he experienced a momentary sensation  that  he didn't understand because no one on Earth had ever experienced it  before. In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out  a  tiny sublimal signal. This signal  simply  communicates  an  exact  and  almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of  his  birth.  On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles  from your birthplace, which really isn't very far,  so  such  signals  are  too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great  stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse.

The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a  shocking,  incomprehensible sense of distance. He didn't know what it meant, but  he  looked  at  Ford Prefect with a new sense of respect, almost awe.

"Are you serious, sir?" he said in a  small  whisper  which  had  the effect of silencing the pub. "You think the world's going to end?"

"Yes," said Ford.

"But, this afternoon?"

Ford had recovered himself. He was at his flippest.

"Yes," he said gaily, "in less than two minutes I would estimate."

The barman couldn't believe the conversation he was  having,  but  he couldn't believe the sensation he had just had either.

"Isn't there anything we can do about it then?" he said.

"No, nothing," said Ford, stuffing the peanuts into his pockets.

Someone in the hushed bar suddenly laughed raucously  at  how  stupid everyone had become.

The man sitting next to Ford was a bit sozzled by now. His eyes waved their way up to Ford.

"I thought," he said, "that if the world was going  to  end  we  were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something."

"If you like, yes," said Ford.

"That's what they told us in the army," said the man,  and  his  eyes began the long trek back down to his whisky.

"Will that help?" asked the barman.

"No," said Ford and gave him a friendly smile. "Excuse me," he  said, "I've got to go." With a wave, he left.

The pub was silent for a  moment  longer,  and  then,  embarrassingly enough, the man with the raucous laugh did  it  again.  The  girl  he  had dragged along to the pub with him had grown to loathe him dearly over  the last hour or so, and it would probably have been a great  satisfaction  to her to know that in a minute and a half or so he would suddenly  evaporate into a whiff of hydrogen, ozone and carbon  monoxide.  However,  when  the moment came she would be too busy evaporating herself to notice it.

The barman cleared his throat. He heard himself say:

"Last orders, please."

The huge yellow machines began to sink downward and to move faster.

Ford knew they were there. This wasn't the way he had wanted it.

Running up the lane, Arthur had nearly reached his house.  He  didn't notice how cold it had suddenly become, he  didn't  notice  the  wind,  he didn't notice the sudden irrational  squall  of  rain.  He  didn't  notice anything but the caterpillar bulldozers crawling over the rubble that  had been his home.

"You barbarians!" he yelled. "I'll sue the council  for  every  penny it's got! I'll have you  hung,  drawn  and  quartered!  And  whipped!  And boiled... until... until... until you've had enough."

Ford was running after him very fast. Very very fast.

"And then I'll do it again!" yelled Arthur. "And when I've finished I will take all the little bits, and I will jump on them!"

Arthur didn't notice that the men were running from  the  bulldozers; he didn't notice that Mr Prosser was staring hectically into the sky. What Mr Prosser had noticed was that  huge  yellow  somethings  were  screaming through the clouds. Impossibly huge yellow somethings.

"And I will carry on jumping on them," yelled Arthur, still  running, "until I get blisters, or I can think of anything even more unpleasant  to do, and then..."

Arthur tripped, and fell headlong, rolled  and  landed  flat  on  his back. At last he noticed that something was  going  on.  His  finger  shot upwards.

"What the hell's that?" he shrieked.

Whatever it was raced across the sky in  monstrous  yellowness,  tore the sky apart with mind-buggering noise and leapt off  into  the  distance leaving the gaping air to shut behind it with a bang that drove your  ears six feet into your skull.

Another one followed and did the same thing only louder.

It's difficult to say exactly what the people on the surface  of  the planet were doing now, because they didn't  really  know  what  they  were doing themselves. None of it made a lot of sense -  running  into  houses, running out of houses, howling noiselessly at the noise.  All  around  the world city streets exploded with people, cars slewed into  each  other  as the noise fell on them and then rolled off like a tidal  wave  over  hills and valleys, deserts and oceans, seeming to flatten everything it hit.

Only one man stood and watched the sky, stood with  terrible  sadness in his eyes and rubber bungs  in  his  ears.  He  knew  exactly  what  was happening and had known ever since his Sub-Etha  Sens-OMatic  had  started winking in the dead of night beside his pillar and woken him with a start. It was what he had waited for all these years, but when he had  deciphered the signal pattern sitting alone in his small dark  room  a  coldness  had gripped him and squeezed his heart. Of all the races in all of the  Galaxy who could have come and said a big hello  to  planet  Earth,  he  thought, didn't it just have to be the Vogons.

Still he knew what he had to do. As the Vogon craft screamed  through the air high above him he opened his satchel. He  threw  away  a  copy  of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, he  threw  away  a  copy  of Godspell: He wouldn't need them where he was going. Everything was  ready, everything was prepared.

He knew where his towel was.

A sudden silence hit the Earth. If anything it  was  worse  than  the noise. For a while nothing happened.

The great ships hung motionless in the  air,  over  every  nation  on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky,  a  blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds  tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in  much the same way that bricks don't.

And still nothing happened.

Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious  whisper  of  open ambient  sound.  Every  hi  fi  set  in  the  world,  every  radio,  every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer,  every  tweeter,  every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned itself on.

Every tin can, every dust bin, every window, every  car,  every  wine glass, every sheet of rusty metal  became  activated  as  an  acoustically perfect sounding board.

Before the Earth passed away it was going to be treated to  the  very ultimate in sound reproduction, the greatest public  address  system  ever built. But there was no concert, no  music,  no  fanfare,  just  a  simple message.

"People of Earth, your attention please," a voice said,  and  it  was wonderful. Wonderful perfect quadrophonic sound with distortion levels  so low as to make a brave man weep.

"This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic  Hyperspace  Planning Council," the voice continued. "As you will no doubt be aware,  the  plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and  regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for  demolition.  The  process  will take slightly less that two of your Earth minutes. Thank you."

The PA died away.

Uncomprehending terror settled on the watching people of  Earth.  The terror moved slowly through the gathered  crowds  as  if  they  were  iron fillings on a sheet of board and a magnet was moving beneath  them.  Panic sprouted again, desperate fleeing panic, but there was nowhere to flee to.

Observing this, the Vogons turned on their PA again. It said:

"There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the  planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your  local  planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've  had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and  it's  far  too  late  to start making a fuss about it now."

The PA fell silent again and its echo drifted off  across  the  land. The huge ships turned slowly in the sky with easy power. On the  underside of each a hatchway opened, an empty black space.

By this time somebody somewhere must have manned a radio transmitter, located a wavelength and broadcasted a message back to the Vogon ships, to plead on behalf of the planet. Nobody ever heard what they said, they only heard the reply. The PA slammed  back  into  life  again.  The  voice  was annoyed. It said:

"What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri?  For  heaven's sake mankind, it's only four light years away you know. I'm sorry, but  if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs that's your own lookout.

"Energize the demolition beams."

Light poured out into the hatchways.

"I don't know," said the voice on the PA, "apathetic  bloody  planet, I've no sympathy at all." It cut off.

There was a terrible ghastly silence.

There was a terrible ghastly noise.

There was a terrible ghastly silence.

The Vogon Constructor fleet coasted away into the inky starry void.

4

Far away on the opposite spiral  arm  of  the  Galaxy,  five  hundred thousand light years from the star Sol, Zaphod  Beeblebrox,  President  of the Imperial Galactic Government, sped across the seas  of  Damogran,  his ion drive delta boat winking and flashing in the Damogran sun.

Damogran the hot; Damogran the remote; Damogran  the  almost  totally unheard of.

Damogran, secret home of the Heart of Gold.

The boat sped on across the water. It would be some  time  before  it reached  its  destination  because  Damogran  is  such  an  inconveniently arranged planet. It consists of  nothing  but  middling  to  large  desert islands separated by very pretty but annoyingly wide stretches of ocean.

The boat sped on.

Because of this topological awkwardness Damogran has always  remained a deserted planet. This is why  the  Imperial  Galactic  Government  chose Damogran for the Heart of Gold project, because it was so deserted and the Heart of Gold was so secret.

The boat zipped and skipped across the sea, the sea that lay  between the main islands of the only archipelago of any useful size on  the  whole planet. Zaphod Beeblebrox was on his way from the tiny spaceport on Easter Island  (the  name  was  an  entirely   meaningless   coincidence   -   in Galacticspeke, easter means small flat and light brown) to  the  Heart  of Gold island, which by another meaningless coincidence was called France.

One of the side effects of work on the Heart  of  Gold  was  a  whole string of pretty meaningless coincidences.

But it was not in any way  a  coincidence  that  today,  the  day  of culmination of the project, the great day of unveiling, the day  that  the Heart of Gold was finally to be introduced to  a  marvelling  Galaxy,  was also a great day of culmination for Zaphod Beeblebrox. It was for the sake of this day that he had  first  decided  to  run  for  the  Presidency,  a decision which had sent waves  of  astonishment  throughout  the  Imperial Galaxy - Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not  the President? Many had seen it as a clinching proof that the whole  of  known creation had finally gone bananas.

Zaphod grinned and gave the boat an extra kick of speed.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippy, good  timer,  (crook?  quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at  personal  relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.

President?

No one had gone bananas, not in that way at least.

Only six people in the entire  Galaxy  understood  the  principle  on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once  Zaphod  Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a fait accompli: he was the ideal Presidency fodder.

[President: full title President of the Imperial Galactic Government.

The term Imperial is kept  though  it  is  now  an  anachronism.  The hereditary Emperor is nearly dead and has been so for many  centuries.  In the last moments of his dying coma he was locked in a statis  field  which keeps him in a state of perpetual unchangingness. All his  heirs  are  now long dead, and this means that without  any  drastic  political  upheaval, power has simply and effectively moved a rung or two down the ladder,  and is now seen to be vested in a body which used to act simply as advisers to the Emperor - an elected  Governmental  assembly  headed  by  a  President elected by that assembly. In fact it vests in no such place.

The President in particular is very much a figurehead - he wields  no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but  the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but  those of finely judged outrage. For  this  reason  the  President  is  always  a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away  from  it.  On  those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most  successful  Presidents  the Galaxy has ever had - he has already spent two  of  his  ten  Presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these  very  few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded.  Most  of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making  process  is handled by a computer. They couldn't be more wrong.]

What they completely failed to understand was why  Zaphod  was  doing it.

He banked sharply, shooting a wild wall of water at the sun.

Today was the day; today was the day when  they  would  realize  what Zaphod had been up to. Today was what Zaphod Beeblebrox's  Presidency  was all about. Today was also his two hundredth birthday, but  that  was  just another meaningless coincidence.

As he skipped his boat across the seas of Damogran he smiled  quietly to himself about what a wonderful exciting day it  was  going  to  be.  He relaxed and spread his two arms lazily across the seat  back.  He  steered with an extra arm he'd recently fitted just beneath his right one to  help improve his ski-boxing.

"Hey," he cooed to himself, "you're a real cool  boy  you."  But  his nerves sang a song shriller than a dog whistle.

The island of France was about twenty miles long, five  miles  across the middle, sandy and crescent shaped. In fact it seemed to exist  not  so much as an island in its own right as simply a means of defining the sweep and curve of a huge bay. This impression was heightened by the  fact  that the inner coastline of the crescent consisted  almost  entirely  of  steep cliffs. From the top of the cliff the land sloped slowly down  five  miles to the opposite shore.

On top of the cliffs stood a reception committee.

It consisted in large part of the engineers and researchers  who  had built the Heart of Gold - mostly humanoid, but here and there were  a  few reptiloid atomineers, two or three green slyph-like maximegalacticans,  an octopoid  physucturalist  or  two  and  a  Hooloovoo  (a  Hooloovoo  is  a super-intelligent shade of the color blue). All except the Hooloovoo  were resplendent in their multicolored ceremonial lab coats; the Hooloovoo  had been temporarily refracted into a free standing prism for the occasion.

There was a mood of immense excitement thrilling through all of them. Together and between them they had gone to and beyond the furthest  limits of physical laws, restructured the fundamental fabric of matter, strained, twisted and broken the laws of possibility and  impossibility,  but  still the greatest excitement of all seemed to be to meet a man with  an  orange sash round his neck. (An orange sash was what the President of the  Galaxy traditionally wore.) It might not even have made much difference  to  them if they'd known exactly  how  much  power  the  President  of  the  Galaxy actually wielded: none at all. Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was  not  to  wield  power  but  to  attract attention away from it.

Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.

The crowd gasped, dazzled by sun and seemanship, as the  Presidential speedboat zipped round the headland into the bay. It flashed and shone  as it came skating over the sea in wide skidding turns.

In fact it didn't need to touch the water  at  all,  because  it  was supported on a hazy cushion of ionized atoms - but just for effect it  was fitted with thin finblades which could be lowered  into  the  water.  They slashed sheets of water hissing into the air, carved deep gashes into  the sea which swayed crazily and sank back foaming into the boat's wake as  it careered across the bay.

Zaphod loved effect: it was what he was best at.

He twisted the wheel  sharply,  the  boat  slewed  round  in  a  wild scything skid beneath the cliff face and dropped to rest  lightly  on  the rocking waves.

Within seconds he ran out onto the deck and waved and grinned at over three billion people. The three billion people weren't actually there, but they watched his every gesture through the eyes of  a  small  robot  tri-D camera which hovered obsequiously in the air nearby.  The  antics  of  the President always made amazingly popular tri-D; that's what they were for.

He grinned again. Three billion and six people didn't  know  it,  but today would be a bigger antic than anyone had bargained for.

The robot camera homed in for a close up on the more popular  of  his two heads and he waved again. He was roughly humanoid in appearance except for the extra head and third arm. His  fair  tousled  hair  stuck  out  in random  directions,  his  blue  eyes  glinted  with  something  completely unidentifiable, and his chins were almost always unshaven.

A twenty-foot-high  transparent  globe  floated  next  to  his  boat, rolling and bobbing, glistening in the brilliant sun. Inside it floated  a wide semi-circular sofa upholstered in glorious red leather: the more  the globe bobbed and rolled, the more the sofa stayed perfectly still,  steady as an upholstered rock. Again, all done for effect as much as anything.

Zaphod stepped through the wall of the globe and relaxed on the sofa. He spread his two arms lazily along the back and with  the  third  brushed some dust off his knee. His heads looked about, smiling; he put  his  feet up. At any moment, he thought, he might scream.

Water boiled up beneath the  bubble,  it  seethed  and  spouted.  The bubble surged into the air, bobbing and rolling on the water spout. Up, up it climbed, throwing stilts of light at the cliff. Up  it  surged  on  the jet, the water falling  from  beneath  it,  crashing  back  into  the  sea hundreds of feet below.

Zaphod smiled, picturing himself.

A thoroughly ridiculous form of transport, but a thoroughly beautiful one.

At the top of the cliff the globe wavered for a moment, tipped on  to a railed ramp, rolled down it to a small concave platform and riddled to a halt.

To tremendous applause Zaphod Beeblebrox stepped out of  the  bubble, his orange sash blazing in the light.

The President of the Galaxy had arrived.

He waited for the applause to die down,  then  raised  his  hands  in greeting.

"Hi," he said.

A government spider sidled up to him and attempted to press a copy of his prepared speech into his hands. Pages three to seven of  the  original version were at the moment floating soggily on the Damogran sea some  five miles out from the bay. Pages one and two had been salvaged by a  Damogran Frond  Crested  Eagle  and  had  already  become  incorporated   into   an extraordinary new form of nest  which  the  eagle  had  invented.  It  was constructed largely of papier m@ch@ and it was virtually impossible for  a newly hatched baby eagle to break out of it. The  Damogran  Frond  Crested Eagle had heard of the notion of survival of the  species  but  wanted  no truck with it.

Zaphod Beeblebrox would not be needing his set speech and  he  gently deflected the one being offered him by the spider.

"Hi," he said again.

Everyone beamed at him, or, at least, nearly everyone. He singled out Trillian from the crowd. Trillian was a gird that  Zaphod  had  picked  up recently whilst visiting a planet, just for fun, incognito. She was  slim, darkish, humanoid, with long waves of black hair, a  full  mouth,  an  odd little nob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes. With her red head  scarf knotted in that particular way and her long flowing silky brown dress  she looked vaguely Arabic. Not that anyone there had ever heard of an Arab  of course. The Arabs had very recently ceased to exist, and  even  when  they had existed they were five hundred thousand  light  years  from  Damogran. Trillian wasn't anybody in particular, or so Zaphod claimed. She just went around with him rather a lot and told him what she thought of him.

"Hi honey," he said to her.

She flashed him a quick tight smile and looked away. Then she  looked back for a moment and smiled more warmly - but by this time he was looking at something else.

"Hi," he said to a small knot of creatures from the  press  who  were standing nearby wishing that he would stop saying Hi and get on  with  the quotes. He grinned at them particularly because he  knew  that  in  a  few moments he would be giving them one hell of a quote.

The next thing he said though was not a lot of use to  them.  One  of the officials of the party had irritably decided that  the  President  was clearly not in a mood to read the deliciously turned speech that had  been written for him, and had flipped the switch on the remote  control  device in his pocket. Away in front of them a huge white dome that bulged against the sky cracked down in the middle, split, and slowly folded  itself  down into the ground. Everyone gasped although they had known perfectly well it was going to do that because they had built it that way.

Beneath it lay uncovered a  huge  starship,  one  hundred  and  fifty metres long, shaped  like  a  sleek  running  shoe,  perfectly  white  and mindboggingly beautiful. At the heart of it, unseen, lay a small gold  box which carried within it the most brain-wretching device ever conceived,  a device which made this starship unique in the history  of  the  galaxy,  a device after which the ship had been named - The Heart of Gold.

"Wow", said Zaphod Beeblebrox to the Heart of Gold. There wasn't much else he could say.

He said it again because he knew it would annoy the press.

"Wow."

The crowd turned their faces back towards him expectantly. He  winked at Trillian who raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes at him. She  knew what he was about to say and thought him a terrible showoff.

"That is really amazing," he said. "That  really  is  truly  amazing. That is so amazingly amazing I think I'd like to steal it."

A marvellous Presidential quote, absolutely true to form.  The  crowd laughed appreciatively, the newsmen gleefully  punched  buttons  on  their Sub-Etha News-Matics and the President grinned.

As he grinned his heart screamed unbearably and he fingered the small Paralyso-Matic bomb that nestled quietly in his pocket.

Finally he could bear it no more. He lifted his heads up to the  sky, let out a wild whoop in major thirds, threw the bomb to the ground and ran forward through the sea of suddenly frozen smiles.

5

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was not  a  pleasant  sight,  even  for  other Vogons. His highly domed nose rose high above a small piggy forehead.  His dark green rubbery skin was thick enough for him to play the game of Vogon Civil Service politics, and play it well, and waterproof enough for him to survive indefinitely at sea depths of up to a thousand feet  with  no  ill effects.

Not that he ever went swimming of course. His busy schedule would not allow it. He was the way he was because billions of  years  ago  when  the Vogons had first crawled out of the sluggish primeval seas  of  Vogsphere, and had lain panting and heaving on the planet's virgin shores... when the first rays of the bright young Vogsol  sun  had  shone  across  them  that morning, it was as if the forces of evolution ad simply given up  on  them there and then, had turned aside in disgust and written  them  off  as  an ugly and unfortunate mistake. They never evolved again; they should  never have survived.

The fact that they did is some kind of  tribute  to  the  thickwilled slug-brained stubbornness of these  creatures.  Evolution?  they  said  to themselves, Who needs it?, and what nature refused to  do  for  them  they simply did without until such time  as  they  were  able  to  rectify  the grosser anatomical inconveniences with surgery.

Meanwhile, the natural  forces  on  the  planet  Vogsphere  had  been working overtime to make up for their earlier blunder. They brought  forth scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs, which  the  Vogons  ate,  smashing their shells with iron mallets;  tall  aspiring  trees  with  breathtaking slenderness and colour which the Vogons cut down and burned the crab  meat with; elegant gazellelike creatures with silken coats and dewy eyes  which the Vogons would catch and sit on. They were no use as  transport  because their backs would snap instantly, but the Vogons sat on them anyway.

Thus the planet Vogsphere whiled away the unhappy millennia until the Vogons suddenly discovered the principles of interstellar travel. Within a few short Vog years every last  Vogon  had  migrated  to  the  Megabrantis cluster, the political hub of the Galaxy  and  now  formed  the  immensely powerful backbone of the Galactic Civil Service. They  have  attempted  to acquire learning, they have attempted to acquire style and  social  grace, but in most respects  the  modern  Vogon  is  little  different  from  his primitive  forebears.  Every  year  they  import   twenty-seven   thousand scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs from their native planet and  while away a happy drunken night smashing them to bits with iron mallets.

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was a fairly typical  Vogon  in  that  he  was thoroughly vile. Also, he did not like hitch hikers.

Somewhere in a small dark cabin buried  deep  in  the  intestines  of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz's flagship, a small  match  flared  nervously.  The owner of the match was not a Vogon, but he knew all  about  them  and  was right to be nervous. His name was Ford Prefect*.

[Ford Prefect's original name  is  only  pronuncible  in  an  obscure Betelgeusian dialect, now virtually extinct  since  the  Great  Collapsing Hrung Disaster of  Gal./Sid./Year  03758  which  wiped  out  all  the  old Praxibetel communities on Betelgeuse Seven. Ford's father was the only man on the entire planet to survive the Great Collapsing Hrung disaster, by an extraordinary  coincidence  that  he  was  never  able  satisfactorily  to explain. The whole episode is shrouded in deep mystery:  in  fact  no  one ever knew what a Hrung was nor why it had chosen to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven particularly. Ford's father, magnanimously waving aside  the  clouds of suspicion that had inevitably settled  around  him,  came  to  live  on Betelgeuse Five where he both fathered and uncled Ford; in memory  of  his now dead race he christened him in the ancient Praxibetel tongue.

Because Ford never learned to  say  his  original  name,  his  father eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in some  parts of the Galaxy. The other kids at school nicknamed him  Ix,  which  in  the language  of  Betelgeuse  Five  translates  as  "boy  who  is   not   able satisfactorily to explain what a Hrung is, nor why  it  should  choose  to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven".]

He looked  about  the  cabin  but  could  see  very  little;  strange monstrous shadows loomed and leaped with the tiny  flickering  flame,  but all was quiet. He breathed a silent  thank  you  to  the  Dentrassis.  The Dentrassis are an unruly tribe of gourmands, a  wild  but  pleasant  bunch whom the Vogons had recently taken to employing as catering staff on their long haul fleets, on the strict understanding that  they  keep  themselves very much to themselves.

This suited the Dentrassis fine,  because  they  loved  Vogon  money, which is one of the hardest currencies in space, but  loathed  the  Vogons themselves. The only sort of Vogon a Dentrassi liked to see was an annoyed Vogon.

It was because of this tiny piece of information  that  Ford  Prefect was not now a whiff of hydrogen, ozone and carbon monoxide.

He heard a slight groan. By the light of the match  he  saw  a  heavy shape moving slightly on the  floor.  Quickly  he  shook  the  match  out, reached in his pocket, found what he was looking for and took it  out.  He crouched on the floor. The shape moved again.

Ford Prefect said: "I bought some peanuts."

Arthur Dent moved, and groaned again, muttering incoherently.

"Here, have some," urged Ford, shaking the packet again,  "if  you've never been through a matter transference beam before you've probably  lost some salt and protein. The beer you had should have cushioned your  system a bit."

"Whhhrrrr..." said Arthur Dent. He opened his eyes.

"It's dark," he said.

"Yes," said Ford Prefect, "it's dark."

"No light," said Arthur Dent. "Dark, no light."

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually  stating  and  repeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or  Oh  dear  you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are  you  alright?  At  first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour.  If  human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation  he  abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while  he  abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately  worried  about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.

"Yes," he agreed with Arthur, "no light." He helped  Arthur  to  some peanuts. "How do you feel?" he asked.

"Like a military academy," said Arthur, "bits of me keep  on  passing out."

Ford stared at him blankly in the darkness.

