The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Hitchhikers Guide 2)

by Douglas Adams

In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

For instance, when the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Traal literally (it said ‘Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists’ instead of ‘Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists’) they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening’s ultragolf.

‘What a depressingly stupid machine,’ said Marvin and trudged away.

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

He had seen the whole Universe stretching to infinity around him – everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he was the most important thing in it. Having a conceited ego is one thing. Actually being told by a machine is another.

Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.

‘The first ten million years were the worst,’ said Marvin, ‘and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.’

The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Enquiry 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?