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‘Time is an illusion. Lunch-time doubly so.’
‘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?’
‘This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer, ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays.’
He made no friends at all in the pub that lunchtime.
There was a terrible ghastly silence. There was a terrible ghastly noise. There was a terrible ghastly silence.
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?
‘Ah,’ said Arthur, ‘this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of.’
‘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.’
“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.
There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out.
‘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.’
we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway.
‘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.’
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.
‘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.
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.
‘Life,’ said Marvin, ‘don’t talk to me about life.’
‘I don’t think I can stand that robot much longer, Zaphod,’ growled Trillian.
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.
‘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.’
‘You watch this door,’ he muttered, ‘it’s about to open again. I can tell by the intolerable air of smugness it suddenly generates.’
‘I hate that door,’ continued Marvin. ‘I’m not getting you down at all, am I?’
‘If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.’
Suddenly Marvin stopped, and held up a hand. ‘You know what’s happened now, of course?’ ‘No, what?’ said Arthur, who didn’t want to know.
Deep in Marvin’s thorax gears ground. ‘Funny,’ he intoned funereally, ‘how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.’
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.
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.
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?
‘Life,’ said Marvin dolefully, ‘loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.’
‘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,’ said Arthur, ‘er …’ He had an odd feeling 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.
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.
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?
‘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.
‘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.
‘Forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
‘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.’
‘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?’
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.’