"If I asked you where the hell we were," said Arthur weakly, "would I regret it?"

Ford stood up. "We're safe," he said.

"Oh good," said Arthur.

"We're in a small galley cabin," said Ford, "in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet."

"Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the  word safe that I wasn't previously aware of."

Ford struck another match to help him  search  for  a  light  switch. Monstrous shadows leaped and loomed again. Arthur struggled  to  his  feet and hugged himself apprehensively. Hideous alien shapes seemed  to  throng about him, the air was thick with musty smells which sidled into his lungs without identifying themselves, and a low irritating hum  kept  his  brain from focusing.

"How did we get here?" he asked, shivering slightly.

"We hitched a lift," said Ford.

"Excuse me?" said Arthur. "Are you trying to tell  me  that  we  just stuck out our thumbs and some green bug-eyed monster stuck  his  head  out and said, Hi fellas,  hop  right  in.  I  can  take  you  as  far  as  the Basingstoke roundabout?"

"Well," said Ford, "the Thumb's  an  electronic  sub-etha  signalling device, the roundabout's at Barnard's  Star  six  light  years  away,  but otherwise, that's more or less right."

"And the bug-eyed monster?"

"Is green, yes."

"Fine," said Arthur, "when can I get home?"

"You can't," said Ford Prefect, and found the light switch.

"Shade your eyes..." he said, and turned it on.

Even Ford was surprised.

"Good grief," said Arthur, "is this really the interior of  a  flying saucer?"

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz heaved his unpleasant  green  body  round  the control  bridge.  He  always  felt  vaguely  irritable  after  demolishing populated planets. He wished that someone would come and tell him that  it was all wrong so that he could shout at them and feel better.  He  flopped as heavily as he could on to his control seat in the hope  that  it  would break and give him something to be genuinely angry about, but it only gave a complaining sort of creak.

"Go away!" he shouted at a young Vogon guard who entered  the  bridge at that moment. The guard vanished immediately, feeling  rather  relieved. He was glad it wouldn't now be him who delivered the  report  they'd  just received. The report was an official release which said that  a  wonderful new form of spaceship drive  was  at  this  moment  being  unveiled  at  a government research base on  Damogran  which  would  henceforth  make  all hyperspatial express routes unnecessary.

Another door slid open, but this time the Vogon captain didn't  shout because it was the door from the  galley  quarters  where  the  Dentrassis prepared his meals. A meal would be most welcome.

A huge furry creature bounded through the door with his  lunch  tray. It was grinning like a maniac.

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was delighted. He knew that when  a  Dentrassi looked that pleased with itself there was something going on somewhere  on the ship that he could get very angry indeed about.

Ford and Arthur stared about them.

"Well, what do you think?" said Ford.

"It's a bit squalid, isn't it?"

Ford frowned at the grubby mattress, unwashed cups and unidentifiable bits of smelly alien underwear that lay around the cramped cabin.

"Well, this is a working ship, you see," said Ford.  "These  are  the Dentrassi sleeping quarters."

"I thought you said they were called Vogons or something."

"Yes," said Ford, "the Vogons run the ship, the  Dentrassis  are  the cooks, they let us on board."

"I'm confused," said Arthur.

"Here, have a look at this," said Ford. He sat down  on  one  of  the mattresses and rummaged about in his satchel. Arthur prodded the  mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had  very  little  to  be nervous  about,  because  all  mattresses   grown   in   the   swamps   of Squornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being  put to service. Very few have ever come to life again.

Ford handed the book to Arthur.

"What is it?" asked Arthur.

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  It's  a  sort  of  electronic book. It tells you everything you need to know about anything. That's  its job."

Arthur turned it over nervously in his hands.

"I like the cover," he said. "Don't Panic. It's the first helpful  or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day."

"I'll show you how it works," said Ford. He snatched it  from  Arthur who was still holding it as if it was a two-week-dead lark and  pulled  it out of its cover.

"You press this button here you see and the screen lights  up  giving you the index."

A screen, about three inches by four, lit up and characters began  to flicker across the surface.

"You want to know about Vogons, so I enter that name so." His fingers tapped some more keys. "And there we are."

The words Vogon Constructor Fleets flared in green across the screen.

Ford pressed a large red button at the bottom of the screen and words began to undulate across it. At the same time, the book began to speak the entry as well in a still quiet measured voice. This is what the book said.

"Vogon Constructor Fleets. Here is what to do if you want  to  get  a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy - not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic,  officious and  callous.  They  wouldn't  even  lift  a  finger  to  save  their  own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of  Traal  without  orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found,  subjected to public inquiry, lost  again,  and  finally  buried  in  soft  peat  and recycled as firelighters.

"The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick  your  finger down his throat, and  the  best  way  to  irritate  him  is  to  feed  his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

"On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you."

Arthur blinked at it.

"What a strange book. How did we get a lift then?"

"That's the point, it's out of date now," said Ford, sliding the book back into its cover. "I'm doing the field research  for  the  New  Revised Edition, and one of the things I'll have to include is a bit about how the Vogons now employ Dentrassi cooks which gives us a  rather  useful  little loophole."

A  pained  expression  crossed  Arthur's  face.  "But  who  are   the Dentrassi?" he said.

"Great guys," said Ford. "They're the best cooks and the  best  drink mixers and they don't give a wet slap about  anything  else.  And  they'll always help hitch hikers aboard, partly because they like the company, but mostly because it annoys the Vogons. Which is exactly the  sort  of  thing you need to know if you're an impoverished hitch hiker trying to  see  the marvels of the Universe for less than thirty Altairan Dollars a  day.  And that's my job. Fun, isn't it?"

Arthur looked lost.

"It's amazing," he said and frowned at one of the other mattresses.

"Unfortunately I got stuck on the Earth  for  rather  longer  than  I intended," said Ford. "I came for a week and got stuck for fifteen years."

"But how did you get there in the first place then?"

"Easy, I got a lift with a teaser."

"A teaser?"

"Yeah."

"Er, what is..."

"A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with  nothing  to  do.  They cruise around looking for planets which haven't made interstellar  contact yet and buzz them."

"Buzz them?" Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making  life difficult for him.

"Yeah", said Ford, "they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor soul  whom  no  one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of  him  wearing silly antennae on their heads and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really." Ford leant back on the mattress with his hands  behind  his  head and looked infuriatingly pleased with himself.

"Ford," insisted Arthur, "I don't know if this sounds  like  a  silly question, but what am I doing here?"

"Well you know that," said Ford. "I rescued you from the Earth."

"And what's happened to the Earth?"

"Ah. It's been demolished."

"Has it," said Arthur levelly.

"Yes. It just boiled away into space."

"Look," said Arthur, "I'm a bit upset about that."

Ford frowned to himself and seemed to roll  the  thought  around  his mind.

"Yes, I can understand that," he said at last.

"Understand that!" shouted Arthur. "Understand that!"

Ford sprang up.

"Keep looking at the book!" he hissed urgently.

"What?"

"Don't Panic."

"I'm not panicking!"

"Yes you are."

"Alright so I'm panicking, what else is there to do?"

"You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy's a fun place. You'll need to have this fish in your ear."

"I beg your pardon?" asked Arthur, rather politely he thought.

Ford was holding up a small glass jar which quite clearly had a small yellow fish wriggling around in it. Arthur blinked at him. He wished there was something simple and recognizable he could grasp  hold  of.  He  would have felt  safe  if  alongside  the  Dentrassi  underwear,  the  piles  of Squornshellous mattresses and the man from Betelgeuse holding up  a  small yellow fish and offering to put it in his ear he had been able to see just a small packet of corn flakes. He couldn't, and he didn't feel safe.

Suddenly a violent noise leapt at them from no source that  he  could identify. He gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to  gargle whilst fighting off a pack of wolves.

"Shush!" said Ford. "Listen, it might be important."

"Im... important?"

"It's the Vogon captain making an announcement on the T'annoy."

"You mean that's how the Vogons talk?"

"Listen!"

"But I can't speak Vogon!"

"You don't need to. Just put that fish in your ear."

Ford, with a lightning movement, clapped his hand  to  Arthur's  ear, and he had the sudden sickening sensation of the fish slithering deep into his aural tract. Gasping with horror he scrabbled at his ear for a  second or so, but then slowly turned goggle-eyed with wonder. He was experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a  picture  of  two  black  silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white  candlestick.  Or  of looking at a lot of coloured dots on  a  piece  of  paper  which  suddenly resolve themselves into the figure six and  mean  that  your  optician  is going to charge you a lot of money for a new pair of glasses.

He was still listening to the howling gargles, he knew that, only now it had taken on the semblance of perfectly straightforward English.

This is what he heard...

6

"Howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gargle  howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl  slurrp  uuuurgh  should have a good time. Message repeats. This is your captain speaking, so  stop whatever you're doing and pay attention. First  of  all  I  see  from  our instruments that we have a couple of hitchhikers  aboard.  Hello  wherever you are. I just want to make it totally clear that  you  are  not  at  all welcome. I worked hard to get where  I  am  today,  and  I  didn't  become captain of a Vogon constructor ship simply so I could turn it into a  taxi service for a load of degenerate freeloaders. I have  sent  out  a  search party, and as soon that they find you I will put  you  off  the  ship.  If you're very lucky I might read you some of my poetry first.

"Secondly, we are about to jump into hyperspace for  the  journey  to Barnard's Star. On arrival we will stay in dock  for  a  seventy-two  hour refit, and no one's to leave the ship during  that  time.  I  repeat,  all planet leave is cancelled. I've just had an  unhappy  love  affair,  so  I don't see why anybody else should have a good time. Message ends."

The noise stopped.

Arthur discovered to his embarrassment that he was lying curled up in a small ball on the floor with his arms wrapped round his head. He  smiled weakly.

"Charming man," he said. "I wish I had a daughter so I  could  forbid her to marry one..."

"You wouldn't need to," said Ford. "They've got as much sex appeal as a road accident. No, don't move," he  added  as  Arthur  began  to  uncurl himself, "you'd better be prepared for  the  jump  into  hyperspace.  It's unpleasantly like being drunk."

"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"

"You ask a glass of water."

Arthur thought about this.

"Ford," he said.

"Yeah?"

"What's this fish doing in my ear?"

"It's translating for you. It's a Babel fish. Look it up in the  book if you like."

He tossed over The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and then  curled himself up into a foetal ball to prepare himself for the jump.

At that moment the bottom fell out of Arthur's mind.

His eyes turned inside out. His feet began to leak out of the top  of his head.

The room folded flat about him, spun around, shifted out of existence and left him sliding into his own navel.

They were passing through hyperspace.

"The Babel fish," said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the  oddest  thing  in  the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it.  It  absorbs  all  unconscious  mental  frequencies  from  this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious  thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech  centres  of  the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly  understand  anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed  into  your  mind  by  your Babel fish.

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that  anything  so mindboggingly useful  could  have  evolved  purely  by  chance  that  some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and  clinching  proof  of  the non-existence of God.

"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse  to  prove  that  I exist,' says God,  `for  proof  denies  faith,  and  without  faith  I  am nothing.'

"`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway,  isn't  it?  It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and  so  therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

"`Oh dear,' says God,  `I  hadn't  thought  of  that,'  and  promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

"`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes  on  to  prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

"Most leading theologians claim that  this  argument  is  a  load  of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't  stop  Oolon  Colluphid  making  a  small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book  Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloddier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Arthur let out a low groan. He was horrified  to  discover  that  the kick through hyperspace hadn't killed him. He was now six light years from the place that the Earth would have been if it still existed.

The Earth.

Visions of it swam sickeningly through his nauseated mind. There  was no way his imagination could feel the impact of  the  whole  Earth  having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he  had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he  had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket  before  and  felt  a sudden stab - the  supermarket  was  gone,  everything  in  it  was  gone. Nelson's Column had gone! Nelson's Column had gone and there would  be  no outcry, because there was no one left to  make  an  outcry.  From  now  on Nelson's Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind - his mind, stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship.  A  wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.

England no longer existed. He'd got that - somehow he'd  got  it.  He tried again. America, he thought, has  gone.  He  couldn't  grasp  it.  He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, had sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he  said  to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonalds, he thought. There  is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.

He passed out. When he came round a second  later  he  found  he  was sobbing for his mother.

He jerked himself violently to his feet.

"Ford!"

Ford looked up from where he was  sitting  in  a  corner  humming  to himself. He always found the actual travelling-through-space part of space travel rather trying.

"Yeah?" he said.

"If you're a researcher on this book thing and you were on Earth, you must have been gathering material on it."

"Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes."

"Let me see what it says in this edition then, I've got to see it."

"Yeah OK." He passed it over again.

Arthur grabbed hold of it and tried to stop  his  hands  shaking.  He pressed the entry for the relevant page. The screen  flashed  and  swirled and resolved into a page of print. Arthur stared at it.

"It doesn't have an entry!" he burst out.

Ford looked over his shoulder.

"Yes it does," he said, "down there, see at the bottom of the screen, just under Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted  whore  of  Eroticon 6."

Arthur followed Ford's finger, and saw where it was pointing.  For  a moment it still didn't register, then his mind nearly blew up.

"What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One word!"

Ford shrugged.

"Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy,  and  only  a limited amount of space in the book's microprocessors," he said,  "and  no one knew much about the Earth of course."

"Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit."

"Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."

"And what does it say now?" asked Arthur.

"Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed cough.

"Mostly harmless!" shouted Arthur.

"What was that noise?" hissed Ford.

"It was me shouting," shouted Arthur.

"No! Shut up!" said Ford. I think we're in trouble."

"You think we're in trouble!"

Outside the door were the sounds of marching feet.

"The Dentrassi?" whispered Arthur.

"No, those are steel tipped boots," said Ford.

There was a sharp ringing rap on the door.

"Then who is it?" said Arthur.

"Well," said Ford, "if we're lucky it's just the Vogons come to throw us in to space."

"And if we're unlucky?"

"If we're unlucky," said Ford grimly, "the captain might  be  serious in his threat that he's going to read us some of his poetry first..."

7

Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe.

The second worst is that of the Azagoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode  To  A  Small Lump of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer  Morning"  four  of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging,  and  the  President  of  the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported  to  have  been  "disappointed"  by  the  poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading  of  his  twelvebook  epic entitled My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in  a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.

The very worst poetry of all perished along with  its  creator  Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England in the destruction of the planet Earth.

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz smiled very slowly. This was done not so  much for effect as because he was trying to remember  the  sequence  of  muscle movements. He had had a terribly therapeutic yell at his prisoners and was now feeling quite relaxed and ready for a little callousness.

The prisoners sat in Poetry Appreciation Chairs - strapped in. Vogons suffered no illusions as to the regard their works were generally held in. Their  early  attempts  at  composition  had  been  part  of   bludgeoning insistence that they be accepted as a properly evolved and cultured  race, but now the only thing that kept them going was sheer bloodymindedness.

The sweat stood out cold on Ford Prefect's brow, and slid  round  the electrodes strapped to his temples. These were attached to  a  battery  of electronic  equipment  -  imagery   intensifiers,   rhythmic   modulators, alliterative residulators and simile dumpers - all  designed  to  heighten the experience of the poem and make sure that not a single nuance  of  the poet's thought was lost.

Arthur Dent sat and quivered. He had no idea what he was in for,  but he knew that he hadn't liked anything that had happened so far and  didn't think things were likely to change.

The Vogon began to read - a fetid little passage of his own devising.

"Oh frettled gruntbuggly..." he began. Spasms wracked Ford's  body  - this was worse than ever he'd been prepared for.

"... thy micturations are to me | As plurdled  gabbleblotchits  on  a lurgid bee."

"Aaaaaaarggggghhhhhh!" went Ford Prefect, wrenching his head back  as lumps of pain thumped through it. He could dimly  see  beside  him  Arthur lolling and rolling in his seat. He clenched his teeth.

"Groop I implore thee," continued the merciless Vogon,  "my  foonting turlingdromes."

His voice was rising to a horrible pitch  of  impassioned  stridency. "And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,  Or  I  will  rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!"

"Nnnnnnnnnnyyyyyyyuuuuuuurrrrrrrggggggghhhhh!" cried Ford Prefect and threw one final spasm as the  electronic  enhancement  of  the  last  line caught him full blast across the temples. He went limp.

Arthur lolled.

"Now Earthlings..." whirred the  Vogon  (he  didn't  know  that  Ford Prefect was in fact from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, and wouldn't have cared if he had) "I present you with a simple choice! Either die in the vacuum of space, or..."  he  paused  for  melodramatic  effect, "tell me how good you thought my poem was!"

He threw himself backwards into a huge leathery bat-shaped  seat  and watched them. He did the smile again.

Ford was rasping for breath. He rolled his  dusty  tongue  round  his parched mouth and moaned.

Arthur said brightly: "Actually I quite liked it."

Ford turned and gaped. Here was an approach that had quite simply not occurred to him.

The Vogon raised a surprised eyebrow that  effectively  obscured  his nose and was therefore no bad thing.

"Oh good..." he whirred, in considerable astonishment.

"Oh yes," said Arthur, "I  thought  that  some  of  the  metaphysical imagery was really particularly effective."

Ford continued to stare at him, slowly organizing his thoughts around this totally new concept. Were they really going to be  able  to  bareface their way out of this?

"Yes, do continue..." invited the Vogon.

"Oh... and er... interesting rhythmic devices too," continued Arthur, "which seemed to counterpoint the... er... er..." He floundered.

Ford leaped to his rescue, hazarding "counterpoint the surrealism  of the underlying metaphor of the... er..." He floundered too, but Arthur was ready again.

"... humanity of the..."

"Vogonity," Ford hissed at him.

"Ah yes, Vogonity (sorry) of the poet's compassionate  soul,"  Arthur felt he was on a home stretch now, "which contrives through the medium  of the verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that, and come  to  terms with the fundamental  dichotomies  of  the  other,"  (he  was  reaching  a triumphant crescendo...) "and one  is  left  with  a  profound  and  vivid insight into... into... er..." (... which suddenly gave out on him.)  Ford leaped in with the coup de gr@ce:

"Into whatever it was the poem was about!"  he  yelled.  Out  of  the corner of his mouth: "Well done, Arthur, that was very good."

The Vogon perused them. For a moment his embittered racial  soul  had been touched, but he thought no - too little too late. His voice  took  on the quality of a cat snagging brushed nylon.

"So what you're saying is that I write poetry because  underneath  my mean callous heartless exterior I really just want to be loved," he  said. He paused. "Is that right?"

Ford laughed a nervous laugh. "Well I mean yes," he said,  "don't  we all, deep down, you know... er..."

The Vogon stood up.

"No, well you're completely wrong," he said, "I just write poetry  to throw my mean callous heartless exterior into sharp relief. I'm  going  to throw you off the ship anyway. Guard! Take the prisoners to  number  three airlock and throw them out!"

"What?" shouted Ford.

A huge young Vogon guard stepped forward and yanked them out of their straps with his huge blubbery arms.

"You can't throw us into space," yelled Ford, "we're trying to  write a book."

"Resistance is useless!" shouted the Vogon guard back at him. It  was the first phrase he'd learnt when he joined the Vogon Guard Corps.

The captain watched with detached amusement and then turned away.

Arthur stared round him wildly.

"I don't want to die now!" he yelled. "I've still got a  headache!  I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and  wouldn't enjoy it!"

The guard grasped  them  both  firmly  round  the  neck,  and  bowing deferentially towards his captain's back, hoiked them both protesting  out of the bridge. A steel door closed and the captain was on his  own  again. He hummed quietly and mused to himself, lightly fingering his notebook  of verses.

"Hmmmm," he said, "counterpoint  the  surrealism  of  the  underlying metaphor..." He considered this for a moment, and  then  closed  the  book with a grim smile.

"Death's too good for them," he said.

The long steel-lined corridor echoed to the feeble struggles  of  the two humanoids clamped firmly under rubbery Vogon armpits.

"This is great," spluttered Arthur, "this is really terrific. Let  go of me you brute!"

The Vogon guard dragged them on.

"Don't you worry," said Ford, "I'll think of  something."  He  didn't sound hopeful.

"Resistance is useless!" bellowed the guard.

"Just don't say things like that," stammered Ford.  "How  can  anyone maintain a positive mental attitude if you're saying things like that?"

"My God," complained Arthur, "you're talking about a positive  mental attitude and you haven't even had your planet demolished today. I woke  up this morning and thought I'd have a nice relaxed day, do a bit of reading, brush the dog... It's now just after four in the afternoon and I'm already thrown out of an alien spaceship six light years from the smoking  remains of the Earth!" He spluttered and gurgled as the Vogon tightened his grip.

"Alright," said Ford, "just stop panicking."

"Who said anything about panicking?" snapped Arthur. "This  is  still just the culture shock. You wait till I've settled down into the situation and found my bearings. Then I'll start panicking."

"Arthur you're getting hysterical. Shut up!" Ford  tried  desperately to think, but was interrupted by the guard shouting again.

"Resistance is useless!"

"And you can shut up as well!" snapped Ford.

"Resistance is useless!"

"Oh give it a rest," said Ford. He  twisted  his  head  till  he  was looking straight up into his captor's face. A thought struck him.

"Do you really enjoy this sort of thing?" he asked suddenly.

The Vogon stopped dead and a look of immense stupidity seeped  slowly over his face.

"Enjoy?" he boomed. "What do you mean?"

"What I mean," said Ford, "is does it  give  you  a  full  satisfying life? Stomping around, shouting, pushing people out of spaceships..."

The Vogon stared up at the low steel ceiling and his eyebrows  almost rolled over each other. His mouth slacked.  Finally  he  said,  "Well  the hours are good..."

"They'd have to be," agreed Ford.

Arthur twisted his head to look at Ford.

"Ford, what are you doing?" he asked in an amazed whisper.

"Oh, just trying to take an interest in the world around me, OK?"  he said. "So the hours are pretty good then?" he resumed.

The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts  moiled  around  in the murky depths.

"Yeah," he said, "but now you come to mention it, most of the  actual minutes are pretty lousy. Except..."  he  thought  again,  which  required looking at the ceiling - "except some of the shouting I  quite  like."  He filled his lungs and bellowed, "Resistance is..."

"Sure, yes," interrupted Ford hurriedly, "you're good at that, I  can tell. But if it's mostly lousy," he said, slowly giving the words time  to reach their mark, "then why do you do it?  What  is  it?  The  girls?  The leather? The machismo? Or do you just find that coming to terms  with  the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?"

"Er..." said the guard, "er... er... I dunno. I  think  I  just  sort of... do it really. My aunt said that spaceship guard was  a  good  career for a young Vogon - you know, the uniform, the lowslung stun ray  holster, the mindless tedium..."

"There you are Arthur," said Ford with the air  of  someone  reaching the conclusion of his argument, "you think you've got problems."

Arthur rather thought he had. Apart from the unpleasant business with his home planet the Vogon guard had  half-throttled  him  already  and  he didn't like the sound of being thrown into space very much.

"Try and understand his problem," insisted Ford.  "Here  he  is  poor lad, his entire life's  work  is  stamping  around,  throwing  people  off spaceships..."

"And shouting," added the guard.

"And shouting, sure," said Ford  patting  the  blubbery  arm  clamped round his neck in friendly condescension, "... and he  doesn't  even  know why he's doing it!"

Arthur agreed this was very sad. He did  this  with  a  small  feeble gesture, because he was too asphyxicated to speak.

Deep rumblings of bemusement came from the guard.

"Well. Now you put it like that I suppose..."

"Good lad!" encouraged Ford.

"But alright," went on the rumblings, "so what's the alternative?"

"Well," said Ford, brightly but slowly, "stop  doing  it  of  course! Tell them," he went on, "you're not going to do it anymore."  He  felt  he had to add something to that, but for the moment the guard seemed to  have his mind occupied pondering that much.

"Eerrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..." said the guard,  "erm,  well  that doesn't sound that great to me."

Ford suddenly felt the moment slipping away.

"Now wait a minute," he said, "that's just the start you see, there's more to it than that you see..."

But at that moment the guard  renewed  his  grip  and  continued  his original purpose of lugging his prisoners to the airlock. He was obviously quite touched.

