Prequel: The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe
Sequel: Mostly Harmless
I took up being cruel to animals,’ he said airily. ‘But only,’ he added, ‘as a hobby.’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Arthur, warily. ‘Yes,’ Ford assured him. ‘I won’t disturb you with the details because they would—’ ‘What?’ ‘Disturb you. But you may be interested to know that I am singlehandedly responsible for the evolved shape of the animal you came to know in later centuries as a giraffe
‘The Guide says that there is an art to flying,’ said Ford, ‘or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss
After a moment or two of this he started to stalk forward slowly and stealthily wearing a puzzled frown of concentration, like a leopard that is not sure whether it’s just seen a half-empty tin of cat food half a mile away across a hot and dusty plain.
Ford was humming something. It was just one note repeated at intervals. He was hoping that somebody would ask him what he was humming, but nobody did. If anybody had asked him he would have said he was humming the first line of a Noël Coward song called ‘Mad About the Boy’ over and over again. It would then have been pointed out to him that he was only singing one note, to which he would have replied that for reasons which he hoped would be apparent, he was omitting the ‘about the boy’ bit. He was annoyed that nobody asked
The second strangest thing about the ship was watching the Somebody Else’s Problem field at work. They could now clearly see the ship for what it was simply because they knew it was there. It was quite apparent, however, that nobody else could. This wasn’t because it was actually invisible or anything hyper-impossible like that. The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand million, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a billion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it. The ultra-famous sciento-magician Effrafax of Wug once bet his life that, given a year, he could render the great megamountain Magramal entirely invisible. Having spent most of the year jiggling around with immense Lux-O-Valves and Refracto-Nullifiers and Spectrum-Bypass-O-Matics, he realized, with nine hours to go, that he wasn’t going to make it. So, he and his friends, and his friends’ friends, and his friends’ friends’ friends, and his friends’ friends’ friends’ friends, and some rather less good friends of theirs who happened to own a major stellar trucking company, put in what is now widely recognized as being the hardest night’s work in history, and, sure enough, on the following day, Magramal was no longer visible. Effrafax lost his bet – and therefore his life – simply because some pedantic adjudicating official noticed (a) that when walking around the area that Magramal ought to be in he didn’t trip over or break his nose on anything, and (b) a suspicious-looking extra moon. The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and effective, and what is more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.
It seemed to Arthur as if the whole sky suddenly just stood aside and let them through. It seemed to him that the atoms of his brain and the atoms of the cosmos were streaming through each other. It seemed to him that he was blown on the wind of the Universe, and that the wind was him. It seemed to him that he was one of the thoughts of the Universe and that the Universe was a thought of his. It seemed to the people at Lord’s Cricket Ground that another North London restaurant had just come and gone as they so often do, and that this was Somebody Else’s Problem.
He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head whilst his house is burning down
‘My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre,’ he muttered to himself, ‘and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.’
The Bistromathic Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances without all that dangerous mucking about with Improbability Factors. Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that time was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in space, and that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants. The first non-absolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up. The second non-absolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre of concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of maths, including statistics and accountancy, and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else’s Problem field. The third and most mysterious piece of non-absoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table, and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a sub-phenomenon in this field.) The baffling discrepancies which used to occur at this point remained uninvestigated for centuries simply because no one took them seriously. They were at the time put down to such things as politeness, rudeness, meanness, flashness, tiredness, emotionality, or the lateness of the hour, and completely forgotten about on the following morning. They were never tested under laboratory conditions, of course, because they never occurred in laboratories – not in reputable laboratories at least. And so it was only with the advent of pocket computers that the startling truth became finally apparent, and it was this: Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of maths was put back by years. Slowly, however, the implications of the idea began to be understood. To begin with it had been too stark, too crazy, too much what the man in the street would have said, ‘Oh yes, I could have told you that,’ about. Then some phrases like ‘Interactive Subjectivity Frameworks’ were invented, and everybody was able to relax and get on with it. The small groups of monks who had taken up hanging around the major research institutes singing strange chants to the effect that the Universe was only a figment of its own imagination were eventually given a street theatre grant and went away.
Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine, and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere. A forest was discovered recently in which most of the trees grew ratchet screwdrivers as fruit. The life cycle of ratchet screwdriver fruit is quite interesting. Once picked it needs a dark dusty drawer in which it can lie undisturbed for years. Then one night it suddenly hatches, discards its outer skin which crumbles into dust, and emerges as a totally unidentifiable little metal object with flanges at both ends and a sort of ridge and a sort of a hole for a screw. This, when found, will get thrown away. No one knows what it is supposed to gain from this. Nature, in her infinite wisdom, is presumably working on it
‘My capacity for happiness,’ he added, ‘you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.’
The mattress globbered. This is the noise made by a live, swamp-dwelling mattress that is deeply moved by a story of personal tragedy. The word can also, according to The Ultra-Complete Maximegalon Dictionary of Every Language Ever, mean the noise made by the Lord High Sanvalvwag of Hollop on discovering that he has forgotten his wife’s birthday for the second year running. Since there was only ever one Lord High Sanvalvwag of Hollop, and he never married, the word is only ever used in a negative or speculative sense, and there is an ever-increasing body of opinion which holds that The Ultra-Complete Maximegalon Dictionary is not worth the fleet of lorries it takes to cart its microstored edition around in. Strangely enough, the dictionary omits the word ‘floopily’, which simply means ‘in the manner of something which is floopy’.
my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.’ ‘Er, five,’ said the mattress. ‘Wrong,’ said Marvin. ‘You see?’
The Universe shattered into a million glittering fragments around it, and each particular shard span silently through the void, reflecting on its silver surface some single searing holocaust of fire and destruction. And then the blackness behind the Universe exploded, and each particular piece of blackness was the furious smoke of hell.
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it. The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt. That is, it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard. Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties. One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it. It is notoriously difficult to prise your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people’s failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport. If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phylum and/or personal inclination), or a bomb going off in your vicinity, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above it in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner. This is a moment for superb and delicate concentration. Bob and float, float and bob. Ignore all considerations of your own weight and simply let yourself waft higher. Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful. They are most likely to say something along the lines of, ‘Good God, you can’t possibly be flying!’ It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right. Waft higher and higher. Try a few swoops, gentle ones at first, then drift above the treetops breathing regularly. DO NOT WAVE AT ANYBODY. When you have done this a few times you will find the moment of distraction rapidly becomes easier and easier to achieve. You will then learn all sorts of things about how to control your flight, your speed, your manoeuvrability, and the trick usually lies in not thinking too hard about whatever you want to do, but just allowing it to happen as if it was going to anyway. You will also learn about how to land properly, which is something you will almost certainly cock up, and cock up badly, on your first attempt. There are private flying clubs you can join which help you achieve the all-important moment of distraction. They hire people with surprising bodies or opinions to leap out from behind bushes and exhibit and/or explain them at the critical moments. Few genuine hitchhikers will be able to afford to join these clubs, but some may be able to get temporary employment at them.
On the way back they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms
If everything you’ve shown us is true …’ ‘True? Of course it’s true.’ ‘… then we don’t stand a whelk’s chance in a supernova.’ ‘A what?’ said Arthur sharply again. He had been following the conversation doggedly up to this point, and was keen not to lose the thread now. ‘A whelk’s chance in a supernova,’ repeated Ford without losing momentum. ‘The—’ ‘What’s a whelk got to do with a supernova?’ said Arthur. ‘It doesn’t,’ said Ford levelly, ‘stand a chance in one.’
‘I think,’ he whispered, ‘that there is something wrong with those anodized dudes, something fundamentally weird.’ ‘They are programmed to kill everybody,’ Slartibartfast pointed out. ‘That,’ wheezed Zaphod between the whacking thuds, ‘could be it.
If I said anything they knocked me out again. We had some great conversations. “Hey … ugh!” “Hi there … ugh!” “I wonder … ugh!” Kept me amused for hours, you know.’ He winced again.
I think,’ he said again, and stopped. The reason he started to say it again was because no one had listened to him the first time, and the reason he stopped was because it looked fairly clear that no one was going to listen to him this time either.