The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1-5)

by Douglas Adams

an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

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.’

‘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.

‘How do you feel?’ he asked him. ‘Like a military academy,’ said Arthur, ‘bits of me keep on passing out.’

‘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!’

‘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.’

’ ‘But what about the End of the Universe? We’ll miss the big moment.’ ‘I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish,’ said Zaphod, ‘nothing but a gnab gib.’

’ ‘The Universe,’ said Arthur, ‘is big enough and old enough to look after itself for half an hour.