"No, I think if it's all the same to you," he said, "I'd  better  get you both shoved into this airlock and then go and get on with  some  other bits of shouting I've got to do."

It wasn't all the same to Ford Prefect after all.

"Come on now... but look!" he said, less slowly, less brightly.

"Huhhhhgggggggnnnnnnn..." said Arthur without any clear inflection.

"But hang on," pursued Ford, "there's music and  art  and  things  to tell you about yet! Arrrggghhh!"

"Resistance is useless," bellowed the guard, and then added, "You see if I keep it up I can eventually get promoted to Senior Shouting  Officer, and  there  aren't   usually   many   vacancies   for   non-shouting   and non-pushing-people-about officers, so I think I'd better stick to  what  I know."

They had now reached the airlock - a large circular steel hatchway of massive strength and weight let into the inner  skin  of  the  craft.  The guard operated a control and the hatchway swung smoothly open.

"But thanks for taking an interest," said the Vogon guard. "Bye now." He flung Ford and Arthur through  the  hatchway  into  the  small  chamber within. Arthur lay panting for breath. Ford scrambled round and flung  his shoulder uselessly against the reclosing hatchway.

"But listen," he shouted to the guard, "there's  a  whole  world  you don't know anything about... here how about this?" Desperately he  grabbed for the only bit of culture he knew offhand - he hummed the first  bar  of Beethoven's Fifth.

"Da da da dum! Doesn't that stir anything in you?"

"No," said the guard, "not really. But I'll mention it to my aunt."

If he said anything further after that  it  was  lost.  The  hatchway sealed itself tight, and all sound was lost but the faint distant  hum  of the ship's engines.

They were in a brightly polished cylindrical chamber about  six  feet in diameter and ten feet long.

"Potentially bright lad I thought," he said and slumped  against  the curved wall.

Arthur was still lying in the curve of the floor where he had fallen. He didn't look up. He just lay panting.

"We're trapped now aren't we?"

"Yes," said Ford, "we're trapped."

"Well didn't you think of anything? I thought you said you were going to think of  something.  Perhaps  you  thought  of  something  and  didn't notice."

"Oh yes, I thought of  something,"  panted  Ford.  Arthur  looked  up expectantly.

"But unfortunately," continued Ford, "it rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway." He kicked  the  hatch  they'd  just been through.

"But it was a good idea was it?"

"Oh yes, very neat."

"What was it?"

"Well I hadn't worked out the details yet.  Not  much  point  now  is there?"

"So... er, what happens next?"

"Oh, er, well the hatchway in front of us will open automatically  in a few moments and  we  will  shoot  out  into  deep  space  I  expect  and asphyxicate. If you take a lungful of air with you you can last for up  to thirty seconds of course..." said Ford. He  stuck  his  hands  behind  his back, raised his eyebrows and started to hum an  old  Betelgeusian  battle hymn. To Arthur's eyes he suddenly looked very alien.

"So this is it," said Arthur, "we're going to die."

"Yes," said Ford, "except... no! Wait a minute!" he  suddenly  lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur's line  of  vision.  "What's this switch?" he cried.

"What? Where?" cried Arthur twisting round.

"No, I was only fooling," said Ford, "we are going to die after all."

He slumped against the wall again and carried on the tune from  where he left off.

"You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when  I'm  trapped in a Vogon airlock with a  man  from  Betelgeuse,  and  about  to  die  of asphyxication in deep space that I really wish I'd  listened  to  what  my mother told me when I was young."

"Why, what did she tell you?"

"I don't know, I didn't listen."

"Oh." Ford carried on humming.

"This is terrific," Arthur thought to himself, "Nelson's  Column  has gone, McDonald's have gone, all that's left is me  and  the  words  Mostly Harmless. Any second now all that will be left  is  Mostly  Harmless.  And yesterday the planet seemed to be going so well."

A motor whirred.

A slight hiss built into a deafening roar of rushing air as the outer hatchway opened on to an empty  blackness  studded  with  tiny  impossibly bright points of light. Ford and Arthur popped into outer space like corks from a toy gun.

8

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times over many years and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers.

The introduction begins like this:

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You  just  won't  believe  how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think  it's  a  long way down the road to the  chemist,  but  that's  just  peanuts  to  space. Listen..." and so on.

(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you really  need  to  know,  like  the  fact  that  the  fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin  is  now  so  worried  about  the  cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year  that  any  net  imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your bodyweight when you leave: so  every  time you go to the lavatory it is vitally important to get a receipt.)

To be fair though, when confronted by the sheer enormity of distances between the stars, better minds than the one responsible for  the  Guide's introduction have faltered. Some invite you to consider  for  a  moment  a peanut in reading and a small  walnut  in  Johannesburg,  and  other  such dizzying concepts.

The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.

Even light, which travels so fast that it takes most races  thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey  between the stars. It takes eight minutes from the star Sol to the place where the Earth used to be, and four years more to arrive at Sol's  nearest  stellar neighbour, Alpha Proxima.

For light to reach the other side of the  Galaxy,  for  it  to  reach Damogran for instance, takes rather longer: five hundred thousand years.

The record for hitch hiking this distance is just under  five  years, but you don't get to see much on the way.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy says that if you hold a lungful of air you can survive in the total  vacuum  of  space  for  about  thirty seconds. However it goes on to say that what with  space  being  the  mind boggling size it is the chances of  getting  picked  up  by  another  ship within those thirty seconds are two  to  the  power  of  two  hundred  and sixty-seven thousand seven hundred and nine to one against.

By a totally staggering coincidence that is also the telephone number of an Islington flat where Arthur once went to a very good party and met a very nice girl whom he totally failed to get off with - she went off  with a gatecrasher.

Though the planet Earth, the Islington flat and  the  telephone  have all now been demolished, it is comforting to reflect that they are all  in some small way commemorated by the fact  that  twenty-nine  seconds  later Ford and Arthur were rescued.

9

A computer chatted to itself in alarm as it noticed an  airlock  open and close itself for no apparent reason.

This was because Reason was in fact out to lunch.

A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and quite  a  lot  of  million light years from end to end.

As it closed up lots of paper hats and party balloons fell out of  it and drifted off through the  universe.  A  team  of  seven  threefoot-high market analysts fell out of it and died, partly of  asphyxication,  partly of surprise.

Two hundred and thirty-nine thousand lightly fried eggs fell  out  of it too, materializing in a large woobly heap on the faminestruck  land  of Poghril in the Pansel system.

The whole Poghril tribe had died out from famine except for one  last man who died of cholesterol poisoning some weeks later.

The nothingth of a second for which  the  hole  existed  reverberated backwards  and  forwards  through  time  in  a  most  improbable  fashion. Somewhere in the deeply remote  past  it  seriously  traumatized  a  small random group of atoms drifting through the empty sterility  of  space  and made them cling together in the most  extraordinarily  unlikely  patterns. These patterns quickly learnt to copy themselves (this was  part  of  what was so extraordinary of the patterns) and went on to cause massive trouble on every planet they drifted on  to.  That  was  how  life  began  in  the Universe.

Five wild Event Maelstroms swirled in vicious storms of unreason  and spewed up a pavement.

On the pavement  lay  Ford  Prefect  and  Arthur  Dent  gulping  like half-spent fish.

"There you are," gasped Ford, scrabbling  for  a  fingerhold  on  the pavement as it raced through the Third Reach of the Unknown, "I  told  you I'd think of something."

"Oh sure," said Arthur, "sure."

"Bright idea of mine," said Ford, "to find a  passing  spaceship  and get rescued by it."

The real universe  arched  sickeningly  away  beneath  them.  Various pretend ones flitted  silently  by,  like  mountain  goats.  Primal  light exploded,  splattering  space-time  as  with  gobbets  of   junket.   Time blossomed, matter shrank away. The highest prime number coalesced  quietly in a corner and hid itself away for ever.

"Oh  come  off  it,"  said  Arthur,  "the  chances  against  it  were astronomical."

"Don't knock it, it worked," said Ford.

"What sort of ship are we in?" asked Arthur as the  pit  of  eternity yawned beneath them.

"I don't know," said Ford, "I haven't opened my eyes yet."

"No, nor have I," said Arthur.

The Universe jumped, froze,  quivered  and  splayed  out  in  several unexpected directions.

Arthur and Ford opened their eyes and looked  about  in  considerable surprise.

"Good god," said Arthur,  "it  looks  just  like  the  sea  front  at Southend."

"Hell, I'm relieved to hear you say that," said Ford.

"Why?"

"Because I thought I must be going mad."

"Perhaps you are. Perhaps you only thought I said it."

Ford thought about this.

"Well, did you say it or didn't you?" he asked.

"I think so," said Arthur.

"Well, perhaps we're both going mad."

"Yes," said Arthur, "we'd be mad, all  things  considered,  to  think this was Southend."

"Well, do you think this is Southend?"

"Oh yes."

"So do I."

"Therefore we must be mad."

"Nice day for it."

"Yes," said a passing maniac.

"Who was that?" asked Arthur

"Who - the man with the five heads and the elderberry  bush  full  of kippers?"

"Yes."

"I don't know. Just someone."

"Ah."

They both sat on the pavement and watched with a  certain  unease  as huge children bounced heavily along the sand  and  wild  horses  thundered through the sky taking  fresh  supplies  of  reinforced  railings  to  the Uncertain Areas.

"You know," said Arthur with a slight cough, "if  this  is  Southend, there's something very odd about it..."

"You mean the way the sea stays steady and the buildings keep washing up and down?" said Ford. "Yes I thought that was odd  too.  In  fact,"  he continued as with a  huge  bang  Southend  split  itself  into  six  equal segments which danced and span  giddily  round  each  other  in  lewd  and licentious formation, "there is something altogether  very  strange  going on."

Wild yowling noises of pipes and strings seared through the wind, hot doughnuts popped out of the road for ten pence each, horrid  fish  stormed out of the sky and Arthur and Ford decided to make a run for it.

They plunged through heavy  walls  of  sound,  mountains  of  archaic thought, valleys of mood music, bad shoe sessions and  footling  bats  and suddenly heard a girl's voice.

It sounded quite a sensible voice, but it  just  said,  "Two  to  the power of one hundred thousand to one against and falling,"  and  that  was all.

Ford skidded down a beam of light and span round  trying  to  find  a source for the voice but could see nothing he could seriously believe in.

"What was that voice?" shouted Arthur.

"I don't know," yelled  Ford,  "I  don't  know.  It  sounded  like  a measurement of probability."

"Probability? What do you mean?"

"Probability. You know, like two to one, three to one, five  to  four against. It said two to the power of one hundred thousand to one  against. That's pretty improbable you know."

A million-gallon vat of custard  upended  itself  over  them  without warning.

"But what does it mean?" cried Arthur.

"What, the custard?"

"No, the measurement of probability!"

"I don't know. I don't know at all. I think we're  on  some  kind  of spaceship."

"I can only assume," said Arthur, "that this is  not  the  firstclass compartment."

Bulges appeared in the fabric of space-time. Great ugly bulges.

"Haaaauuurrgghhh..." said Arthur as he felt his  body  softening  and bending in unusual directions. "Southend seems to be melting  away...  the stars are swirling... a dustbowl... my legs  are  drifting  off  into  the sunset... my left arm's come off too." A frightening thought  struck  him: "Hell," he said, "how am I going to operate  my  digital  watch  now?"  He wound his eyes desperately around in Ford's direction.

"Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."

Again came the voice.

"Two to the  power  of  seventy-five  thousand  to  one  against  and falling."

Ford waddled around his pond in a furious circle.

"Hey, who are you," he quacked. "Where are you? What's going  on  and is there any way of stopping it?"

"Please relax," said the voice pleasantly, like a  stewardess  in  an airliner with only one wing and two engines one of which is on fire,  "you are perfectly safe."

"But that's not the point!" raged Ford. "The point is that I am now a perfectly save penguin, and my colleague here is rapidly  running  out  of limbs!"

"It's alright, I've got them back now," said Arthur.

"Two to the power of fifty thousand to one against and falling," said the voice.

"Admittedly," said Arthur, "they're longer than I usually like  them, but..."

"Isn't there anything," squawked Ford in avian fury,  "you  feel  you ought to be telling us?"

The voice cleared its throat. A giant petit four  lolloped  off  into the distance.

"Welcome," the voice said, "to the Starship Heart of Gold."

The voice continued.

"Please do not be alarmed," it said, "by anything  you  see  or  hear around you. You are bound to feel some initial ill  effects  as  you  have been rescued from certain death at an improbability level of  two  to  the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand to one  against  -  possibly much higher. We are now cruising at  a  level  of  two  to  the  power  of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be  restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal  anyway.  Thank  you. Two to the power of twenty thousand to one against and falling."

The voice cut out.

Ford and Arthur were in a small luminous pink cubicle.

Ford was wildly excited.

"Arthur!" he said, "this is fantastic! We've been picked up by a ship powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive! This is incredible!  I  heard rumors about it before! They were all officially  denied,  but  they  must have done it! They've built the Improbability Drive!  Arthur,  this  is... Arthur? What's happening?"

Arthur had jammed himself against the door to the cubicle, trying  to hold it closed, but it was ill  fitting.  Tiny  furry  little  hands  were squeezing themselves through the cracks, their  fingers  were  inkstained; tiny voices chattered insanely.

Arthur looked up.

"Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys  outside  who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out."

10

The Infinite  Improbability  Drive  is  a  wonderful  new  method  of crossing vast interstellar distances in a  mere  nothingth  of  a  second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.

It was discovered by a  lucky  chance,  and  then  developed  into  a governable form of propulsion by the Galactic Government's  research  team on Damogran.

This, briefly, is the story of its discovery.

The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability  by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 SubMeson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer  (say a nice hot cup  of  tea)  were  of  course  well  understood  -  and  such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making  all  the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one  foot  to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this - partly because it was a debasement of science, but  mostly  because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

Another thing they couldn't stand  was  the  perpetual  failure  they encountered in trying to construct a  machine  which  could  generate  the infinite improbability  field  needed  to  flip  a  spaceship  across  the mind-paralysing distances between the furthest stars, and in the end  they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.

Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab  after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:

If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to  do  in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is,  feed  that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it  a  fresh  cup  of really hot tea... and turn it on!

He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had  managed to create the long sought after golden  Infinite  Improbability  generator out of thin air.

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass.

11

The Improbability-proof control cabin of the  Heart  of  Gold  looked like a perfectly conventional spaceship except that it was perfectly clean because it was so new. Some of the control seats hadn't  had  the  plastic wrapping taken off yet. The cabin was mostly white, oblong, and about  the size of a smallish restaurant. In fact it wasn't perfectly oblong: the two long walls were raked round in a slight parallel curve, and all the angles and corners were contoured in excitingly chunky shapes. The truth  of  the matter is that it would have been a great deal simpler and more  practical to build the cabin as an ordinary three-dimensional oblong rom,  but  then the designers would have  got  miserable.  As  it  was  the  cabin  looked excitingly purposeful, with large video screens ranged  over  the  control and guidance system  panels  on  the  concave  wall,  and  long  banks  of computers set into the convex wall. In one corner a robot sat humped,  its gleaming brushed steel head hanging loosely between its  gleaming  brushed steel knees. It  too  was  fairly  new,  but  though  it  was  beautifully constructed and polished it somehow looked as if the various parts of  its more or less humanoid body didn't quite fit properly. In fact they  fitted perfectly well, but something in its bearing  suggested  that  they  might have fitted better.

Zaphod Beeblebrox paced nervously up and down the cabin, brushing his hands over pieces of gleaming equipment and giggling with excitement.

Trillian sat hunched over a clump of instruments reading off figures. Her voice was carried round the Tannoy system of the whole ship.

"Five to one against and falling..." she said, "four to  one  against and falling... three to one... two... one... probability factor of one  to one... we have normality, I repeat we  have  normality."  She  turned  her microphone off -  then  turned  it  back  on,  with  a  slight  smile  and continued: "Anything you still can't  cope  with  is  therefore  your  own problem. Please relax. You will be sent for soon."

Zaphod burst out in annoyance: "Who are they Trillian?"

Trillian span her seat round to face him and shrugged.

"Just a couple of guys we seem to have picked up in open space,"  she said. "Section ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha."

"Yeah, well that's a very sweet thought Trillian," complained Zaphod, "but do you really think it's wise under the circumstances? I  mean,  here we are on the run and everything, we must have  the  police  of  half  the Galaxy after us by now, and we stop to pick up hitch hikers.  OK,  so  ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?"

He tapped irritably at a control panel. Trillian  quietly  moved  his hand before he tapped anything important. Whatever Zaphod's  qualities  of mind might include - dash, bravado, conceit - he  was  mechanically  inept and could easily blow the ship up with an  extravagant  gesture.  Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason why he had had such  a  wild  and successful life that  he  never  really  understood  the  significance  of anything he did.

"Zaphod," she said patiently, "they were floating unprotected in open space... you wouldn't want them to have died would you?"

"Well, you know... no. Not as such, but..."

"Not as such? Not die as such? But?" Trillian cocked her head on  one side.

"Well, maybe someone else might have picked them up later."

"A second later and they would have been dead."

"Yeah, so if you'd taken the trouble to think about the problem a bit longer it would have gone away."

"You'd been happy to let them die?"

"Well, you know, not happy as such, but..."

"Anyway," said Trillian, turning back to the controls, "I didn't pick them up."

"What do you mean? Who picked them up then?"

"The ship did."

"Huh?"

"The ship did. All by itself."

"Huh?"

"Whilst we were in Improbability Drive."

"But that's incredible."

"No Zaphod. Just very very improbable."

"Er, yeah."

"Look Zaphod," she said, patting his  arm,  "don't  worry  about  the aliens. They're just a couple of guys I expect. I'll send the  robot  down to get them and bring them up here. Hey Marvin!"

In the corner, the robot's head swung up sharply,  but  then  wobbled about imperceptibly. It pulled itself up to its feet as if  it  was  about five pounds heavier that  it  actually  was,  and  made  what  an  outside observer would have thought was a heroic effort  to  cross  the  room.  It stopped in front  of  Trillian  and  seemed  to  stare  through  her  left shoulder.

"I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed," it said.  Its voice was low and hopeless.

"Oh God," muttered Zaphod and slumped into a seat.

"Well,"  said  Trillian  in  a  bright  compassionate  tone,  "here's something to occupy you and keep your mind off things."

"It won't work," droned Marvin, "I have an exceptionally large mind."

"Marvin!" warned Trillian.

"Alright," said Marvin, "what do you want me to do?"

"Go down to number two entry bay and bring the  two  aliens  up  here under surveillance."

With a microsecond pause, and a finely calculated micromodulation  of pitch and timbre - nothing you could actually take  offence  at  -  Marvin managed to convey his utter contempt and horror of all things human.

"Just that?" he said.

"Yes," said Trillian firmly.

"I won't enjoy it," said Marvin.

Zaphod leaped out of his seat.

"She's not asking you to enjoy it," he  shouted,  "just  do  it  will you?"

"Alright," said Marvin like the tolling  of  a  great  cracked  bell, "I'll do it."

"Good..." snapped Zaphod, "great... thank you..."

Marvin turned and lifted  his  flat-topped  triangular  red  eyes  up towards him.

"I'm not getting you down at all am I?" he said pathetically.

"No no Marvin," lilted Trillian, "that's just fine, really..."

"I wouldn't like to think that I was getting you down."

"No, don't worry about that," the lilt continued, "you  just  act  as comes naturally and everything will be just fine."

"You're sure you don't mind?" probed Marvin.

"No no Marvin," lilted Trillian, "that's just  fine,  really...  just part of life."

"Marvin flashed him an electronic look.

"Life," said Marvin, "don't talk to me about life."

He turned hopelessly on his heel and lugged himself out of the cabin. With a satisfied hum and a click the door closed behind him

"I don't think I can stand that robot much  longer  Zaphod,"  growled Trillian.

The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing  division  of  the  Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun  To Be With."

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing  division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," with a  footnote to the effect that the editors  would  welcome  applications  from  anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.

Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that  had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in  the future  defined  the  marketing  division  of   the   Sirius   Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first  against  the wall when the revolution came."

The pink cubicle had winked out of existence, the  monkeys  had  sunk away to a better dimension.  Ford  and  Arthur  found  themselves  in  the embarkation area of the ship. It was rather smart.

"I think the ship's brand new," said Ford.

"How can you tell?" asked Arthur. "Have you got  some  exotic  device for measuring the age of metal?"

"No, I just found this sales brochure lying on the floor. It's a  lot of `the Universe can be yours' stuff. Ah! Look, I was right."

Ford jabbed at one of the pages and showed it to Arthur.

"It says: Sensational new breakthrough in Improbability  Physics.  As soon as the ship's drive reaches Infinite Improbability it passes  through every point in the Universe. Be the envy of other major governments.  Wow, this is big league stuff."

Ford hunted excitedly  through  the  technical  specs  of  the  ship, occasionally gasping with astonishment at what he read - clearly  Galactic astrotechnology had moved ahead during the years of his exile.

Arthur listened for a short while, but being unable to understand the vast majority of what Ford was saying he began to  let  his  mind  wander, trailing his fingers along the edge of an incomprehensible computer  bank, he reached out and pressed an invitingly large  red  button  on  a  nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words Please do  not  press  this  button again. He shook himself.

"Listen," said Ford, who was still engrossed in the  sales  brochure, "they make a big thing of the ship's  cybernetics.  A  new  generation  of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and  computers,  with  the  new  GPP feature."

"GPP feature?" said Arthur. "What's that?"

"Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities."

"Oh," said Arthur, "sounds ghastly."

A voice behind them said, "It is." The voice was low and hopeless and accompanied by a slight clanking sound. They span round and saw an  abject steel man standing hunched in the doorway.

"What?" they said.

"Ghastly," continued Marvin, "it all  is.  Absolutely  ghastly.  Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door," he  said,  stepping  through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator  as  he  mimicked  the style of the sales brochure. "All the  doors  in  this  spaceship  have  a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you,  and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done."

As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did  indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality  to  it.  "Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm  ah!"  it said.

Marvin regarded it with  cold  loathing  whilst  his  logic  circuits chattered with disgust and tinkered with the concept of directing physical violence against it Further circuits cut in saying, Why bother? What's the point? Nothing is worth  getting  involved  in.  Further  circuits  amused themselves by analysing the molecular components of the door, and  of  the humanoids' brain cells. For a quick encore  they  measured  the  level  of hydrogen emissions in the surrounding cubic parsec of space and then  shut down again in boredom. A spasm of despair shook the  robot's  body  as  he turned.

"Come on," he droned, "I've been ordered to  take  you  down  to  the bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take  you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."

He turned and walked back to the hated door.

"Er, excuse me," said Ford following  after  him,  "which  government owns this ship?"

Marvin ignored him.

"You watch this door," he muttered, "it's about to open again. I  can tell by the intolerable air of smugness it suddenly generates."

With an ingratiating little whine the door slit open again and Marvin stomped through.

"Come on," he said.

The others followed quickly and the door slit back  into  place  with pleased little clicks and whirrs.

"Thank  you  the  marketing  division  of  the   Sirius   Cybernetics Corporation," said Marvin and trudged desolately up  the  gleaming  curved corridor that stretched out before them. "Let's build robots with  Genuine People Personalities," they said. So they tried it  out  with  me.  I'm  a personality prototype. You can tell can't you?"

Ford and Arthur muttered embarrassed little disclaimers.

"I hate that door," continued Marvin. "I'm not getting  you  down  at all am I?"

"Which government..." started Ford again.

"No government owns it," snapped the robot, "it's been stolen."

"Stolen?"

"Stolen?" mimicked Marvin.

"Who by?" asked Ford.

"Zaphod Beeblebrox."

Something extraordinary  happened  to  Ford's  face.  At  least  five entirely separate and distinct expressions of shock and amazement piled up on it in a jumbled mess. His left leg, which was in mid stride, seemed  to have difficulty in finding the floor again. He stared  at  the  robot  and tried to entangle some dartoid muscles.

"Zaphod Beeblebrox?.." he said weakly.

