Sequel: The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe by Douglas Adams
I’d like to add some notes about this book, because it particularly changed the way I see the world. I was in 8th grade when I first read this series and I constantly think about how clever and funny and brilliant this series is. It’s a huge part of who I am.
Mr L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal 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.
Bypasses are devices which allow some people to dash 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 from point B are so keen to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people from 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 want 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.
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
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.
Here’s what The Encyclopaedia 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 Hitchhiker’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 drinking 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 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sells rather better than The Encyclopaedia Galactica.
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 made an Algolian Suntiger get on with what it was doing.
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.’
a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker 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 hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker 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 know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
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, 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.
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.
‘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.’
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very 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 all right? 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 exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.
How do you feel?’ he asked him. ‘Like a military academy,’ said Arthur, ‘bits of me keep on passing out.’
‘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,’ 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.
‘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.’
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 mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a 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 vanishes 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
the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.’
Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths 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 twelve-book 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
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 asphyxiation 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
Arthur and Ford opened their eyes and looked about in considerable surprise. ‘Good God,’ said Arthur, ‘it looks just like the sea front at South-end.’ ‘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.’
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.’
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.
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.
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 ticker tape. ‘I can even work out your personality problems to ten decimal places if it will help.’
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 be in any way 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 mouse cage, 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 sustains the bruise. This fact may safely be made the subject of suspense since it is of no significance whatsoever.
I’m quite dizzy with anticipation … Or is it the wind? There really is a lot of that now, isn’t there? 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.
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
the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, 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-backwards somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, but in fact the message was this: So long, and thanks for all the fish.
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 very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.
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 hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional 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 moment, 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 that the mice would be set all sorts of tests, learning to ring bells, run round 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.’
Many many millions of years ago a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional 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)
And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off
Banter, Zaphod gives a valid point
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?
‘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.’
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,’
‘I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I beg your pardon?’ asked the old man mildly. ‘Oh nothing,’ said Arthur, ‘only joking.’ 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 onto 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.
Now,’ said Benjy mouse, ‘to business.’ Ford and Zaphod clinked their glasses together. ‘To business!’ they said. ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Benjy. Ford looked round. ‘Sorry, I thought you were proposing a toast,’ he said.
‘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.’
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
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 of 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.
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
The aircar rocketed them at speeds in excess of R17 through the steel tunnels that led out onto the appalling surface of the planet which was now in the grip of yet another drear morning twilight. Ghastly grey light 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 tranquillity this equation can result in considerable stress, ulcers and even death. R17 is not a fixed velocity, but it is clearly far too fast.
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
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.