"Sorry, did I say something wrong?" said Marvin, dragging himself  on regardless. "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so  I  don't know why I bother to say it, oh God I'm so depressed.  Here's  another  of those self-satisfied door. Life! Don't talk to me about life."

"No one ever mentioned it," muttered Arthur irritably. "Ford, are you alright?"

Ford stared at him. "Did that robot say Zaphod Beeblebrox?" he said.

12

A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold  cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wavebands for news of  himself.  The machine was rather  difficult  to  operate.  For  years  radios  had  been operated by means of pressing buttons  and  turning  dials;  then  as  the technology   became   more   sophisticated   the   controls   were    made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels  with  your  fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction  of  the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit  infuriatingly  still  if  you  wanted  to  keep listening to the same programme.

Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again. More gunk  music, but this time it was a background to a news  announcement.  The  news  was always heavily edited to fit the rhythms of the music.

"... and news  brought  to  you  here  on  the  sub-etha  wave  band, broadcasting around the galaxy around the clock," squawked a  voice,  "and we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent  life  forms  everywhere... and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks  together, guys. And of course, the big news story tonight is the  sensational  theft of the new Improbability Drive prototype ship by none other than  Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox. And the question everyone's asking is...  has the big Z finally flipped?  Beeblebrox,  the  man  who  invented  the  Pan Galactic  Gargle  Blaster,  ex-confidence  trickster,  once  described  by Eccentrica Gallumbits as the Best Bang since the  Big  One,  and  recently voted the Wort Dressed Sentinent Being  in  the  Known  Universe  for  the seventh time... has he got an answer this time? We asked his private brain care specialist Gag Halfrunt..." The music swirled and dived for a moment. Another voice broke in, presumably Halfrunt. He said: "Vell, Zaphod's jist zis guy you know?" but got no further  because  an  electric  pencil  flew across the cabin and through the radio's on/off sensitive airspace. Zaphod turned and glared at Trillian - she had thrown the pencil.

"Hey," he said, what do you do that for?"

Trillian was tapping her fingers on a screenful of figures.

"I've just thought of something," she said.

"Yeah? Worth interrupting a news bulletin about me for?"

"You hear enough about yourself as it is."

"I'm very insecure. We know that."

"Can we drop your ego for a moment? This is important."

"If there's anything more important than my ego  around,  I  want  it caught and shot now." Zaphod glared at her again, then laughed.

"Listen," she said, "we picked up those couple of guys..."

"What couple of guys?"

"The couple of guys we picked up."

"Oh, yeah," said Zaphod, "those couple of guys."

"We picked them up in sector ZZ 9 Plural Z Alpha."

"Yeah?" said Zaphod and blinked.

Trillian said quietly, "Does that mean anything to you?"

"Mmmmm," said Zaphod, "ZZ 9 Plural Z Alpha. ZZ 9 Plural Z Alpha?"

"Well?" said Trillian.

"Er... what does the Z mean?" said Zaphod.

"Which one?"

"Any one."

One  of  the  major  difficulties   Trillian   experienced   in   her relationship  with  Zaphod  was  learning  to  distinguish   between   him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending  to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to  hide  the  fact that he actually didn't understand what was going  on,  and  really  being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being  amazingly  clever  and  quite clearly was so - but not all the time, which obviously worried him,  hence the act. He proffered people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.  This above all appeared to Trillian to be genuinely stupid, but  she  could  no longer be bothered to argue about it.

She sighed and punched up a star map on the visiscreen so  she  could make it simple for him, whatever his reasons for wanting  it  to  be  that way.

"There," she pointed, "right there."

"Hey... Yeah!" said Zaphod.

"Well?" she said.

"Well what?"

Parts of the inside of her head screamed at other parts of the inside of her head. She said, very calmly, "It's the same sector  you  originally picked me up in."

He looked at her and then looked back at the screen.

"Hey, yeah," he said, "now  that  is  wild.  We  should  have  zapped straight into the middle of the Horsehead Nebula. How did we  come  to  be there? I mean that's nowhere."

She ignored this.

"Improbability Drive," she said patiently. "You explained  it  to  me yourself. We pass through every point in the Universe, you know that."

"Yeah, but that's one wild coincidence isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Picking someone up at that point? Out of the whole of  the  Universe to choose from? That's just too... I want to work this out. Computer!"

The  Sirius  Cybernetics   Corporation   Shipboard   Computer   which controlled  and  permeated  every  particle  of  the  ship  switched  into communication mode.

"Hi there!" it said brightly and simultaneously  spewed  out  a  tiny ribbon of ticker tape just for the record. The ticker tape said, Hi there!

"Oh God," said Zaphod. He hadn't worked with this computer  for  long but had already learned to loathe it.

The computer continued,  brash  and  cheery  as  if  it  was  selling detergent.

"I want you to know that whatever your problem, I am here to help you solve it."

"Yeah yeah," said Zaphod. "Look, I think I'll just  use  a  piece  of paper."

"Sure thing," said the computer, spilling  out  its  message  into  a waste bin at the same time, "I understand. If you ever want..."

"Shut up!" said Zaphod, and snatching up a pencil sat  down  next  to Trillian at the console.

"OK, OK..." said the computer in a hurt tone of voice and closed down its speech channel again.

Zaphod and Trillian pored over the  figures  that  the  Improbability flight path scanner flashed silently up in front of them.

"Can we work out," said Zaphod, "from their point of  view  what  the Improbability of their rescue was?"

"Yes, that's a constant", said Trillian, "two to  the  power  of  two hundred and seventy-six thousand seven hundred and nine to one against."

"That's high. They're two lucky lucky guys."

"Yes."

"But relative to what we were doing when the ship picked them up..."

Trillian   punched   up   the   figures.   They   showed   tow-to-the power-of-Infinity-minus-one  (an  irrational  number  that  only   has   a conventional meaning in Improbability physics).

"... it's pretty low," continued Zaphod with a slight whistle.

"Yes," agreed Trillian, and looked at him quizzically.

"That's one big whack of Improbability to be accounted for. Something pretty improbable has got to show up on the  balance  sheet  if  it's  all going to add up into a pretty sum."

Zaphod scribbled a few sums, crossed them out and  threw  the  pencil away.

"Bat's dots, I can't work it out."

"Well?"

Zaphod knocked his two heads together in irritation and  gritted  his teeth.

"OK," he said. "Computer!"

The voice circuits sprang to life again.

"Why hello there!" they said (ticker tape, ticker tape). "All I  want to do is make your day nicer and nicer and nicer..."

"Yeah well shut up and work something out for me."

"Sure  thing,"  chattered  the  computer,  "you  want  a  probability forecast based on..."

"Improbability data, yeah."

"OK," the computer continued. "Here's an interesting  little  notion. Did you realize  that  most  people's  lives  are  governed  by  telephone numbers?"

A pained look crawled across one of Zaphod's  faces  and  on  to  the other one.

"Have you flipped?" he said.

"No, but you will when I tell you that..."

Trillian gasped. She scrabbled at the buttons  on  the  Improbability flight path screen.

"Telephone number?" she said. "Did that thing say telephone number?"

Numbers flashed up on the screen.

The computer had paused politely, but now it continued.

"What I was about to say was that..."

"Don't bother please," said Trillian.

"Look, what is this?" said Zaphod.

"I don't know," said Trillian, "but those aliens - they're on the way up to the bridge with that wretched robot. Can we  pick  them  up  on  any monitor cameras?"

13

Marvin trudged on down the corridor, still moaning.

"... and then of course I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left hand side..."

"No?" said Arthur grimly as he walked along beside him. "Really?"

"Oh yes," said Marvin, "I mean I've asked for them to be replaced but no one ever listens."

"I can imagine."

Vague whistling and humming noises were coming from Ford. "Well  well well," he kept saying to himself, "Zaphod Beeblebrox..."

Suddenly Marvin stopped, and held up a hand.

"You know what's happened now of course?"

"No, what?" said Arthur, who didn't what to know.

"We've arrived at another of those doors."

There was a sliding door let into the side of  the  corridor.  Marvin eyed it suspiciously.

"Well?" said Ford impatiently. "Do we go through?"

"Do we go through?" mimicked Marvin. "Yes. This is  the  entrance  to the bridge. I was told to take you to the  bridge.  Probably  the  highest demand that will be made on my intellectual capacities today  I  shouldn't wonder."

Slowly, with great loathing, he stepped  towards  the  door,  like  a hunter stalking his prey. Suddenly it slid open.

"Thank you," it said, "for making a simple door very happy."

Deep in Marvin's thorax gears ground.

"Funny," he intoned funerally, "how just when you  think  life  can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does."

He heaved himself through the door and left Ford and  Arthur  staring at each other and  shrugging  their  shoulders.  From  inside  they  heard Marvin's voice again.

"I suppose you want to see the aliens now," he said. "Do you want  me to sit in a corner and rust, or just fall apart where I'm standing?"

"Yeah, just show them in would you Marvin?" came another voice.

Arthur looked at Ford and was astonished to see him laughing.

"What's?.."

"Shhh," said Ford, "come in."

He stepped through into the bridge.

Arthur followed him in nervously and was  astonished  to  see  a  man lolling back in a chair with his feet on a  control  console  picking  the teeth in his right-hand head with  his  left  hand.  The  right-hand  head seemed to be thoroughly preoccupied with this task, but the left-hand  one was grinning a broad, relaxed, nonchalant grin. The number of things  that Arthur couldn't believe he was seeing was fairly large.  His  jaw  flapped about at a loose end for a while.

The peculiar man waved a lazy wave at  Ford  and  with  an  appalling affectation of nonchalance said, "Ford, hi, how are you?  Glad  you  could drop in."

Ford was not going to be outcooled.

"Zaphod," he drawled, "great to see you,  you're  looking  well,  the extra arm suits you. Nice ship you've stolen."

Arthur goggled at him.

"You mean you know this guy?"  he  said,  waving  a  wild  finger  at Zaphod.

"Know him!" exclaimed Ford, "he's..." he paused, and  decided  to  do the introductions the other way round.

"Oh, Zaphod, this is a friend of mine,  Arthur  Dent,"  he  said,  "I saved him when his planet blew up."

"Oh sure," said Zaphod, "hi Arthur, glad  you  could  make  it."  His right-hand head looked round casually, said "hi" and went back  to  having his teeth picked.

Ford carried on. "And Arthur,"  he  said,  "this  is  my  semi-cousin Zaphod Beeb..."

"We've met," said Arthur sharply.

When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane  and  you  lazily sail past a few hard driving cars and  are  feeling  pretty  pleased  with yourself and then accidentally change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your bonnet  in  a  rather  ugly mess, it tends to throw you off your stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford Prefect off his.

"Err... what?"

"I said we've met."

Zaphod gave an awkward start of surprise and jabbed a gum sharply.

"Hey... er, have we? Hey... er..."

Ford rounded on Arthur with an angry flash in his eyes. Now  he  felt he was back on home ground he suddenly began  to  resent  having  lumbered himself with this ignorant primitive who knew as much about the affairs of the Galaxy as an Ilford-based gnat knew about life in Peking.

"What  do  you  mean  you've  met?"  he  demanded.  "This  is  Zaphod Beeblebrox from Betelgeuse Five you know, not  bloody  Martin  Smith  from Croydon."

"I don't care," said Arthur coldly.  We've  met,  haven't  we  Zaphod Beeblebrox - or should I say... Phil?"

"What!" shouted Ford.

"You'll have to remind me," said Zaphod. "I've a terrible memory  for species."

"It was at a party," pursued Arthur.

"Yeah, well I doubt that," said Zaphod.

"Cool it will you Arthur!" demanded Ford.

Arthur would not be deterred. "A party six months  ago.  On  Earth... England..."

Zaphod shook his head with a tight-lipped smile.

"London," insisted Arthur, "Islington."

"Oh," said Zaphod with a guilty start, "that party."

This wasn't fair on Ford at all. He  looked  backwards  and  forwards between Arthur and Zaphod. "What?" he said to Zaphod. "You don't  mean  to say you've been on that miserable planet as well do you?"

"No, of course not," said Zaphod breezily. "Well,  I  may  have  just dropped in briefly, you know, on my way somewhere..."

"But I was stuck there for fifteen years!"

"Well I didn't know that did I?"

"But what were you doing there?"

"Looking about, you know."

"He gatecrashed a party," persisted Arthur, trembling with anger,  "a fancy dress party..."

"It would have to be, wouldn't it?" said Ford.

"At this party," persisted Arthur, "was a girl... oh  well,  look  it doesn't matter now. The whole place has gone up in smoke anyway..."

"I wish you'd stop sulking about that bloody planet," said Ford. "Who was the lady?"

"Oh just somebody. Well alright, I wasn't doing very well  with  her. I'd been trying all evening. Hell, she was  something  though.  Beautiful, charming, devastatingly intelligent, at last I'd got her to myself  for  a bit and was plying her with a bit of talk when this friend of yours barges up and says Hey doll, is this guy boring you? Why don't  you  talk  to  me instead? I'm from a different planet." I never saw her again."

"Zaphod?" exclaimed Ford.

"Yes," said Arthur, glaring at him and trying not  to  feel  foolish. "He only had the two arms and the one head and  he  called  himself  Phil, but..."

"But you must admit he did turn out to be from another planet,"  said Trillian wandering into sight at the other end of  the  bridge.  She  gave Arthur a pleasant smile which settled on him like a ton of bricks and then turned her attention to the ship's controls again.

There was silence for a few seconds, and then out  of  the  scrambled mess of Arthur's brain crawled some words.

"Tricia McMillian?" he said. "What are you doing here?"

"Same as you," she said, "I hitched a lift. After all with  a  degree in Maths and another in astrophysics what else was there  to  do?  It  was either that or the dole queue again on Monday."

"Infinity minus one," chattered the computer, "Improbability sum  now complete."

Zaphod looked about him, at Ford, at Arthur, and then at Trillian.

"Trillian," he said, "is this sort of thing  going  to  happen  every time we use the Improbability drive?"

"Very probably, I'm afraid," she said.

14

The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill at ease knowing  that they had been brought together not of their  own  volition  or  by  simple coincidence,  but  by  some  curious  principle  of  physics   -   as   if relationships between people  were  susceptible  to  the  same  laws  that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules.

As the ship's artificial night closed in they were each  grateful  to retire to separate cabins and try to rationalize their thoughts.

Trillian couldn't sleep. She sat on a couch and  stared  at  a  small cage which contained her last and only links with Earth - two  white  mice that she had insisted Zaphod let her bring. She had expected  not  to  see the planet again, but she was disturbed by her negative  reaction  to  the planet's destruction. It seemed remote and unreal and she  could  find  no thoughts to think about it. She watched the mice scurrying round the  cage and running furiously  in  their  little  plastic  treadwheels  till  they occupied her whole attention. Suddenly she shook herself and went back  to the bridge to watch over the tiny flashing lights and figures that charted the ship's progress through the void. She wished she knew what it was  she was trying not to think about.

Zaphod couldn't sleep. He also wished he knew what  it  was  that  he wouldn't let himself think about. For as long as he  could  remember  he'd suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there. Most of  the time he was able to put this thought aside and not worry about it, but  it had been re-awakened by the sudden inexplicable arrival  of  Ford  Prefect and Arthur Dent. Somehow it  seemed  to  conform  to  a  pattern  that  he couldn't see.

Ford couldn't sleep. He was too excited about being back on the  road again. Fifteen years of virtual imprisonment were over,  just  as  he  was finally beginning to give up hope. Knocking about with Zaphod  for  a  bit promised to be a lot of fun, though there seemed to be  something  faintly odd about his semi-cousin that he couldn't put his  finger  on.  The  fact that he had become President of the Galaxy was frankly astonishing, as was the manner of his leaving the post. Was there a reason  behind  it?  There would be no point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomably into an  art  form.  He attacked everything in life with a mixture  of  extraordinary  genius  and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

Arthur slept: he was terribly tired.

There was a tap at Zaphod's door. It slid open.

"Zaphod?.."

"Yeah?"

"I think we just found what you came to look for."

"Hey, yeah?"

Ford gave up the attempt to sleep. In the corner of his cabin  was  a small computer screen and keyboard. He sat at it for a while and tried  to compose a new entry for the Guide on the subject of  Vogons  but  couldn't think of anything vitriolic enough so he gave that up too, wrapped a  robe round himself and went for a walk to the bridge.

As he entered he was surprised to see two figures  hunched  excitedly over the instruments.

"See? The ship's about to move  into  orbit,"  Trillian  was  saying. "There's a planet out there. It's at the exact coordinates you predicted."

Zaphod heard a noise and looked up.

"Ford!" he hissed. "Hey, come and take a look at this."

Ford went and had a look at it. It was a series of  figures  flashing over a screen.

"You recognize those Galactic coordinates?" said Zaphod.

"No."

"I'll give you a clue. Computer!"

"Hi gang!" enthused the computer.  "This  is  getting  real  sociable isn't it?"

"Shut up," said Zaphod, "and show up the screens."

Light on the bridge  sank.  Pinpoints  of  light  played  across  the consoles and reflected in four  pairs  of  eyes  that  stared  up  at  the external monitor screens.

There was absolutely nothing on them.

"Recognize that?" whispered Zaphod.

Ford frowned.

"Er, no," he said.

"What do you see?"

"Nothing."

"Recognize it?"

"What are you talking about?"

"We're in the Horsehead Nebula. One whole vast dark cloud."

"And I was meant to recognize that from a blank screen?"

"Inside a dark nebula is the only place in the  Galaxy  you'd  see  a dark screen."

"Very good."

Zaphod laughed. He was clearly very excited about  something,  almost childishly so.

"Hey, this is really terrific, this is just far too much!"

"What's so great about being stuck in a dust cloud?" said Ford.

"What would you reckon to find here?" urged Zaphod.

"Nothing."

"No stars? No planets?"

"No."

"Computer!" shouted Zaphod, "rotate angle of vision through oneeighty degrees and don't talk about it!"

For a moment it seemed that nothing was happening, then a  brightness glowed at the edge of the huge screen. A red star  the  size  of  a  small plate crept across it followed quickly by another one - a  binary  system. Then a vast crescent sliced into the corner of the picture - a  red  glare shading away into the deep black, the night side of the planet.

"I've found it!" cried Zaphod, thumping the console. "I've found it!"

Ford stared at it in astonishment.

"What is it?" he said.

"That..." said Zaphod, "is  the  most  improbable  planet  that  ever existed."

15

(Excerpt from The Hitch Hiker's Guide to  the  Galaxy,  Page  634784, Section 5a, Entry: Magrathea)

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free.

Mighty  starships  plied  their  way  between  exotic  suns,  seeking adventure and reward amongst the furthest reaches of  Galactic  space.  In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men  were  real  men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri  were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And  all  dared  to  brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives  that  no man had split before - and thus was the Empire forged.

Many men of course became extremely  rich,  but  this  was  perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor  -  at least no one  worth  speaking  of.  And  for  all  the  richest  and  most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull  and  niggly,  and they began to imagine that this was therefore  the  fault  of  the  worlds they'd settled on - none of them was  entirely  satisfactory:  either  the climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the  day was half an hour too long, or the sea was exactly the wrong shade of pink.

And thus were created the conditions for a  staggering  new  form  of specialist industry: custom-made luxury planet building. The home of  this industry was the planet Magrathea,  where  hyperspatial  engineers  sucked matter through white holes in space to form it into dream planets  -  gold planets, platinum planets, soft rubber planets with lots of earthquakes  - all lovingly made to meet the exacting standards that the Galaxy's richest men naturally came to expect.

But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon  became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was  reduced  to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and  a long sullen silence settled over a billion worlds, disturbed only  by  the pen scratchings of scholars as they laboured  into  the  night  over  smug little treaties on the value of a planned political economy.

Magrathea itself disappeared and its  memory  soon  passed  into  the obscurity of legend.

In these enlightened days of course, no one believes a word of it.

16

Arthur awoke to the sound of argument and went to  the  bridge.  Ford was waving his arms about.

"You're crazy, Zaphod," he was saying, "Magrathea is a myth, a  fairy story, it's what parents tell their kids about at night if they want  them to grow up to become economists, it's..."

"And that's what we are currently in orbit around," insisted Zaphod.

"Look, I can't help what you may personally be in orbit around," said Ford, "but this ship..."

"Computer!" shouted Zaphod.

"Oh no..."

"Hi there! This is Eddie your shipboard  computer,  and  I'm  feeling just great guys, and I know I'm just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any programme you care to run through me."

Arthur looked inquiringly at Trillian. She motioned him to come on in but keep quiet.

"Computer," said Zaphod, "tell us again what our  present  trajectory is."

"A real pleasure feller," it burbled, "we are currently in  orbit  at an altitude  of  three  hundred  miles  around  the  legendary  planet  of Magrathea."

"Proving nothing," said Ford. "I  wouldn't  trust  that  computer  to speak my weight."

"I can do that for you, sure," enthused the  computer,  punching  out more tickertape. "I can even work out  you  personality  problems  to  ten decimal places if it will help."

Trillian interrupted.

"Zaphod," she said, "any minute now we will be swinging round to  the daylight side of this planet," adding, "whatever it turns out to be."

"Hey, what do you mean by that? The planet's  where  I  predicted  it would be isn't it?"

"Yes, I know there's a planet there. I'm  not  arguing  with  anyone, it's just that I wouldn't know Magrathea from any other lump of cold rock. Dawn's coming up if you want it."

"OK, OK," muttered Zaphod, "let's at least give our eyes a good time. Computer!"

"Hi there! What can I..."

"Just shut up and give us a view of the planet again."

A dark featureless mass once more filled the  screens  -  the  planet rolling away beneath them.

They watched for a moment in silence, but  Zaphod  was  fidgety  with excitement.

"We are now traversing the night side..." he said in a hushed  voice. The planet rolled on.

"The surface of the planet is now three hundred miles beneath  us..." he continued. He was trying to restore a sense of occasion to what he felt should have been a great  moment.  Magrathea!  He  was  piqued  by  Ford's sceptical reaction. Magrathea!

"In a few seconds," he continued, "we should see... there!"

The moment carried itself. Even the most seasoned  star  tramp  can't help but shiver at the spectacular drama of a sunrise seen from space, but a binary sunrise is one of the marvels of the Galaxy.

Out of the utter blackness stabbed a sudden point of blinding  light. It crept up by slight degrees and  spread  sideways  in  a  thin  crescent blade, and within seconds  two  suns  were  visible,  furnaces  of  light, searing the black edge of the horizon with white fire.  Fierce  shafts  of colour streaked through the thin atmosphere beneath them.

"The fires of dawn!.." breathed Zaphod. "The twin suns  of  Soulianis and Rahm!.."

"Or whatever," said Ford quietly.

"Soulianis and Rahm!" insisted Zaphod.

The suns blazed into the pitch of  space  and  a  low  ghostly  music floated through the bridge: Marvin was humming ironically because he hated humans so much.

As Ford gazed at the spectacle of light before them excitement  burnt inside him, but only the excitement of seeing a strange new planet, it was enough for him to see it as it was. It faintly irritated him  that  Zaphod had to impose some ludicrous fantasy on to the scene to make it  work  for him. All this Magrathea nonsense seemed juvenile. Isn't it enough  to  see that a garden is beautiful  without  having  to  believe  that  there  are fairies at the bottom of it too?

All  this  Magrathea  business  seemed  totally  incomprehensible  to Arthur. He edged up to Trillian and asked her what was going on.

"I only know what  Zaphod's  told  me,"  she  whispered.  "Apparently Magrathea is some kind of legend from way  back  which  no  one  seriously believes in. Bit like Atlantis on Earth, except that the legends  say  the Magratheans used to manufacture planets."

Arthur blinked at the screens  and  felt  he  was  missing  something important. Suddenly he realized what it was.

"Is there any tea on this spaceship?" he asked.

More of the planet was unfolding beneath them as the  Heart  of  Gold streaked along its orbital path. The suns now stood high in the black sky, the pyrotechnics of dawn were over, and the surface of the planet appeared bleak and forbidding in the common light of day -  grey,  dusty  and  only dimly contoured. It looked dead and cold as a crypt.  From  time  to  time promising features would appear on the distant horizon  -  ravines,  maybe mountains, maybe even cities - but as  they  approached  the  lines  would soften and blur into anonymity and nothing would transpire.  The  planet's surface was blurred by time, by the slow movement of the thin stagnant air that had crept across it for century upon century.

Clearly, it was very very old.

A moment of doubt came to Ford as he watched the grey landscape  move beneath them. The immensity of time worried him, he could  feel  it  as  a presence. He cleared his throat.

"Well, even supposing it is..."

"It is," said Zaphod.

"Which it isn't," continued Ford. "What do you want with  it  anyway? There's nothing there."

"Not on the surface," said Zaphod.

"Alright, just supposing there's something. I take it you're not here for the sheer industrial archaeology of it all. What are you after?"

One of Zaphod's heads looked away. The other one looked round to  see what the first was looking at, but it  wasn't  looking  at  anything  very much.

"Well," said Zaphod airily, "it's  partly  the  curiosity,  partly  a sense of adventure, but mostly I think it's the fame and the money..."

Ford glanced at him sharply. He got a  very  strong  impression  that Zaphod hadn't the faintest idea why he was there at all.

"You know I don't like the look of that planet at all," said Trillian shivering.

"Ah, take no notice," said Zaphod,  "with  half  the  wealth  of  the former Galactic Empire stored on  it  somewhere  it  can  afford  to  look frumpy."

Bullshit, thought Ford. Even supposing this  was  the  home  of  some ancient civilization  now  gone  to  dust,  even  supposing  a  number  of exceedingly unlikely things, there was  no  way  that  vast  treasures  of wealth were going to be stored there in any form  that  would  still  have meaning now. He shrugged.

"I think it's just a dead planet," he said.

"The suspense is killing me," said Arthur testily.

Stress and nervous tension are now serious  social  problems  in  all parts of the Galaxy, and it is in order that this situation should not  in any way be exacerbated that the following facts will now  be  revealed  in advance.

The planet in question is in fact the legendary Magrathea.

The deadly missile attack  shortly  to  be  launched  by  an  ancient automatic defence system will result  merely  in  the  breakage  of  three coffee cups and a micecage, the bruising of somebody's upper arm, and  the untimely creation and sudden demise of a bowl of petunias and an  innocent sperm whale.

In order that some sense of mystery should  still  be  preserved,  no revelation will yet be made  concerning  whose  upper  arm  sustained  the bruise. This fact may safely be made the subject of suspense since  it  is of no significance whatsoever.

17

After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shellshocked fragments  the  previous  day  had left him with. He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had  provided  him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost,  but  not  quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When  the Drink  button  was  pressed  it  made  an  instant  but  highly   detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis  of  the subject's metabolism and then sent  tiny  experimental  signals  down  the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain  to  see  what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite  why  it  did  this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that  was  almost,  but not  quite,  entirely  unlike  tea.  The  Nutri-Matic  was  designed   and manufactured  by  the  Sirius  Cybernetics  Corporation  whose  complaints department now covers all the major land masses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system.

Arthur drank the liquid and found it reviving. He glanced up  at  the screens again and watched a few more  hundred  miles  of  barren  greyness slide past. It suddenly occurred to him to ask a question which  had  been bothering him.

"Is it safe?" he said.

"Magrathea's been dead for five  million  years,"  said  Zaphod,  "of course it's safe. Even the  ghosts  will  have  settled  down  and  raised families by now." At which point a strange and inexplicable sound thrilled suddenly through the bridge - a noise as of a distant fanfare;  a  hollow, reedy, insubstantial sound. It preceded a voice that was  equally  hollow, reedy and insubstantial. The voice said "Greetings to you..."

Someone from the dead planet was talking to them.

"Computer!" shouted Zaphod.

"Hi there!"

"What the photon is it?"

"Oh, just some five-million-year-old tape that's being  broadcast  at us."

"A what? A recording?"

"Shush!" said Ford. "It's carrying on."

The voice was old, courteous, almost charming,  but  was  underscored with quite unmistakable menace.

"This is a recorded announcement," it said, "as I'm afraid we're  all out at the moment. The commercial council of Magrathea thanks you for your esteemed visit..."

("A voice from ancient Magrathea!" shouted  Zaphod.  "OK,  OK,"  said Ford.)

"... but regrets," continued the voice, "that the  entire  planet  is temporarily closed for business. Thank you. If you  would  care  to  leave your name and the address of a planet where you can be  contacted,  kindly speak when you hear the tone."

A short buzz followed, then silence.

"They want to get rid of us," said Trillian nervously.  "What  do  we do?"

"It's just a recording," said  Zaphod.  "We  keep  going.  Got  that, computer?"

"I got it," said the computer and gave the  ship  an  extra  kick  of speed.

They waited.

After a second or so came the fanfare once again, and then the voice.

"We would like to assure you that as soon as our business is  resumed announcements will  be  made  in  all  fashionable  magazines  and  colour supplements, when our clients will once again be able to select  from  all that's best in contemporary geography." The menace in the voice took on  a sharper edge. "Meanwhile we thank our clients for their kind interest  and would ask them to leave. Now."

Arthur looked round the nervous faces of his companions.

"Well, I suppose we'd better be going then, hadn't we?" he suggested.

"Shhh!" said  Zaphod.  "There's  absolutely  nothing  to  be  worried about."

"Then why's everyone so tense?"

"They're just interested!" shouted Zaphod. "Computer, start a descent into the atmosphere and prepare for landing."

This time the fanfare was quite  perfunctory,  the  voice  distinctly cold.

"It is most gratifying," it  said,  "that  your  enthusiasm  for  our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to  assure  you  that  the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a  special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients, and  the  fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a  courtesy  detail.  We  look forward to your custom in future lives... thank you."

The voice snapped off.

"Oh," said Trillian.

"Er..." said Arthur.

"Well?" said Ford.

"Look," said Zaphod, "will you get it into your heads? That's just  a recorded message. It's millions of years old. It doesn't apply to us,  get it?"

"What," said Trillian quietly, "about the missiles?"

"Missiles? Don't make me laugh."

Ford tapped Zaphod on the shoulder and pointed at  the  rear  screen. Clear in the distance behind them two silver darts were  climbing  through the atmosphere towards the ship. A quick change of  magnification  brought them into close focus - two massively real rockets thundering through  the sky. The suddenness of it was shocking.

"I think they're going to have a very good try at  applying  to  us," said Ford.

Zaphod stared at them in astonishment.

"Hey this is terrific!" he said. "Someone down  there  is  trying  to kill us!"

"Terrific," said Arthur.

"But don't you see what this means?"

"Yes. We're going to die."

"Yes, but apart from that."

"Apart from that?"

"It means we must be on to something!"

"How soon can we get off it?"

Second by second the image of  the  missiles  on  the  screen  became larger. They had swung round now on to a direct homing course so that  all that could be seen of them now was the warheads, head on.

"As a matter of interest," said Trillian, "what are we going to do?"

"Just keep cool," said Zaphod.

"Is that all?" shouted Arthur.

"No, we're also going to... er... take evasive action!"  said  Zaphod with a sudden access of panic.  "Computer,  what  evasive  action  can  we take?"

"Er, none I'm afraid, guys," said the computer.

"... or something...", said Zaphod, "er..." he said.

"There seems to be something jamming my guidance  system,"  explained the computer brightly, "impact minus forty-five seconds.  Please  call  me Eddie if it will help you to relax."

Zaphod  tried  to  run  in  several   equally   decisive   directions simultaneously. "Right!" he said. "Er... we've got to get  manual  control of this ship."

"Can you fly her?" asked Ford pleasantly.

"No, can you?"

"No."

"Trillian, can you?"

"No."

"Fine," said Zaphod, relaxing. "We'll do it together."

"I can't either," said Arthur, who felt  it  was  time  he  began  to assert himself.

"I'd guessed that," said Zaphod. "OK computer,  I  want  full  manual control now."

"You got it," said the computer.

Several large desk panels slid open and  banks  of  control  consoles sprang  up  out  of  them,  showering  the  crew  with  bits  of  expanded polystyrene packaging and balls of rolled-up  cellophane:  these  controls had never been used before.

Zaphod stared at them wildly.

"OK, Ford," he said, "full retro thrust and ten degrees starboard. Or something..."

"Good  luck  guys,"  chirped  the  computer,  "impact  minus   thirty seconds..."

Ford leapt to the controls - only a few of them  made  any  immediate sense to him so he pulled those.  The  ship  shook  and  screamed  as  its guidance rocked jets tried to push it every which way  simultaneously.  He released half of them and the ship span round in a tight  arc  and  headed back the way it had come, straight towards the oncoming missiles.

Air cushions ballooned out of the walls in an instant as everyone was thrown against them. For a few  seconds  the  inertial  forces  held  them flattened and squirming for breath, unable to move. Zaphod  struggled  and pushed in manic desperation and finally managed a savage kick at  a  small lever that formed part of the guidance system.

The lever snapped off. The ship twisted sharply and rocketed upwards. The crew were hurled violently back across the cabin. Ford's copy  of  The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy smashed  into  another  section  of  the control console with the combined result that the guide started to explain to anyone who cared to listen about the best ways  of  smuggling  Antarean parakeet glands out of Antares (an Antarean  parakeet  gland  stuck  on  a small stick is a revolting but much sought  after  cocktail  delicacy  and very large sums of money are often paid for them by very rich  idiots  who want to impress other very rich idiots), and the ship suddenly dropped out of the sky like a stone.

It was of course more or less at this moment that  one  of  the  crew sustained a nasty bruise to the  upper  arm.  This  should  be  emphasized because, as had already been revealed, they  escape  otherwise  completely unharmed and the deadly nuclear missiles do not eventually hit  the  ship. The safety of the crew is absolutely assured.

"Impact minus twenty seconds, guys..." said the computer.

"Then turn the bloody engines back on!" bawled Zaphod.

"OK, sure thing, guys," said the computer. With  a  subtle  roar  the engines cut back in, the ship smoothly  flattened  out  of  its  dive  and headed back towards the missiles again.

The computer started to sing.

"When you walk through the storm..." it whined  nasally,  "hold  your head up high..."

Zaphod screamed at it to shut up, but his voice was lost in  the  din of what they quite naturally assumed was approaching destruction.

"And don't... be afraid... of the dark!" Eddie wailed.

The ship, in flattening out had in fact flattened out upside down and lying on the ceiling as they were it was now totally impossible for any of the crew to reach the guidance systems.

"At the end of the storm..." crooned Eddie.

The two missiles loomed massively on the screens  as  they  thundered towards the ship.

"... is a golden sky..."

But by an  extraordinarily  lucky  chance  they  had  not  yet  fully corrected their flight paths to that of the erratically weaving ship,  and they passed right under it.

"And the sweet silver  songs  of  the  lark...  Revised  impact  time fifteen seconds fellas... Walk on through the wind..."

The missiles banked round in a screeching arc and plunged  back  into pursuit.

"This is it," said Arthur watching them. "We are now quite definitely going to die aren't we?"

"I wish you'd stop saying that," shouted Ford.

"Well we are aren't we?"

"Yes."

"Walk on through the rain..." sang Eddie.

A thought struck Arthur. He struggled to his feet.

"Why doesn't anyone turn on this Improbability Drive thing?" he said. "We could probably reach that."

"What are  you  crazy?"  said  Zaphod.  "Without  proper  programming anything could happen."

"Does that matter at this stage?" shouted Arthur.

"Though your dreams be tossed and blown..." sand Eddie.

Arthur scrambled up on to one end of the excitingly chunky pieces  of moulded contouring where the curve of the wall met the ceiling.

"Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart..."

"Does anyone know why Arthur can't turn on the Improbability  Drive?" shouted Trillian.

"And you'll never walk alone... Impact minus five seconds, it's  been great knowing you guys, God bless... You'll ne... ver... walk... alone!"

"I said," yelled Trillian, "does anyone know..."

The next thing that happened was a mid-mangling  explosion  of  noise and light.

18

And the next thing that happened after that was  that  the  Heart  of Gold continued on its way perfectly  normally  with  a  rather  fetchingly redesigned interior. It was somewhat larger,  and  done  out  in  delicate pastel shades of green and blue. In the centre a spiral staircase, leading nowhere in particular, stood in a spray of ferns and  yellow  flowers  and next to it a stone sundial pedestal housed  the  main  computer  terminal. Cunningly deployed lighting and mirrors created the illusion  of  standing in a conservatory overlooking a  wide  stretch  of  exquisitely  manicured garden. Around the periphery of the conservatory area stood  marble-topped tables on intricately beautiful wrought-iron legs. As you gazed  into  the polished surface of the marble  the  vague  forms  of  instruments  became visible, and as you touched them the  instruments  materialized  instantly under your hands. Looked at from the correct angles the  mirrors  appeared to reflect all the required data readouts, though it was  far  from  clear where they were reflected from. It was in fact sensationally beautiful.

Relaxing in a wickerwork sun chair, Zaphod Beeblebrox said, "What the hell happened?"

"Well I was just saying," said Arthur lounging by a small fish  pool, "there's this Improbability Drive switch over here..." he waved  at  where it had been. There was a potted plant there now.

"But where  are  we?"  said  Ford  who  was  sitting  on  the  spiral staircase, a nicely chilled Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in his hand.

"Exactly where we were, I think..." said Trillian, as all about  them the mirrors showed them an image of the blighted  landscape  of  Magrathea which still scooted along beneath them.

Zaphod leapt out of his seat.

"Then what's happened to the missiles?" he said.

A new and astounding image appeared in the mirrors.

"They would appear," said Ford doubtfully, "to  have  turned  into  a bowl of petunias and a very surprised looking whale..."

"At an Improbability Factor," cut in Eddie, who hadn't changed a bit, "of eight million seven hundred and sixty-seven thousand one  hundred  and twenty-eight to one against."

Zaphod stared at Arthur.

"Did you think of that, Earthman?" he demanded.

"Well," said Arthur, "all I did was..."

"That's very good thinking you know. Turn on the Improbability  Drive for a second without first activating the proofing screens.  Hey  kid  you just saved our lives, you know that?"

"Oh," said Arthur, "well, it was nothing really..."

"Was it?" said Zaphod. "Oh well, forget it then. OK,  computer,  take us in to land."

"But..."

"I said forget it."

Another thing that got  forgotten  was  the  fact  that  against  all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence  several miles above the surface of an alien planet.

And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale,  this poor innocent creature had very little time to  come  to  terms  with  its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not  being  a whale any more.

This is a complete record of its thoughts from the  moment  it  began its life till the moment it ended it.

Ah!.. What's happening? it thought.

Er, excuse me, who am I?

Hello?

Why am I here? What's my purpose in life?

What do I mean by who am I?

Calm down, get a grip now... oh! this is  an  interesting  sensation, what is it? It's a sort of... yawning, tingling sensation in  my...  my... well I suppose I'd better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I  shall call the world, so let's call it my stomach.

Good. Ooooh, it's getting quite strong. And hey,  what's  about  this whistling roaring sound going past what I'm  suddenly  going  to  call  my head? Perhaps I can call that... wind! Is that a good  name?  It'll  do... perhaps I can find a better name for it later when  I've  found  out  what it's for. It must be something  very  important  because  there  certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of it. Hey! What's this thing?  This...  let's call it a tail - yeah, tail. Hey! I can can really thrash it about  pretty good can't I? Wow! Wow! That feels great! Doesn't  seem  to  achieve  very much but I'll probably find out what it's for later on. Now - have I built up any coherent picture of things yet?

No.

Never mind, hey, this is really exciting, so much to find out  about, so much to look forward to, I'm quite dizzy with anticipation...

Or is it the wind?

There really is a lot of that now isn't it?

And wow! Hey! What's this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a  big  wide  sounding name like... ow... ound... round... ground! That's it! That's a good  name - ground!

I wonder if it will be friends with me?

And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the  mind  of  the bowl of petunias as it fell  was  Oh  no,  not  again.  Many  people  have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of  petunias  had  thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we  do now.

19

"Are we taking this robot with us?" said Ford, looking with  distaste at Marvin who was standing in an awkward hunched  posture  in  the  corner under a small palm tree.

Zaphod glanced  away  from  the  mirror  screens  which  presented  a panoramic view of the blighted landscape on which the Heart  of  Gold  had now landed.

"Oh, the Paranoid Android," he said. "Yeah, we'll take him."

"But what are supposed to do with a manically depressed robot?"

"You think you've got problems," said Marvin as if he was  addressing a newly occupied coffin, "what are  you  supposed  to  do  if  you  are  a manically depressed robot? No, don't bother  to  answer  that,  I'm  fifty thousand times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level."

Trillian burst in through the door from her cabin.

"My white mice have escaped!" she said.

An expression of deep worry and concern failed  to  cross  either  of Zaphod's faces.

"Nuts to your white mice," he said.

Trillian glared an upset glare at him, and disappeared again.

It is possible that her remark would have commanded greater attention had it been generally realized that human beings were only the third  most intelligent life form present on the planet  Earth,  instead  of  (as  was generally thought by most independent observers) the second.

"Good afternoon boys."

The  voice  was  oddly  familiar,  but  oddly  different.  It  had  a matriarchal twang. It announced itself to the crew as they arrived at  the airlock hatchway that would let them out on the planet surface.

They looked at each other in puzzlement.

"It's the computer,"  explained  Zaphod.  "I  discovered  it  had  an emergency back-up personality that I thought might work out better."

"Now this is going to be your first day out on a strange new planet," continued Eddie's new voice, "so I want you all wrapped up snug and  warm, and no playing with any naughty bug-eyed monsters."

Zaphod tapped impatiently on the hatch.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I think we might be better off  with  a  slide rule."

"Right!" snapped the computer. "Who said that?"

"Will you open the exit hatch please, computer?" said  Zaphod  trying not to get angry.

"Not until whoever said that owns up," urged the computer, stamping a few synapses closed.

"Oh God," muttered Ford, slumped against a bulkhead  and  started  to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentinent life forms would forget how to do this. Only by  counting  could  humans  demonstrate their independence of computers.

"Come on," said Eddie sternly.

"Computer..." began Zaphod...

"I'm  waiting,"  interrupted  Eddie.  "I  can   wait   all   day   if necessary..."

"Computer..." said Zaphod again, who had been trying to think of some subtle piece of reasoning to put the computer down with, and  had  decided not to bother competing with it on its own ground, "if you don't open that exit hatch this moment I shall zap straight off to your major  data  banks and reprogram you with a very large axe, got that?"

Eddie, shocked, paused and considered this.

Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the  most  aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of  going  up  to  a  human being and saying Blood... blood... blood... blood...

Finally Eddie said quietly, "I can see this relationship is something we're all going to have to work at," and the hatchway opened.

An icy wind ripped into  them,  they  hugged  themselves  warmly  and stepped down the ramp on to the barren dust of Magrathea.

"It'll all end in tears, I know it," shouted  Eddie  after  them  and closed the hatchway again.

A few minutes later he  opened  and  closed  the  hatchway  again  in response to a command that caught him entirely by surprise.

20

Five figures wandered slowly over the blighted land. Bits of it  were dullish grey, bits of it  dullish  brown,  the  rest  of  it  rather  less interesting to look at. It was like a dried-out marsh, now barren  of  all vegetation and covered with a layer of dust about an inch  thick.  It  was very cold.

Zaphod was clearly rather depressed  about  it.  He  stalked  off  by himself and was soon lost to sight behind a slight rise in the ground.

The wind stung Arthur's eyes and ears, and the stale thin air clasped his throat. However, the thing stung most was his mind.

"It's fantastic..." he said, and his  own  voice  rattled  his  ears. Sound carried badly in this thin atmosphere.

"Desolate hole if you ask me," said Ford. "I could have more fun in a cat litter." He felt a mounting irritation. Of all the planets in all  the star systems of all the Galaxy - didn't he just have to turn up at a  dump like this after fifteen years of being a castaway?  Not  even  a  hot  dog stand in evidence. He stooped down and picked up a cold clot of earth, but there was nothing underneath it worth crossing thousands of light years to look at.

"No," insisted Arthur, "don't you understand, this is the first  time I've actually stood on the surface of  another  planet...  a  whole  alien world!.. Pity it's such a dump though."

Trillian hugged herself, shivered and frowned. She could  have  sworn she saw a slight and unexpected movement out of the corner of her eye, but when she glanced in that direction all she could see was the  ship,  still and silent, a hundred yards or so behind them.

She was relieved when a second or  so  later  they  caught  sight  of Zaphod standing on top of the ridge of ground and waving to them  to  come and join him.

He seemed to be excited, but they couldn't clearly hear what  he  was saying because of the thinnish atmosphere and the wind.

As they approached the ridge of higher ground they became aware  that it seemed to be circular - a crater about a hundred and fifty yards  wide. Round the outside of the crater the  sloping  ground  was  spattered  with black and red lumps. They stopped and looked at a piece. It  was  wet.  It was rubbery.

With horror they suddenly realized that it was fresh whalemeat.

At the top of the crater's lip they met Zaphod.

"Look," he said, pointing into the crater.

In the centre lay the exploded carcass of a lonely sperm  whale  that hadn't lived long enough to be disappointed with its lot. The silence  was only disturbed by the slight involuntary spasms of Trillian's throat.

"I suppose there's no point in trying to bury it?"  murmured  Arthur, and then wished he hadn't.

"Come," said Zaphod and started back down into the crater.

"What, down there?" said Trillian with severe distaste.

"Yeah," said Zaphod, "come on, I've got something to show you."

"We can see it," said Trillian.

"Not that," said Zaphod, "something else. Come on."

They all hesitated.

"Come on," insisted Zaphod, "I've found a way in."

"In?" said Arthur in horror.

"Into the interior of the planet! An underground passage.  The  force of the whale's impact cracked it open, and that's where  we  have  to  go. Where no man has trod these five million years, into the  very  depths  of time itself..."

Marvin started his ironical humming again.

Zaphod hit him and he shut up.

With little shudders of disgust they all  followed  Zaphod  down  the incline into the crater, trying very hard not to look at  its  unfortunate creator.

"Life," said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or  ignore  it,  you  can't like it."

The ground had caved in where  the  whale  had  hit  it  revealing  a network of galleries and passages, now  largely  obstructed  by  collapsed rubble and entrails. Zaphod had made a start clearing a way  into  one  of them, but Marvin was able to do it rather faster. Dank air wafted  out  of its dark recesses, and as Zaphod shone a torch into it, little was visible in the dusty gloom.

"According to the legends," he said, "the Magratheans lived  most  of their lives underground."

"Why's that?" said Arthur. "Did the surface become  too  polluted  or overpopulated?"

"No, I don't think so," said Zaphod. "I think they just  didn't  like it very much."

"Are you sure you know what  you're  doing?"  said  Trillian  peering nervously into the darkness. "We've been attacked once already you know."

"Look kid, I promise you the live population of this  planet  is  nil plus the four of  us,  so  come  on,  let's  get  on  in  there.  Er,  hey Earthman..."

"Arthur," said Arthur.

"Yeah could you just sort of keep this robot with you and guard  this end of the passageway. OK?"

"Guard?" said Arthur. "What from? You just said there's no one here."

"Yeah, well, just for safety, OK?" said Zaphod.

"Whose? Yours or mine?"

"Good lad. OK, here we go."

Zaphod scrambled down into the  passage,  followed  by  Trillian  and Ford.

"Well I hope you  all  have  a  really  miserable  time,"  complained Arthur.

"Don't worry," Marvin assured him, "they will."

In a few seconds they had disappeared from view.

Arthur stamped around in a huff, and  then  decided  that  a  whale's graveyard is not on the whole a good place to stamp around in.

Marvin eyed him balefully for a moment, and then turned himself off.

Zaphod marched quickly down the  passageway,  nervous  as  hell,  but trying to hide it by  striding  purposefully.  He  flung  the  torch  beam around. The walls were covered in dark tiles and were cold to  the  touch, the air thick with decay.

"There, what  did  I  tell  you?"  he  said.  "An  inhabited  planet. Magrathea," and he strode on through the dirt and debris that littered the tile floor.

Trillian was reminded unavoidably of the London  Underground,  though it was less thoroughly squalid.

At intervals along the walls the tiles gave way to  large  mosaics  - simple angular patterns in bright colours. Trillian  stopped  and  studied one of them but could not interpret any  sense  in  them.  She  called  to Zaphod.

"Hey, have you any idea what these strange symbols are?"

"I think they're just strange symbols of  some  kind,"  said  Zaphod, hardly glancing back.

Trillian shrugged and hurried after him.

From time to time a doorway led either to  the  left  or  right  into smallish chambers which Ford discovered to be full  of  derelict  computer equipment. He dragged Zaphod into one to have a look. Trillian followed.

"Look," said Ford, "you reckon this is Magrathea..."

"Yeah," said Zaphod, "and we heard the voice, right?"

"OK, so I've bought the fact that it's Magrathea -  for  the  moment. What you have so far said nothing about is how in the Galaxy you found it. You didn't just look it up in a star atlas, that's for sure."

"Research. Government archives. Detective work.  Few  lucky  guesses. Easy."

"And then you stole the Heart of Gold to come and look for it with?"

"I stole it to look for a lot of things."

"A lot of things?" said Ford in surprise. "Like what?"

"I don't know."

"What?"

"I don't know what I'm looking for."

"Why not?"

"Because... because... I think it  might  be  because  if  I  knew  I wouldn't be able to look for them."

"What, are you crazy?"

"It's a possibility I haven't ruled out yet," said Zaphod quietly. "I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under  its  current conditions. And its current conditions are not good."

For a long time nobody said anything as Ford gazed at Zaphod  with  a mind suddenly full of worry.

"Listen old friend, if you want to..." started Ford eventually.

"No, wait... I'll tell you something," said Zaphod.  "I  freewheel  a lot. I get an idea to do something, and, hey, why not, I do it.  I  reckon I'll become President of the Galaxy, and it just  happens,  it's  easy.  I decide to steal this ship. I decide to look for Magrathea, and it all just happens. Yeah, I work out how it can best be done, right,  but  it  always works out. It's like having a Galacticredit card which  keeps  on  working though you never send off the cheques. And then whenever I stop and  think - why did I want to do something? - how did I work out how to do it?  -  I get a very strong desire just to stop thinking about it. Like I have  now. It's a big effort to talk about it."

Zaphod paused for a while. For a while there  was  silence.  Then  he frowned and said, "Last night I was worrying about this again.  About  the fact that part of my mind just didn't  seem  to  work  properly.  Then  it occurred to me that the way it seemed was that someone else was  using  my mind to have good ideas with, without telling me about it. I put  the  two ideas together and decided that maybe that somebody had locked off part of my mind for that purpose, which was why I couldn't use it. I  wondered  if there was a way I could check.

"I went to the  ship's  medical  bay  and  plugged  myself  into  the encephelographic screen. I went through every major screening test on both my heads - all the tests I had to  go  through  under  government  medical officers before my nomination for Presidency could be  properly  ratified. They showed up nothing. Nothing unexpected at least. They  showed  that  I was clever, imaginative, irresponsible, untrustworthy, extrovert,  nothing you couldn't have guessed. And no other anomalies. So I started  inventing further tests, completely at random. Nothing. Then I  tried  superimposing the results from one head on top of the results from the other head. Still nothing. Finally I got silly, because I'd given it all up as nothing  more than an attack of paranoia. Last thing I did before I  packed  it  in  was take the superimposed picture and look at it through a green  filter.  You remember I was always superstitious about the color green  when  I  was  a kid? I always wanted to be a pilot on one of the trading scouts?"

Ford nodded.

"And there it was," said Zaphod, "clear as day. A  whole  section  in the middle of both brains that related only  to  each  other  and  not  to anything else around them. Some bastard had cauterized  all  the  synapses and electronically traumatised those two lumps of cerebellum."

Ford stared at him, aghast. Trillian had turned white.

"Somebody did that to you?" whispered Ford.

"Yeah."

"But have you any idea who? Or why?"

"Why? I can only guess. But I do know who the bastard was."

"You know? How do you know?"

"Because they left their initials burnt into the cauterized synapses. They left them there for me to see."

Ford stared at him in horror and felt his skin begin to crawl.

"Initials? Burnt into your brain?"

"Yeah."

"Well, what were they, for God's sake?"

Zaphod looked at him in silence again for a moment.  Then  he  looked away.

"Z.B.," he said.

At that moment a steel shutter  slammed  down  behind  them  and  gas started to pour into the chamber.

"I'll tell you about it later," choked Zaphod  as  all  three  passed out.

21

On the surface of Magrathea Arthur wandered about moodily.

Ford had thoughtfully left him his copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy to while away the time with. He pushed a few buttons at random.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited  book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like  a  good idea at the time.

One of these (the one Arthur now came across) supposedly relates  the experiences of one Veet Voojagig, a quiet young student at the  University of Maximegalon, who pursued a brilliant academic career  studying  ancient philology,  transformational  ethics  and  the  wave  harmonic  theory  of historical perception, and then, after a night of  drinking  Pan  Galactic Gargle Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed  with the problem of what had happened to all the biros  he'd  bought  over  the past few 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. Somewhere in the cosmos,  he  said,  along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, there was also  a planet entirely given over to biro life forms. And it was to  this  planet that unattended biros would make their way, slipping away quietly  through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a  uniquely biroid  lifestyle,  responding  to  highly  biro-oriented   stimuli,   and generally leading the biro equivalent of the good life.

And as theories go this was all very fine  and  pleasant  until  Veet Voojagig 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 was finally sent into tax exile, which is  the  usual  fate  reserved  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 Voojagig 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, however, remain the question of both the mysterious 60,000 Altairan dollars paid yearly into his Brantisvogan bank  account,  and  of course Zaphod Beeblebrox's highly profitable second-hand biro business.

Arthur read this, and put the book down.

The robot still sat there, completely inert.

Arthur got up and walked to the top of the crater. He  walked  around the crater. He watched two suns set magnificently over Magrathea.

He went back down into the crater. He woke the robot up because  even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.

"Night's falling," he said. "Look robot, the stars are coming out."

From the heart of a dark nebula it is possible to see very few stars, and only very faintly, but they were there to be seen.

The robot obediently looked at them, then looked back.

"I know," he said. "Wretched isn't it?"

"But that sunset! I've never seen anything  like  it  in  my  wildest dreams... the two suns! It was like mountains of fire boiling into space."

"I've seen it," said Marvin. "It's rubbish."

"We only ever had the one sun at home," persevered  Arthur,  "I  came from a planet called Earth you know."

"I know," said Marvin, "you keep going on about it. It sounds awful."

"Ah no, it was a beautiful place."

"Did it have oceans?"

"Oh  yes,"  said  Arthur  with  a  sigh,  "great  wide  rolling  blue oceans..."

"Can't bear oceans," said Marvin.

"Tell me," inquired Arthur, "do you get on well with other robots?"

"Hate them," said Marvin. "Where are you going?"

Arthur couldn't bear any more. He had got up again.

"I think I'll just take another walk," he said.

"Don't  blame  you,"  said  Marvin  and  counted  five  hundred   and ninety-seven thousand million sheep before falling asleep again  a  second later.

Arthur slapped his arms about himself to try and get his  circulation a little more enthusiastic about its job. He trudged back up the  wall  of the crater.

Because the atmosphere was so thin and because  there  was  no  moon, nightfall was very rapid and it was by now very  dark.  Because  of  this, Arthur practically walked into the old man before he noticed him.

22

He was standing with his  back  to  Arthur  watching  the  very  last glimmers of light sink into blackness behind the horizon. He was  tallish, elderly and dressed in a single long grey robe. When he  turned  his  face was thin and distinguished, careworn but not unkind, the sort of face  you would happily bank with. But he didn't turn yet,  not  even  to  react  to Arthur's yelp of surprise.

Eventually the last rays of the sun had vanished completely,  and  he turned. His face was still illuminated from  somewhere,  and  when  Arthur looked for the source of the light he saw that a few yards  away  stood  a small craft of some kind - a small hovercraft, Arthur guessed. It  shed  a dim pool of light around it.

The man looked at Arthur, sadly it seemed.

"You choose a cold night to visit our dead planet," he said.

"Who... who are you?" stammered Arthur.

The man looked away. Again a kind of  sadness  seemed  to  cross  his face.

"My name is not important," he said.

He seemed to have something on his  mind.  Conversation  was  clearly something he felt he didn't have to rush at. Arthur felt awkward.

"I... er... you startled me..." he said, lamely.

The man looked round to him again and slightly raised his eyebrows.

"Hmmmm?" he said.

"I said you startled me."

"Do not be alarmed, I will not harm you."

Arthur frowned at him. "But you shot at us! There  were  missiles..." he said.

The man chuckled slightly.

"An automatic system," he  said  and  gave  a  small  sigh.  "Ancient computers ranged in the bowels of the planet tick away the dark millennia, and the ages hang heavy on their dusty data banks. I think they  take  the occasional pot shot to relieve the monotony."

He looked gravely at Arthur and said, "I'm a great fan of science you know."

"Oh... er, really?" said Arthur, who was beginning to find the  man's curious, kindly manner disconcerting.

"Oh, yes," said the old man, and simply stopped talking again.

"Ah," said Arthur, "er..." He had an odd felling of being like a  man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman's  husband  wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks  about  the weather and leaves again.

"You seem ill at ease," said the old man with polite concern.

"Er, no... well, yes. Actually you see, we weren't  really  expecting to find anybody about in fact. I sort of gathered that you were  all  dead or something..."

"Dead?" said the old man. "Good gracious no, we have but slept."

"Slept?" said Arthur incredulously.

"Yes, through the economic recession you  see,"  said  the  old  man, apparently unconcerned about whether  Arthur  understood  a  word  he  was talking about or not.

"Er, economic recession?"

"Well you see, five million years ago the Galactic economy collapsed, and seeing that custom-made planets are something of  a  luxury  commodity you see..."

He paused and looked at Arthur.

"You know we built planets do you?" he asked solemnly.

"Well yes," said Arthur, "I'd sort of gathered..."

"Fascinating trade," said the old man, and a wistful look  came  into his eyes, "doing the coastlines was always  my  favourite.  Used  to  have endless fun doing the little bits in fjords... so anyway," he said  trying to find his thread again, "the recession came and we decided it would save us a lot of bother if we just slept  through  it.  So  we  programmed  the computers to revive us when it was all over."

The man stifled a very slight yawn and continued.

"The computers were index linked to the Galactic stock market  prices you see, so that we'd all be revived when everybody else had  rebuilt  the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services."

Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this.

"That's a pretty unpleasant way to behave isn't it?"

"Is it?" asked the old man mildly. "I'm  sorry,  I'm  a  bit  out  of touch."

He pointed down into the crater.

"Is that robot yours?" he said.

"No," came a thin metallic voice from the crater, "I'm mine."

"If you'd call it a robot," muttered Arthur. "It's  more  a  sort  of electronic sulking machine."

"Bring it," said the old man. Arthur was quite surprised  to  hear  a note of decision suddenly present in the old man's  voice.  He  called  to Marvin who crawled up the slope making a big show of being lame, which  he wasn't.

"On second thoughts," said the old man, "leave it here. You must come with me. Great things are afoot."  He  turned  towards  his  craft  which, though no apparent signal had been given, now drifted quietly towards them through the dark.

Arthur looked down at Marvin, who now made an  equally  big  show  of turning round laboriously and trudging off  down  into  the  crater  again muttering sour nothings to himself.

"Come," called the old man, "come now or you will be late."

"Late?" said Arthur. "What for?"

"What is your name, human?"

"Dent. Arthur Dent," said Arthur.

"Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent," said  the  old  man,  sternly. "It's a sort of threat you see." Another wistful look came into his  tired old eyes. "I've never been very good at them myself, but I'm told they can be very effective."

Arthur blinked at him.

"What an extraordinary person," he muttered to himself.

"I beg your pardon?" said the old man.

"Oh nothing, I'm sorry,"  said  Arthur  in  embarrassment.  "Alright, where do we go?"

"In my aircar," said the old man motioning Arthur  to  get  into  the craft which had settled silently next to them. "We are going deep into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is  being  revived  from  its five-million-year slumber. Magrathea awakes."

Arthur shivered involuntarily as he seated himself next  to  the  old man. The strangeness of it, the silent bobbing movement of the craft as it soared into the night sky quite unsettled him.

He looked at the old man, his face illuminated by the  dull  glow  of tiny lights on the instrument panel.

"Excuse me," he said to him, "what is your name by the way?"

"My name?" said the old man, and the same distant sadness  came  into his face again. He paused. "My name," he said, "... is Slartibartfast."

Arthur practically choked.

"I beg your pardon?" he spluttered.

"Slartibartfast," repeated the old man quietly.

"Slartibartfast?"

The old man looked at him gravely.

"I said it wasn't important," he said.

The aircar sailed through the night.

23

It is an important and popular fact that things are not  always  what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed  that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved  so  much  - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all  the  dolphins  had  ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But  conversely,  the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than  man - for precisely the same reasons.

Curiously enough, the  dolphins  had  long  known  of  the  impending destruction of the planet Earth  and  had  made  many  attempts  to  alert mankind  of  the  danger;  but   most   of   their   communications   were misinterpreted as amusing attempts  to  punch  footballs  or  whistle  for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own  means shortly before the Vogons arrived.

The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted  as  a  surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwardssomersault  through  a  hoop whilst whistling the "Star Sprangled Banner", but in fact the message  was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.

In fact there was only one species on  the  planet  more  intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioural  research laboratories running round  inside  wheels  and  conducting  frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on  man.  The  fact  that  once  again  man completely misinterpreted this  relationship  was  entirely  according  to these creatures' plans.

24

Silently the aircar coasted through the cold darkness, a single  soft glow of light that was utterly alone in the deep Magrathean night. It sped swiftly. Arthur's companion seemed sunk in  his  own  thoughts,  and  when Arthur tried on a couple of occasions to engage him in conversation  again he would simply reply by asking if he was  comfortable  enough,  and  then left it at that.

Arthur tried to gauge the speed at which they  were  travelling,  but the blackness outside was absolute and he was denied any reference points. The sense of motion was so soft and slight he could  almost  believe  they were hardly moving at all.

Then a tiny glow of light appeared in the  far  distance  and  within seconds had grown so much in size that Arthur realized it  was  travelling towards them at a colossal speed, and he tried to make out  what  sort  of craft it might be. He peered at it, but was unable to  discern  any  clear shape, and suddenly gasped in alarm as the  aircraft  dipped  sharply  and headed downwards in what seemed certain to be a  collision  course.  Their relative velocity seemed unbelievable, and Arthur had hardly time to  draw breath before it was all over. The next thing  he  was  aware  of  was  an insane silver blur that seemed  to  surround  him.  He  twisted  his  head sharply round and saw  a  small  black  point  dwindling  rapidly  in  the distance behind them, and it took him several seconds to realize what  had happened.

They had plunged into a tunnel in the ground. The colossal speed  had been their own relative to the glow of light which was a  stationary  hole in the ground, the mouth of the tunnel. The insane blur of silver was  the circular wall of the tunnel down which they were shooting,  apparently  at several hundred miles an hour.

He closed his eyes in terror.

After a length of time which he made no attempt to judge, he sensed a slight subsidence in their speed and some while later  became  aware  that they were gradually gliding to a gentle halt.

He opened his eyes again. They  were  still  in  the  silver  tunnel, threading and weaving their way through what appeared to be  a  crisscross warren of converging tunnels. When they finally stopped it was in a  small chamber of curved steel. Several tunnels also had their terminus here, and at the farther end of the chamber Arthur could see a large circle  of  dim irritating light. It was irritating because  it  played  tricks  with  the eyes, it was impossible to focus on it properly or tell how near or far it was. Arthur guessed (quite wrongly) that it might be ultra violet.

Slartibartfast turned and regarded Arthur with his solemn old eyes.

"Earthman," he said, "we are now deep in the heart of Magrathea."

"How did you know I was an Earthman?" demanded Arthur.

"These things will become clear to you," said the old man gently, "at least," he added with slight doubt in his voice, "clearer than they are at the moment."

He continued: "I should warn you that the chamber  we  are  about  to pass into does not literally exist within  our  planet.  It  is  a  little too... large. We are about to pass through a gateway into a vast tract  of hyperspace. It may disturb you."

Arthur made nervous noises.

Slartibartfast touched a button and added, not entirely reassuringly. "It scares the willies out of me. Hold tight."

The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and  suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.

It  wasn't  infinity  in  fact.  Infinity  itself  looks   flat   and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking  into  infinity  - distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The  chamber  into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very  very big, so that it gave the impression of infinity far better  than  infinity itself.

Arthur's senses bobbed and span, as, travelling at the immense  speed he knew the aircar attained, they climbed  slowly  through  the  open  air leaving the gateway through which they had passed an invisible pinprick in the shimmering wall behind them.

The wall.

The wall defied the imagination - seduced it  and  defeated  it.  The wall was so paralysingly vast and sheer that its  top,  bottom  and  sides passed away beyond the reach of sight. The mere  shock  of  vertigo  could kill a man.

The wall appeared perfectly flat. It  would  take  the  finest  laser measuring equipment to detect that as it climbed, apparently to  infinity, as it dropped dizzily away, as it planed  out  to  either  side,  it  also curved. It met itself again thirteen light seconds away.  In  other  words the wall formed the inside of a hollow sphere, a sphere over three million miles across and flooded with unimaginable light.

"Welcome," said Slartibartfast as the tiny speck that was the aircar, travelling now at three times the  speed  of  sound,  crept  imperceptibly forward into the mindboggling space, "welcome," he said, "to  our  factory floor."

Arthur stared about him in a kind of wonderful  horror.  Ranged  away before them, at distances he could neither judge nor even guess at, were a series of curious suspensions, delicate traceries of metal and light  hung about shadowy spherical shapes that hung in the space.

"This," said Slartibartfast, "is where we make most  of  our  planets you see."

"You mean," said Arthur, trying to form the words, "you  mean  you're starting it all up again now?"

"No no, good heavens no," exclaimed the  old  man,  "no,  the  Galaxy isn't nearly rich enough to support us yet. No,  we've  been  awakened  to perform just one extraordinary commission for very... special clients from another dimension. It may interest you... there in the distance  in  front of us."

Arthur followed the old man's finger, till he was able  to  pick  out the floating structure he was pointing out. It was indeed the only one  of the many structures that betrayed any sign of activity  about  it,  though this was more a sublimal impression than  anything  one  could  put  one's finger on.

At the moment however a flash of light arced  through  the  structure and revealed in stark relief the patterns that were  formed  on  the  dark sphere within. Patterns that Arthur knew, rough blobby shapes that were as familiar to him as the shapes of words, part of the furniture of his mind. For a few seconds he sat in stunned silence as the  images  rushed  around his mind and tried to find somewhere to settle down and make sense.

Part of his brain told him that he knew perfectly well  what  he  was looking at and what the shapes represented whilst another  quite  sensibly refused to countenance the  idea  and  abdicated  responsibility  for  any further thinking in that direction.

The flash came again, and this time there could be no doubt.

"The Earth..." whispered Arthur.

"Well, the Earth Mark Two in fact," said  Slartibartfast  cheerfully. "We're making a copy from our original blueprints."

There was a pause.

"Are you trying to tell me," said Arthur, slowly  and  with  control, "that you originally... made the Earth?"

"Oh yes," said Slartibartfast. "Did you ever go to a place... I think it was called Norway?"

"No," said Arthur, "no, I didn't."

"Pity," said Slartibartfast, "that was one of mine. Won an award  you know.  Lovely  crinkly  edges.  I  was  most  upset  to  hear  about   its destruction."

"You were upset!"

"Yes. Five minutes later and it wouldn't have mattered  so  much.  It was a quite shocking cock-up."

"Huh?" said Arthur.

"The mice were furious."

"The mice were furious?"

"Oh yes," said the old man mildly.

"Yes well  so  I  expect  were  the  dogs  and  cats  and  duckbilled platypuses, but..."

"Ah, but they hadn't paid for it you see, had they?"

"Look," said Arthur, "would it save you a lot of time if I just  gave up and went mad now?"

For a while the aircar flew on in awkward silence. Then the  old  man tried patiently to explain.

"Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned,  paid  for,  and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the  completion  of  the purpose for which it was built, and we've got to build another one."

Only one word registered with Arthur.

"Mice?" he said.

"Indeed Earthman."

"Look, sorry - are we talking about the  little  white  furry  things with the cheese fixation and women standing on tables screaming  in  early sixties sit coms?"

Slartibartfast coughed politely.

"Earthman," he said, "it is sometimes hard to  follow  your  mode  of speech. Remember I have been asleep inside this planet  of  Magrathea  for five million years and know little of these  early  sixties  sit  coms  of which you speak. These creatures you call mice,  you  see,  they  are  not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyperintelligent pandimensional beings. The whole business  with  the cheese and the squeaking is just a front."

The old man paused, and with a sympathetic frown continued.

"They've been experimenting on you I'm afraid."

Arthur thought about this for a second, and then his face cleared.

"Ah no," he said, "I see the source of the misunderstanding now.  No, look you see, what happened was that we used to do  experiments  on  them. They were often used in behavioural research, Pavlov and all that sort  of stuff. So what happened was hat the mice would be set all sorts of  tests, learning to ring bells, run around mazes and  things  so  that  the  whole nature of the learning process could be examined. From our observations of their behaviour we were able to  learn  all  sorts  of  things  about  our own..."

Arthur's voice tailed off.

"Such subtlety..." said Slartibartfast, "one has to admire it."

"What?" said Arthur.

"How better to disguise their real natures, and how better  to  guide your thinking. Suddenly running down a maze  the  wrong  way,  eating  the wrong bit of cheese, unexpectedly dropping dead of myxomatosis, - if  it's finely calculated the cumulative effect is enormous."

He paused for effect.

"You   see,   Earthman,   they   really   are   particularly   clever hyperintelligent pan-dimensional  beings.  Your  planet  and  people  have formed the  matrix  of  an  organic  computer  running  a  tenmillion-year research programme...

"Let me tell you the whole story. It'll take a little time."

"Time," said Arthur weakly, "is not currently one of my problems."

25

There are of course many problems connected with life, of which  some of the most popular are Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do  they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

Many  many  millions  of  years  ago  a  race   of   hyperintelligent pandimensional  beings  (whose  physical  manifestation   in   their   own pan-dimensional universe is not dissimilar to our own) got so fed up  with the constant bickering about the meaning of life which used  to  interrupt their favourite pastime of Brockian Ultra Cricket (a  curious  game  which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason  and  then running away) that they decided to sit down and solve their problems  once and for all.

And to this end they built themselves  a  stupendous  super  computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before  the  data  banks  had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am  and  got  as far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone  managed to turn it off.

It was the size of a small city.

Its main console was installed  in  a  specially  designed  executive office, mounted on an enormous  executive  desk  of  finest  ultramahagony topped with rich ultrared  leather.  The  dark  carpeting  was  discreetly sumptuous, exotic  pot  plants  and  tastefully  engraved  prints  of  the principal computer programmers and their families were deployed  liberally about the room, and stately windows looked out upon  a  tree-lined  public square.

On the day of the Great On-Turning two  soberly  dressed  programmers with brief cases arrived and were shown discreetly into the  office.  They were aware that this day they would represent their  entire  race  in  its greatest moment, but they conducted themselves calmly and quietly as  they seated themselves deferentially before the desk, opened their brief  cases and took out their leather-bound notebooks.

Their names were Lunkwill and Fook.

For a few  moments  they  sat  in  respectful  silence,  then,  after exchanging a quiet glance with Fook, Lunkwill leaned forward and touched a small black panel.

The subtlest of hums indicated that the massive computer was  now  in total active mode. After a pause it spoke to them in a voice rich resonant and deep.

It said: "What is this great task for  which  I,  Deep  Thought,  the second greatest computer in the Universe  of  Time  and  Space  have  been called into existence?"

Lunkwill and Fook glanced at each other in surprise.

"Your task, O Computer..." began Fook.

"No, wait a minute, this isn't right," said  Lunkwill,  worried.  "We distinctly designed this computer to be the greatest one  ever  and  we're not making do with second best. Deep Thought," he addressed the  computer, "are you not as we designed you to be, the greatest most powerful computer in all time?"

"I described myself as the second greatest,"  intoned  Deep  Thought, "and such I am."

Another worried look passed between  the  two  programmers.  Lunkwill cleared his throat.

"There must be some mistake,"  he  said,  "are  you  not  a  greatest computer than the Milliard Gargantubrain which can count all the atoms  in a star in a millisecond?"

"The Milliard Gargantubrain?"  said  Deep  Thought  with  unconcealed contempt. "A mere abacus - mention it not."

"And are you not," said Fook leaning anxiously  forward,  "a  greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh  Galaxy  of  Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the  trajectory  of  every  single  dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?"

"A five-week sand blizzard?" said Deep Thought  haughtily.  "You  ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the  Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."

The two programmers sat in uncomfortable silence for a  moment.  Then Lunkwill leaned forward again.

"But are you not," he said, "a more fiendish disputant than the Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler of Ciceronicus 12, the Magic  and Indefatigable?"

"The Great  Hyperlobic  Omni-Cognate  Neutron  Wrangler,"  said  Deep Thought thoroughly rolling the r's, "could  talk  all  four  legs  off  an Arcturan MegaDonkey - but only I could  persuade  it  to  go  for  a  walk afterwards."

"Then what," asked Fook, "is the problem?"

"There is no problem," said Deep  Thought  with  magnificent  ringing tones. "I am simply the second greatest computer in the Universe of  Space and Time."

"But the second?" insisted Lunkwill. "Why  do  you  keep  saying  the second? You're surely not  thinking  of  the  Multicorticoid  Perspicutron Titan Muller are you? Or the Pondermatic? Or the..."

Contemptuous lights flashed across the computer's console.

"I  spare  not  a  single  unit  of  thought  on   these   cybernetic simpletons!" he boomed. "I speak of none but the computer that is to  come after me!"

Fook was losing patience. He pushed his notebook aside and  muttered, "I think this is getting needlessly messianic."

"You know nothing of future time," pronounced Deep Thought, "and  yet in my teeming circuitry I can  navigate  the  infinite  delta  streams  of future probability and see that there must one day come a  computer  whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but  which  it will be my fate eventually to design."

Fook sighed heavily and glanced across to Lunkwill.

"Can we get on and ask the question?" he said.

Lunkwill motioned him to wait.

"What computer is this of which you speak?" he asked.

"I will speak of it no further  in  this  present  time,"  said  Deep Thought. "Now. Ask what else of me you will that I may function. Speak."

They shrugged at each other. Fook composed himself.

"O Deep Thought Computer," he said, "the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us..." he paused, "...the Answer!"

"The answer?" said Deep Thought. "The answer to what?"

"Life!" urged Fook.

"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.

"Everything!" they said in chorus.

Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.

"Tricky," he said finally.

"But can you do it?"

Again, a significant pause.

"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."

"There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement."

"A simple answer?" added Lunkwill.

"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything.  There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about it."

A sudden commotion destroyed the moment: the door flew open  and  two angry men wearing the coarse faded-blue robes and  belts  of  the  Cruxwan University burst into the room, thrusting aside the  ineffectual  flunkies who tried to bar their way.

"We demand admission!" shouted the younger of the two men elbowing  a pretty young secretary in the throat.

"Come on," shouted the older one, "you can't keep us out!" He  pushed a junior programmer back through the door.

"We demand that you can't keep  us  out!"  bawled  the  younger  one, though he was now firmly inside the room  and  no  further  attempts  were being made to stop him.

"Who are you?" said Lunkwill, rising angrily from his seat. "What  do you want?"

"I am Majikthise!" announced the older one.

"And I demand that I am Vroomfondel!" shouted the younger one.

Majikthise  turned  on  Vroomfondel.  "It's  alright,"  he  explained angrily, "you don't need to demand that."

"Alright!" bawled Vroomfondel  banging  on  an  nearby  desk.  "I  am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand, that  is  a  solid  fact!  What  we demand is solid facts!"

"No we don't!" exclaimed Majikthise in irritation. "That is precisely what we don't demand!"

Scarcely pausing for breath, Vroomfondel shouted,  "We  don't  demand solid facts! What we demand is a total absence of solid  facts.  I  demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!"

"But who the devil are you?" exclaimed an outraged Fook.

"We," said Majikthise, "are Philosophers."

"Though we may not be," said Vroomfondel waving a warning  finger  at the programmers.

"Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are quite definitely  here  as representatives  of  the  Amalgamated  Union   of   Philosophers,   Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine  off,  and we want it off now!"

"What's the problem?" said Lunkwill.

"I'll  tell  you  what  the  problem  is  mate,"   said   Majikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!"

"We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not  be the problem!"

"You just let the  machines  get  on  with  the  adding  up,"  warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities  thank  you  very much. You want to check your legal position you do  mate.  Under  law  the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable  prerogative  of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds  it  and we're straight out of a job aren't we?  I  mean  what's  the  use  of  our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be  a  God  if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding  phone  number  the  next morning?"

"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

Suddenly a stentorian voice boomed across the room.

"Might I make an observation at this point?" inquired Deep Thought.

"We'll go on strike!" yelled Vroomfondel.

"That's  right!"  agreed  Majikthise.   "You'll   have   a   national Philosopher's strike on your hands!"

The hum level in the room suddenly  increased  as  several  ancillary bass driver units,  mounted  in  sedately  carved  and  varnished  cabinet speakers around the room, cut in to give Deep  Thought's  voice  a  little more power.

"All I wanted to say," bellowed the computer, "is  that  my  circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer  to  the  Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything," - he paused and satisfied himself that he now  had  everyone's  attention,  before  continuing  more quietly, "but the programme will take me a little while to run."

Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.

"How long?" he said.

"Seven and a half million years," said Deep Thought.

Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.

"Seven and a half million years!.." they cried in chorus.

"Yes," declaimed Deep Thought, "I said I'd have to  think  about  it, didn't I? And it occurs to me that running a programme like this is  bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the  whole  area  of philosophy in general. Everyone's going to have their own  theories  about what answer I'm eventually to come up with, and who better  to  capitalize on that  media  market  than  you  yourself?  So  long  as  you  can  keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each  other  off in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train  for  life. How does that sound?"

The two philosophers gaped at him.

"Bloody hell," said Majikthise, "now that is what  I  call  thinking. Here Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?"

"Dunno," said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper, "think our brains  must be too highly trained Majikthise."

So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door  and into a lifestyle beyond their wildest dreams.

26

"Yes, very salutary," said Arthur, after Slartibartfast  had  related the salient points of the story to him, "but I don't understand  what  all this has got to do with the Earth and mice and things."

"That is but the first half of the story Earthman," said the old man. "If you would care to discover what happened seven  and  a  half  millions later, on the great day of the Answer, allow me to invite you to my  study where you can experience the events yourself on our  Sens-O-Tape  records. That is unless you would care to take a quick stroll on the surface of New Earth. It's only half completed I'm afraid  -  we  haven't  even  finished burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet, then  we  have the Tertiary and Quarternary Periods of the  Cenozoic  Era  to  lay  down, and..."

"No thank you," said Arthur, "it wouldn't be quite the same."

"No," said Slartibartfast, "it won't be," and he  turned  the  aircar round and headed back towards the mind-numbing wall.

27

Slartibartfast's study was a total  mess,  like  the  results  of  an explosion in a public library. The old man frowned as they stepped in.

"Terribly unfortunate,"  he  said,  "a  diode  blew  in  one  of  the life-support computers. When we tried to  revive  our  cleaning  staff  we discovered they'd been dead for nearly thirty thousand years. Who's  going to clear away the bodies, that's what I want to know. Look why  don't  you sit yourself down over there and let me plug you in?"

He gestured Arthur towards a chair which looked as  if  it  had  been made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus.

"It was made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus," explained the old man as he pottered about fishing bits of wire  out  from  under  tottering piles of paper and drawing instruments. "Here," he said, "hold these," and passed a couple of stripped wire end to Arthur.

The instant he took hold of them a bird flew straight through him.

He was suspended in mid-air and totally invisible to himself. Beneath him was a pretty treelined city square, and all around it as  far  as  the eye could see were white concrete buildings of airy  spacious  design  but somewhat the worse for wear - many were cracked  and  stained  with  rain. Today however the sun was shining, a fresh breeze danced  lightly  through the trees, and the odd sensation  that  all  the  buildings  were  quietly humming was probably caused by the  fact  that  the  square  and  all  the streets around it were thronged with cheerful excited people. Somewhere  a band was playing, brightly coloured flags were fluttering  in  the  breeze and the spirit of carnival was in the air.

Arthur felt extraordinarily lonely stuck up in the air above  it  all without so much as a body to his name, but before he had time  to  reflect on this a voice rang out across  the  square  and  called  for  everyone's attention.

A man standing on a brightly dressed dais before the  building  which clearly dominated the square was addressing the crowd over a Tannoy.

"O people waiting in the Shadow  of  Deep  Thought!"  he  cried  out. "Honoured Descendants of Vroomfondel and Majikthise, the Greatest and Most Truly Interesting Pundits the Universe  has  ever  known...  The  Time  of Waiting is over!"

Wild cheers broke out amongst the crowd. Flags,  streamers  and  wolf whistles sailed through the air. The narrower streets looked  rather  like centipedes rolled over on their backs and frantically waving their legs in the air.

"Seven and a half million years our race has waited  for  this  Great and Hopefully Enlightening Day!" cried the cheer leader. "The Day  of  the Answer!"

Hurrahs burst from the ecstatic crowd.

"Never again," cried the man, "never again will we  wake  up  in  the morning and think Who am I? What is my purpose in life?  Does  it  really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don't get up and go to work? For today we will finally learn once and for all the plain and  simple  answer  to  all these nagging little problems of Life, the Universe and Everything!"

As the crowd erupted once again, Arthur found himself gliding through the air and down towards one of the large stately  windows  on  the  first floor of  the  building  behind  the  dais  from  which  the  speaker  was addressing the crowd.

He experienced a moment's panic as he sailed straight through towards the window, which passed when a second or so later he found  he  had  gone right through the solid glass without apparently touching it.

No one in the room remarked on his peculiar arrival, which is  hardly surprising as he  wasn't  there.  He  began  to  realize  that  the  whole experience was  merely  a  recorded  projection  which  knocked  six-track seventy-millimetre into a cocked hat.

The room was much as Slartibartfast had described it. In seven and  a half million years it had been well looked  after  and  cleaned  regularly every century or so. The ultramahagony desk was worn  at  the  edges,  the carpet a little  faded  now,  but  the  large  computer  terminal  sat  in sparkling glory on the desk's leather top, as bright as  if  it  had  been constructed yesterday.

Two severely dressed men sat respectfully  before  the  terminal  and waited.

"The time is nearly upon us," said one, and Arthur was  surprised  to see a word suddenly materialize in thin air just by the  man's  neck.  The word was Loonquawl, and it flashed a couple of times and  the  disappeared again. Before Arthur was able to assimilate this the other man  spoke  and the word Phouchg appeared by his neck.

"Seventy-five  thousand  generations  ago,  our  ancestors  set  this program in motion," the second man said, "and in all that time we will  be the first to hear the computer speak."

"An awesome prospect, Phouchg," agreed  the  first  man,  and  Arthur suddenly realized that he was watching a recording with subtitles.

"We are the ones who will hear," said Phouchg,  "the  answer  to  the great question of Life!.."

"The Universe!.." said Loonquawl.

"And Everything!.."

"Shhh," said Loonquawl with a slight gesture, "I think  Deep  Thought is preparing to speak!"

There was a moment's expectant pause whilst  panels  slowly  came  to life on the front of the console. Lights flashed on and off experimentally and settled down into a businesslike pattern. A soft low hum came from the communication channel.

"Good morning," said Deep Thought at last.

"Er... Good morning, O Deep Thought," said Loonquawl  nervously,  "do you have... er, that is..."

"An answer for you?" interrupted Deep Thought majestically.  "Yes.  I have."

The two men shivered with expectancy. Their waiting had not  been  in vain.

"There really is one?" breathed Phouchg.

"There really is one," confirmed Deep Thought.

"To Everything? To the great  Question  of  Life,  the  Universe  and Everything?"

"Yes."

Both of the men had been trained for this  moment,  their  lives  had been a preparation for it, they had been selected at birth  as  those  who would witness the answer, but even so they found  themselves  gasping  and squirming like excited children.

"And you're ready to give it to us?" urged Loonquawl.

"I am."

"Now?"

"Now," said Deep Thought.

They both licked their dry lips.

"Though I don't think," added Deep Thought,  "that  you're  going  to like it."

"Doesn't matter!" said Phouchg. "We must know it! Now!"

"Now?" inquired Deep Thought.

"Yes! Now..."

"Alright," said the computer and settled into silence again. The  two men fidgeted. The tension was unbearable.

"You're really not going to like it," observed Deep Thought.

"Tell us!"

"Alright," said Deep Thought. "The Answer to the Great Question..."

"Yes!.."

"Of Life, the Universe and Everything..." said Deep Thought.

"Yes!.."

"Is..." said Deep Thought, and paused.

"Yes!.."

"Is..."

"Yes!!!?.."

"Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

28

It was a long time before anyone spoke.

Out of the corner of his eye Phouchg  could  see  the  sea  of  tense expectant faces down in the square outside.

"We're going to get lynched aren't we?" he whispered.

"It was a tough assignment," said Deep Thought mildly.

"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got  to  show  for seven and a half million years' work?"

"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer,  "and  that  quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to  be  quite  honest  with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

"But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question  of  Life,  the Universe and Everything!" howled Loonquawl.

"Yes," said Deep Thought with  the  air  of  one  who  suffers  fools gladly, "but what actually is it?"

A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as  they  stared  at  the computer and then at each other.

"Well, you  know,  it's  just  Everything...  Everything..."  offered Phouchg weakly.

"Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the  question actually is, you'll know what the answer means."

"Oh terrific," muttered  Phouchg  flinging  aside  his  notebook  and wiping away a tiny tear.

"Look, alright, alright," said Loonquawl, "can you just  please  tell us the Question?"

"The Ultimate Question?"

"Yes!"

"Of Life, the Universe, and Everything?"

"Yes!"

Deep Thought pondered this for a moment.

"Tricky," he said.

"But can you do it?" cried Loonquawl.

Deep Thought pondered this for another long moment.

Finally: "No," he said firmly.

Both men collapsed on to their chairs in despair.

"But I'll tell you who can," said Deep Thought.

They both looked up sharply.

"Who?" "Tell us!"

Suddenly Arthur began to feel his apparently non-existent scalp begin to crawl as he found himself moving slowly but inexorably forward  towards the console, but it was only a dramatic zoom on the part  of  whoever  had made the recording he assumed.

"I speak of none other than the computer that is to come  after  me," intoned Deep Thought,  his  voice  regaining  its  accustomed  declamatory tones. "A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy  to calculate - and yet I will  design  it  for  you.  A  computer  which  can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself  shall  form  part  of  its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year program! Yes!  I  shall design this computer for you. And I shall name it also unto  you.  And  it shall be called... The Earth."

Phouchg gaped at Deep Thought.

"What a dull name," he said and great  incisions  appeared  down  the length of his body. Loonquawl too suddenly sustained horrific gashed  from nowhere. The Computer console blotched and cracked,  the  walls  flickered and crumbled and the room crashed upwards into its own ceiling...

Slartibartfast was standing in front of Arthur holding the two wires.

"End of the tape," he explained.

29

"Zaphod! Wake up!"

"Mmmmmwwwwwerrrrr?"

"Hey come on, wake up."

"Just let me stick to what I'm good at, yeah?"  muttered  Zaphod  and rolled away from the voice back to sleep.

"Do you want me to kick you?" said Ford.

"Would it give you a lot of pleasure?" said Zaphod, blearily.

"No."

"Nor me. So what's the point? Stop bugging me." Zaphod curled himself up.

"He got a double dose of the gas," said Trillian looking down at him, "two windpipes."

"And stop talking," said Zaphod, "it's hard enough  trying  to  sleep anyway. What's the matter with the ground? It's all cold and hard."

"It's gold," said Ford.

With an amazingly balletic movement Zaphod was standing and  scanning the horizon, because that was how far the gold ground stretched  in  every direction, perfectly smooth and solid. It gleamed like... it's  impossible to say what it gleamed like because nothing  in  the  Universe  gleams  in quite the same way that a planet of solid gold does.

"Who put all that there?" yelped Zaphod, goggle-eyed.

"Don't get excited," said Ford, "it's only a catalogue."

"A who?"

"A catalogue," said Trillian, "an illusion."

"How can you say that?" cried Zaphod, falling to his hands and  knees and staring at the ground. He poked it and prodded it with his fingernail. It was very heavy and very slightly soft -  he  could  mark  it  with  his fingernail. It was very yellow and very shiny, and when he breathed on  it his breath evaporated off it in that very peculiar and  special  way  that breath evaporates off solid gold.

"Trillian and I came round a while ago," said Ford. "We  shouted  and yelled till somebody came and then carried on shouting  and  yelling  till they got fed up and put us in their planet catalogue to keep us busy  till they were ready to deal with us. This is all Sens-O-Tape."

Zaphod stared at him bitterly.

"Ah, shit," he said, "you wake me up from my own perfectly good dream to show me somebody else's." He sat down in a huff.

"What's that series of valleys over there?" he said.

"Hallmark," said Ford. "We had a look."

"We didn't wake you earlier," said Trillian.  "The  last  planet  was knee deep in fish."

"Fish?"

"Some people like the oddest things."

"And before that," said Ford, "we had platinum. Bit dull. We  thought you'd like to see this one though."

Seas of light glared at them in one solid blaze wherever they looked.

"Very pretty," said Zaphod petulantly.

In the sky a huge green catalogue number appeared. It  flickered  and changed, and when they looked around again so had the land.

As with one voice they all went, "Yuch."

The sea was purple. The beach they  were  on  was  composed  of  tiny yellow and green  pebbles  -  presumably  terribly  precious  stones.  The mountains in the distance seemed  soft  and  undulating  with  red  peaks. Nearby stood a solid silver beach table with a frilly  mauve  parasol  and silver tassles.

In the sky a huge sign appeared, replacing the catalogue  number.  It said, Whatever your tastes, Magrathea can cater for you. We are not proud.

And five hundred entirely naked women  dropped  out  of  the  sky  on parachutes.

In a moment the scene vanished and left them in a  springtime  meadow full of cows.

"Ow!" said Zaphod. "My brains!"

"You want to talk about it?" said Ford.

"Yeah, OK," said Zaphod, and all  three  sat  down  and  ignored  the scenes that came and went around them.

"I figure this," said Zaphod. "Whatever happened to my  mind,  I  did it. And I did it in such a  way  that  it  wouldn't  be  detected  by  the government screening tests. And I wasn't to know anything about it myself. Pretty crazy, right?"

The other two nodded in agreement.

"So I reckon, what's so secret that I can't let anybody know  I  know it, not the Galactic Government, not even myself?  And  the  answer  is  I don't know. Obviously. But I put a few things together and I can begin  to guess. When did I decide to run for President? Shortly after the death  of President Yooden Vranx. You remember Yooden, Ford?"

"Yeah," said Ford, "he was that guy we met when  we  were  kids,  the Arcturan captain. He was a gas. He gave us conkers when you bust your  way into his megafreighter. Said you were the most amazing kid he'd ever met."

"What's all this?" said Trillian.

"Ancient  history,"  said  Ford,  "when  we  were  kids  together  on Betelgeuse. The Arcturan megafreighters used to carry most  of  the  bulky trade between the Galactic Centre and the outlying regions The  Betelgeuse trading scouts used to find the markets and  the  Arcturans  would  supply them. There was a lot of trouble with space pirates before they were wiped out in the Dordellis wars, and the megafreighters had to be equipped  with the most fantastic defence shields known to Galactic  science.  They  were real brutes of ships, and huge. In orbit round a planet they would eclipse the sun.

"One day, young Zaphod here decides to raid one. On a tri-jet scooter designed for stratosphere work, a mere kid.  I  mean  forget  it,  it  was crazier than a mad monkey. I went along for the ride because I'd got  some very safe money on him not doing it, and didn't want him coming back  with fake evidence. So what happens? We got in his tri-jet which he had  souped up into something totally other, crossed three  parsecs  in  a  matter  of weeks, bust our way into a megafreighter I still don't know  how,  marched on to the bridge waving toy pistols and demanded conkers. A wilder thing I have not known. Lost me a year's pocket money. For what? Conkers."

"The captain was this really amazing guy, Yooden Vranx," said Zaphod. "He gave us food, booze - stuff from really weird parts of  the  Galaxy  - lots of conkers of course, and we had just the most incredible time.  Then he teleported us back. Into the maximum security wing of Betelgeuse  state prison. He was a cool guy. Went on to become President of the Galaxy."

Zaphod paused.

The scene around them was currently plunged into  gloom.  Dark  mists swirled round them and  elephantine  shapes  lurked  indistinctly  in  the shadows. The air was occasionally rent with the sounds of illusory  beings murdering other illusory beings. Presumably enough people must have  liked this sort of thing to make it a paying proposition.

"Ford," said Zaphod quietly.

"Yeah?"

"Just before Yooden died he came to see me."

"What? You never told me."

"No."

"What did he say? What did he come to see you about?"

"He told me about the Heart of Gold. It was his idea  that  I  should steal it."

"His idea?"

"Yeah," said Zaphod, "and the only possible way of stealing it was to be at the launching ceremony."

Ford gaped at him in astonishment for a moment, and then roared  with laughter.

"Are you telling me," he said, "that you set yourself  up  to  become President of the Galaxy just to steal that ship?"

"That's it," said Zaphod with the sort of grin that  would  get  most people locked away in a room with soft walls.

"But why?" said Ford. "What's so important about having it?"

"Dunno," said Zaphod, "I think if I'd consciously known what  was  so important about it and what I would need it for it would have showed up on the brain screening tests and I would never have passed.  I  think  Yooden told me a lot of things that are still locked away."

"So you think you went and mucked about inside your own  brain  as  a result of Yooden talking to you?"

"He was a hell of a talker."

"Yeah, but Zaphod old mate, you  want  to  look  after  yourself  you know."

Zaphod shrugged.

"I mean, don't you have any inkling of the  reasons  for  all  this?" asked Ford.

Zaphod thought hard about this and doubts seemed to cross his minds.

"No," he said at last, "I don't seem to be letting myself into any of my secrets. Still," he added on  further  reflection,  "I  can  understand that. I wouldn't trust myself further than I could spit a rat."

A moment later, the  last  planet  in  the  catalogue  vanished  from beneath them and the solid world resolved itself again.

They were sitting in a plush waiting room full  of  glass-top  tables and design awards.

A tall Magrathean man was standing in front of them.

"The mice will see you now," he said.

30

"So there you have it," said  Slartibartfast,  making  a  feeble  and perfunctory attempt to clear away some of the appalling mess of his study. He picked up a paper from the top of a pile, but then  couldn't  think  of anywhere else to put it, so he but it back on top  of  the  original  pile which promptly fell over. "Deep Thought designed the Earth,  we  built  it and you lived on it."

"And the Vogons came and destroyed it five minutes before the program was completed," added Arthur, not unbitterly.

"Yes," said the old man, pausing to gaze hopelessly round  the  room. "Ten million years of planning and work gone just like that.  Ten  million years, Earthman... can you conceive of that kind of time span? A  galactic civilization could grow from a single worm five times over in  that  time. Gone." He paused.

"Well that's bureaucracy for you," he added.

"You know," said Arthur thoughtfully, "all this  explains  a  lot  of things. All through my life I've had this  strange  unaccountable  feeling that something was going on in the world, something  big,  even  sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."

"No," said the old  man,  "that's  just  perfectly  normal  paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that."

"Everyone?" said Arthur. "Well, if everyone has that perhaps it means something! Perhaps somewhere outside the Universe we know..."

"Maybe.  Who  cares?"  said  Slartibartfast  before  Arthur  got  too excited. "Perhaps I'm old and tired," he continued, "but  I  always  think that the chances of finding out what really is going on  are  so  absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it  and  just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I  got  an  award for Norway."

He rummaged around in a pile of debris and pulled out a large perspex block with his name on it and a model of Norway moulded into it.

"Where's the sense in that?" he said. "None that I've  been  able  to make out. I've been doing fjords in all my life.  For  a  fleeting  moment they become fashionable and I get a major award."

He turned it over in his hands with  a  shrug  and  tossed  it  aside carelessly, but not so carelessly that it didn't land on something soft.

"In this replacement Earth we're building they've given me Africa  to do and of course I'm doing it with all fjords again because  I  happen  to like them, and I'm old fashioned enough to think that they give  a  lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it's not equatorial  enough. Equatorial!" He gave a hollow laugh. "What does  it  matter?  Science  has achieved some wonderful things of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day."

"And are you?"

"No. That's where it all falls down of course."

"Pity," said Arthur with sympathy. "It  sounded  like  quite  a  good lifestyle otherwise."

Somewhere on the wall a small white light flashed.

"Come," said Slartibartfast, "you are to meet the mice. Your  arrival on the planet has caused considerable  excitement.  It  has  already  been hailed, so I gather, as the third most improbable event in the history  of the Universe."

"What were the first two?"

"Oh, probably just coincidences," said Slartibartfast carelessly.  He opened the door and stood waiting for Arthur to follow.

Arthur glanced around him once more, and then down at himself, at the sweaty dishevelled clothes he had been lying in the  mud  in  on  Thursday morning.

"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty  with  my  lifestyle,"  he muttered to himself.

"I beg your pardon?" said the old man mildly.

"Oh nothing," said Arthur, "only joking."

31

It is of course well known that careless talk costs  lives,  but  the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that  Arthur  said  "I  seem  to  be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle," a freak  wormhole  opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a  distant  Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on  the  brink  of  frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the  commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled  battle  shorts,  gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite  him  in  a  cloud  of green sweet-smelling  steam,  and,  with  a  million  sleek  and  horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death  at  his  single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take  back  what  it  had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that  very moment the words I  seem  to  be  having  tremendous  difficulty  with  my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg  tongue  this  was  the  most  dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage  terrible  war for centuries.

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been  decimated  over  a few thousand years, it was realized  that  the  whole  thing  had  been  a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled  their  few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own  Galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years the  mighty  ships  tore  across  the  empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the  first  planet  they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where  due  to  a  terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Those who study the complex interplay of  cause  and  effect  in  the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going  on  all  the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.

"It's just life," they say.

A short aircar trip brought  Arthur  and  the  old  Magrathean  to  a doorway. They left the car and went through the door into a  waiting  room full of glass-topped tables and  perspex  awards.  Almost  immediately,  a light flashed above the door at the  other  side  of  the  room  and  they entered.

"Arthur! You're safe!" a voice cried.

"Am I?" said Arthur, rather startled. "Oh good."

The lighting was rather subdued and it took him a moment or so to see Ford, Trillian and Zaphod sitting round a large table  beautifully  decked out with exotic dishes, strange sweetmeats and bizarre fruits.  They  were stuffing their faces.

"What happened to you?" demanded Arthur.

"Well," said Zaphod, attacking a  boneful  of  grilled  muscle,  "our guests here have been gassing us and zapping our minds and being generally weird and have now given us a rather nice meal to make it up to us. Here," he said hoiking out a lump of evil smelling meat from a bowl,  "have  some Vegan Rhino's cutlet. It's delicious if you happen to like  that  sort  of thing."

"Hosts?" said Arthur. "What hosts? I don't see any..."

A small voice said, "Welcome to lunch, Earth creature."

Arthur glanced around and suddenly yelped.

"Ugh!" he said. "There are mice on the table!"

There was an awkward silence as everyone looked pointedly at Arthur.

He was busy staring at two white mice sitting  in  what  looked  like whisky glasses on the table. He heard the silence and  glanced  around  at everyone.

"Oh!" he said, with sudden realization.  "Oh,  I'm  sorry,  I  wasn't quite prepared for..."

"Let me introduce you," said Trillian. "Arthur this is Benji mouse."

"Hi," said one of the mice. His whiskers stroked what must have  been a touch sensitive panel on the inside of the whisky-glass like affair, and it moved forward slightly.

"And this is Frankie mouse."

The other mouse said, "Pleased to meet you," and did likewise.

Arthur gaped.

"But aren't they..."

"Yes," said Trillian, "they are the mice I brought with me  from  the Earth."

She looked him in the eye and Arthur thought he detected the  tiniest resigned shrug.

"Could you pass me that bowl  of  grated  Arcturan  Megadonkey?"  she said.

Slartibartfast coughed politely.

"Er, excuse me," he said.

"Yes, thank you Slartibartfast," said Benji mouse sharply,  "you  may go."

"What? Oh... er, very well," said the old man, slightly taken  aback, "I'll just go and get on with some of my fjords then."

"Ah, well in fact that won't be necessary," said Frankie  mouse.  "It looks very much as if we won't be needing the new Earth  any  longer."  He swivelled his pink little eyes. "Not now that we have found  a  native  of the planet who was there seconds before it was destroyed."

"What?" cried Slartibartfast, aghast. "You can't mean that! I've  got a thousand glaciers poised and ready to roll over Africa!"

"Well perhaps  you  can  take  a  quick  skiing  holiday  before  you dismantle them," said Frankie, acidly.

"Skiing holiday!" cried the old man. "Those  glaciers  are  works  of art!  Elegantly  sculptured  contours,  soaring  pinnacles  of  ice,  deep majestic ravines! It would be sacrilege to go skiing on high art!"

"Thank you Slartibartfast," said Benji firmly. "That will be all."

"Yes sir," said the old man  coldly,  "thank  you  very  much.  Well, goodbye Earthman," he said to Arthur, "hope the lifestyle comes together."

With a brief nod to the rest of the  company  he  turned  and  walked sadly out of the room.

Arthur stared after him not knowing what to say.

"Now," said Benji mouse, "to business."

Ford and Zaphod clinked their glasses together.

"To business!" they said.

"I beg your pardon?" said Benji.

Ford looked round.

"Sorry, I thought you were proposing a toast," he said.

The two mice scuttled impatiently around in their  glass  transports. Finally they composed themselves,  and  Benji  moved  forward  to  address Arthur.

"Now, Earth creature," he said, "the situation we have in  effect  is this. We have, as you know, been more or less running your planet for  the last ten million years in order to find this  wretched  thing  called  the Ultimate Question."

"Why?" said Arthur, sharply.

"No - we already thought of that  one,"  said  Frankie  interrupting, "but it doesn't fit the answer. Why? - Forty-Two... you  see,  it  doesn't work."

"No," said Arthur, "I mean why have you been doing it?"

"Oh, I see," said Frankie. "Well, eventually just habit I  think,  to be brutally honest. And this is more or less the point - we're sick to the teeth with the whole thing, and the prospect of doing it all over again on account  of  those  whinnet-ridden  Vogons  quite  frankly  gives  me  the screaming heeby jeebies, you know what I mean? It was by the merest  lucky chance that Benji and I finished our particular job and  left  the  planet early for a quick holiday, and have since  manipulated  our  way  back  to Magrathea by the good offices of your friends."

"Magrathea is a gateway back to our own dimension," put in Benji.

"Since when," continued his murine colleague, "we have had  an  offer of a quite enormously fat contract to do the  5D  chat  show  and  lecture circuit back in our own dimensional neck of the woods, and we're very much inclined to take it."

"I would, wouldn't you Ford?" said Zaphod promptingly.

"Oh yes," said Ford, "jump at it, like a shot."

Arthur glanced at them, wondering what all this was leading up to.

"But we've got to have a product you  see,"  said  Frankie,  "I  mean ideally we still need the Ultimate Question in some form or other."

Zaphod leaned forward to Arthur.

"You see," he said, "if they're just  sitting  there  in  the  studio looking very relaxed and, you know, just mentioning that  they  happen  to know the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, and then  eventually have to admit that in fact it's Forty-two, then the show's probably  quite short. No follow-up, you see."

"We have to have something that sounds good," said Benji.

"Something that sounds good?" exclaimed Arthur. "An Ultimate Question that sounds good? From a couple of mice?"

The mice bristled.

"Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of  pure  research,  yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm  afraid where you begin to suspect that if there's any real truth, it's  that  the entire multi-dimensional infinity of  the  Universe  is  almost  certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if  it  comes  to  a  choice  between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the  other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do  with  the exercise," said Frankie.

"But..." started Arthur, hopelessly.

"Hey, will you get this, Earthman," interrupted Zaphod.  "You  are  a last generation product of that computer matrix, right, and you were there right up to the moment your planet got the finger, yeah?"

"Er..."

"So your brain was an organic part of the  penultimate  configuration of the computer programme," said Ford, rather lucidly he thought.

"Right?" said Zaphod.

"Well," said Arthur doubtfully. He wasn't aware of ever  having  felt an organic part of anything. He  had  always  seen  this  as  one  of  his problems.

"In other words," said Benji, steering  his  curious  little  vehicle right over to Arthur, "there's a good chance that  the  structure  of  the question is encoded in the structure of your brain - so we want to buy  it off you."

"What, the question?" said Arthur.

"Yes," said Ford and Trillian.

"For lots of money," said Zaphod.

"No, no," said Frankie, "it's the brain we want to buy."

"What!"

"I thought you said you could just read  his  brain  electronically," protested Ford.

"Oh yes," said Frankie, "but we'd have to get it out first. It's  got to be prepared."

"Treated," said Benji.

"Diced."

"Thank you," shouted Arthur, tipping up his chair  and  backing  away from the table in horror.

"It could always be replaced," said Benji reasonably, "if  you  think it's important."

"Yes, an  electronic  brain,"  said  Frankie,  "a  simple  one  would suffice."

"A simple one!" wailed Arthur.

"Yeah," said Zaphod with a sudden evil  grin,  "you'd  just  have  to program it to say What? and I don't understand  and  Where's  the  tea?  - who'd know the difference?"

"What?" cried Arthur, backing away still further.

"See what I mean?" said  Zaphod  and  howled  with  pain  because  of something that Trillian did at that moment.

"I'd notice the difference," said Arthur.

"No you wouldn't," said Frankie mouse, "you'd be programmed not to."

Ford made for the door.

"Look, I'm sorry, mice old lads," he said. "I don't think we've got a deal."

"I rather think we have to have a deal," said the mice in chorus, all the charm vanishing fro their piping little voices in an instant.  With  a tiny whining shriek their two glass transports lifted themselves  off  the table, and swung through the air  towards  Arthur,  who  stumbled  further backwards into a  blind  corner,  utterly  unable  to  cope  or  think  of anything.

Trillian grabbed him desperately by the arm and  tried  to  drag  him towards the door, which Ford and  Zaphod  were  struggling  to  open,  but Arthur was dead weight - he seemed  hypnotized  by  the  airborne  rodents swooping towards him.

She screamed at him, but he just gaped.

With one more yank, Ford and Zaphod got the door open. On  the  other side of it was a small pack of rather ugly men who they could only  assume were the heavy mob of Magrathea. Not only were they ugly  themselves,  but the medical equipment they carried with them was  also  far  from  pretty. They charged.

So - Arthur was about to have his head cut open, Trillian was  unable to help him, and Ford and Zaphod were about to  be  set  upon  by  several thugs a great deal heavier and more sharply armed than they were.

All in all it was extremely fortunate that at that moment every alarm on the planet burst into an earsplitting din.

32

"Emergency! Emergency!"  blared  the  klaxons  throughout  Magrathea. "Hostile ship has landed on planet. Armed intruders in section 8A. Defence stations, defence stations!"

The two mice sniffed irritably round the  fragments  of  their  glass transports where they lay shattered on the floor.

"Damnation," muttered Frankie mouse, "all that fuss over  two  pounds of Earthling brain." He scuttled round and about, his pink eyes  flashing, his fine white coat bristling with static.

"The only thing we can do now," said Benji,  crouching  and  stroking his whiskers in thought, "is to try and fake a question, invent  one  that will sound plausible."

"Difficult," said Frankie. He thought. "How about What's  yellow  and dangerous?"

Benji considered this for a moment.

"No, no good," he said. "Doesn't fit the answer."

They sank into silence for a few seconds.

"Alright," said Benji. "What do  you  get  if  you  multiply  six  by seven?"

"No, no, too literal, too factual," said Frankie,  "wouldn't  sustain the punters' interest."

Again they thought.

Then Frankie said: "Here's a thought. How many roads must a man  walk down?"

"Ah," said Benji. "Aha, now that does sound promising!" He rolled the phrase around a little. "Yes," he said,  "that's  excellent!  Sounds  very significant without actually tying you down to meaning  anything  at  all. How many roads must a man  walk  down?  Forty-two.  Excellent,  excellent, that'll fox 'em. Frankie baby, we are made!"

They performed a scampering dance in their excitement.

Near them on the floor lay several rather ugly men who had  been  hit about the head with some heavy design awards.

Half a mile away, four figures pounded up a corridor  looking  for  a way out. They emerged into a wide open-plan  computer  bay.  They  glanced about wildly.

"Which way do you reckon Zaphod?" said Ford.

"At a wild guess, I'd say down here," said Zaphod, running  off  down to the right between a computer bank and the wall. As the  others  started after him he was brought up short by a Kill-O-Zap energy bolt that cracked through the air inches in front of  him  and  fried  a  small  section  of adjacent wall.

A voice on a loud hailer said, "OK Beeblebrox, hold it  right  there. We've got you covered."

"Cops!" hissed Zaphod, and span around in a crouch. "You want to  try a guess at all, Ford?"

"OK, this way," said Ford, and the four of them ran  down  a  gangway between two computer banks.

At the end of the gangway appeared a heavily armoured and spacesuited figure waving a vicious Kill-O-Zap gun.

"We don't want to shoot you, Beeblebrox!" shouted the figure.

"Suits me fine!" shouted Zaphod  back  and  dived  down  a  wide  gap between two data process units.

The others swerved in behind him.

"There are two of them," said Trillian. "We're cornered."

They squeezed themselves down in an angle between  a  large  computer data bank and the wall.

They held their breath and waited.

Suddenly the air exploded with energy bolts as both the  cops  opened fire on them simultaneously.

"Hey, they're shooting at us," said  Arthur,  crouching  in  a  tight ball, "I thought they said they didn't want to do that."

"Yeah, I thought they said that," agreed Ford.

Zaphod stuck a head up for a dangerous moment.

"Hey," he said, "I thought you said you didn't want to shoot us!" and ducked again.

They waited.

After a moment a voice replied, "It isn't easy being a cop!"

"What did he say?" whispered Ford in astonishment.

"He said it isn't easy being a cop."

"Well surely that's his problem isn't it?"

"I'd have thought so."

Ford shouted out, "Hey listen! I think we've got enough  problems  on our own having you shooting at us, so  if  you  could  avoid  laying  your problems on us as well, I think we'd all find it easier to cope!"

Another pause, and then the loud hailer again.

"Now see here, guy," said the voice on the loud hailer,  "you're  not dealing with any dumb two-bit trigger-pumping morons with  low  hairlines, little piggy eyes and no  conversation,  we're  a  couple  of  intelligent caring guys that you'd probably quite like if you met us socially! I don't go  around  gratuitously  shooting  people  and  then  bragging  about  it afterwards in seedy space-rangers bars, like some cops I could mention!  I go around shooting  people  gratuitously  and  then  I  agonize  about  it afterwards for hours to my girlfriend!"

"And I write novels!" chimed in the other cop. "Though I haven't  had any of them published yet, so I better warn you, I'm in a meeeean mood!"

Ford's eyes popped halfway out  of  their  sockets.  "Who  are  these guys?" he said.

"Dunno," said  Zaphod,  "I  think  I  preferred  it  when  they  were shooting."

"So are you going to come quietly," shouted one of  the  cops  again, "or are you going to let us blast you out?"

"Which would you prefer?" shouted Ford.

A millisecond later the air about them started to fry again, as  bolt after bolt of Kill-O-Zap hurled itself into the computer bank in front  of them.

The fusillade continued for several seconds at unbearable intensity.

When it stopped, there were a few seconds of near  quietness  ad  the echoes died away.

"You still there?" called one of the cops.

"Yes," they called back.

"We didn't enjoy doing that at all," shouted the other cop.

"We could tell," shouted Ford.

"Now, listen to this, Beeblebrox, and you better listen good!"

"Why?" shouted Back Zaphod.

"Because," shouted the cop, "it's going to be very  intelligent,  and quite interesting and humane! Now either you all give  yourselves  up  now and let us beat you up a bit, though not very much of  course  because  we are firmly opposed to needless violence, or we blow up this entire  planet and possibly one or two others we noticed on our way out here!"

"But that's crazy!" cried Trillian. "You wouldn't do that!"

"Oh yes we would," shouted the cop, "wouldn't we?" he asked the other one.

"Oh yes, we'd have to, no question," the other one called back.

"But why?" demanded Trillian.

"Because there are some things you have to do  even  if  you  are  an enlightened liberal cop who knows all about sensitivity and everything!"

"I just don't believe these guys," muttered Ford, shaking his head.

One cop shouted to the other, "Shall we shoot them again for a bit?"

"Yeah, why not?"

They let fly another electric barrage.

The heat and noise was quite fantastic. Slowly, the computer bank was beginning to disintegrate. The front had almost all melted away, and thick rivulets of molten metal were winding their way back  towards  where  they were squatting. They huddled further back and waited for the end.

33

But the end never came, at least not then.

Quite suddenly the barrage stopped, and the sudden silence afterwards was punctuated by a couple of strangled gurgles and thuds.

The four stared at each other.

"What happened?" said Arthur.

"They stopped," said Zaphod with a shrug.

"Why?"

"Dunno, do you want to go and ask them?"

"No."

They waited.

"Hello?" called out Ford.

No answer.

"That's odd."

"Perhaps it's a trap."

"They haven't the wit."

"What were those thuds?"

"Dunno."

They waited for a few more seconds.

"Right," said Ford, "I'm going to have a look."

He glanced round at the others.

"Is no one going to say, No you can't possibly, let me go instead?"

They all shook their heads.

"Oh well," he said, and stood up.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen. Ford  peered through the thick smoke that was billowing out of the burning computer.

Cautiously he stepped out into the open.

Still nothing happened.

Twenty  yards  away  he  could  dimly  see  through  the  smoke   the space-suited figure of one of the cops. He was lying in a crumpled heap on the ground. Twenty yards in the other direction lay the second man. No one else was anywhere to be seen.

This struck Ford as being extremely odd.

Slowly, nervously, he walked towards the  first  one.  The  body  lay reassuringly still as he approached it, and continued to lie  reassuringly still as he reached it and put his foot down on the  Kill-O-Zap  gun  that still dangled from its limp fingers.

He reached down and picked it up, meeting no resistance.

The cop was quite clearly dead.

A quick examination revealed him to be from Blagulon Kappa - he was a methane-breathing life form, dependent on his space suit for  survival  in the thin oxygen atmosphere of Magrathea.

The tiny  life-support  system  computer  on  his  backpack  appeared unexpectedly to have blown up.

Ford poked around in it in considerable astonishment. These miniature suit computers usually had the full back-up of the main computer  back  on the ship, with which they were directly linked through the sub-etha.  Such a system was fail-safe in all  circumstances  other  than  total  feedback malfunction, which was unheard of.

He hurried over to  the  other  prone  figure,  and  discovered  that exactly  the  same  impossible  thing  had  happened  to  him,  presumably simultaneously.

He  called  the  others  over  to  look.  They   came,   shared   his astonishment, but not his curiosity.

"Let's get shot out of this hole,"  said  Zaphod.  "If  whatever  I'm supposed to be looking for is here, I  don't  want  it."  He  grabbed  the second Kill-O-Zap gun, blasted a perfectly  harmless  accounting  computer and rushed out into the corridor, followed by the others. He  very  nearly blasted hell out of an aircar that stood waiting  for  them  a  few  yards away.

The aircar was empty,  but  Arthur  recognized  it  as  belonging  to Slartibartfast.

It had a note from him pinned to part of its sparse instrument panel. The note had an arrow drawn on it, pointing at one of the controls.

It said, This is probably the best button to press.

34

The aircar rocketed them at speeds in excess of R17 through the steel tunnels that lead out onto the appalling surface of the planet  which  was now in the grip of yet another drear morning twilight. Ghastly grey lights congealed on the land.

R is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental wellbeing and not being  more  than  say five minutes late. It is therefore clearly an almost  infinitely  variable figure according to circumstances, since the first two  factors  vary  not only with speed taken as an absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor. Unless handled  with  tranquility  this  equation  can  result  in considerable stress, ulcers and even death.

R17 is not a fixed velocity, but it is clearly far too fast.

The aircar flung itself through the air at R17 and  above,  deposited them next to the Heart of Gold which stood starkly on  the  frozen  ground like a bleached bone, and then precipitately hurled  itself  back  in  the direction whence they had come, presumably on important  business  of  its own.

Shivering, the four of them stood and looked at the ship.

Beside it stood another one.

It was the Blagulon Kappa policecraft, a  bulbous  sharklike  affair, slate green in colour and  smothered  with  black  stencilled  letters  of varying degrees of size and unfriendliness. The  letters  informed  anyone who cared to read them as to where the ship was from, what section of  the police it was assigned to, and where the power feeds should be connected.

It seemed somehow unnaturally dark and silent, even for a ship  whose two-man crew was at that  moment  lying  asphyxicated  in  a  smoke-filled chamber several miles beneath the ground.  It  is  one  of  those  curious things that is impossible to explain or define, but one can sense  when  a ship is completely dead.

Ford could sense it and found it most mysterious -  a  ship  and  two policemen seemed to have gone spontaneously dead. In  his  experience  the Universe simply didn't work like that.

The other three could sense it too, but they could sense  the  bitter cold even more and hurried back into the Heart of Gold suffering  from  an acute attack of no curiosity.

Ford stayed, and went to examine the Blagulon ship. As he walked,  he nearly tripped over an inert steel figure lying  face  down  in  the  cold dust.

"Marvin!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing?"

"Don't feel you have to take  any  notice  of  me,  please,"  came  a muffled drone.

"But how are you, metalman?" said Ford.

"Very depressed."

"What's up?"

"I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there."

"Why," said Ford squatting down beside him and  shivering,  "are  you lying face down in the dust?"

"It's a very effective way of being wretched,"  said  Marvin.  "Don't pretend you want to talk to me, I know you hate me."

"No I don't."

"Yes you do, everybody does. It's part of the shape of the  Universe. I only have to talk to somebody and they begin to  hate  me.  Even  robots hate me. If you just ignore me I expect I shall probably go away."

He jacked himself up to his feet  and  stood  resolutely  facing  the opposite direction.

"That ship hated me," he said dejectedly, indicating the policecraft.

"That ship?" said Ford in sudden excitement. "What happened to it? Do you know?"

"It hated me because I talked to it."

"You talked to it?" exclaimed Ford. "What do you mean you  talked  to it?"

"Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it," said Marvin.

"And what happened?" pressed Ford.

"It committed suicide," said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold.

35

That night, as the Heart of Gold was busy putting a few  light  years between itself and the Horsehead Nebula, Zaphod lounged  under  the  small palm tree on the bridge trying to bang his brain into shape  with  massive Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters; Ford and Trillian sat in a corner discussing life and matters arising from it; and Arthur  took  to  his  bed  to  flip through Ford's copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since he was going to live in the place, he reasoned, he'd  better  start  finding  out something about it.

He came across this entry.

It said: 'The History of every major Galactic Civilization  tends  to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases,  those  of  Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as  the  How,  Why  and  Where phases.

"For instance, the first phase is characterized by the  question  How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?"

He got no further before the ship's intercom buzzed into life.

"Hey Earthman? You hungry kid?" said Zaphod's voice.

"Er, well yes, a little peckish I suppose," said Arthur.

"OK baby, hold tight," said Zaphod. "We'll take in a  quick  bite  at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe." Last-modified: Tue,  4-Mar-97 23:24:28 GMT