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Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is 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.
Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change,
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
The thing that used to worry him most was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was looking so worried about.
Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn’t him.
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.’
‘It’s not as if it’s a particularly nice house,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but I happen to like it.’ ‘You’ll like the bypass.’ ‘Oh shut up,’ said Arthur Dent.
Mr Prosser thought it sounded perfectly potty. ‘That sounds perfectly reasonable …’ he said in a reassuring tone of voice, wondering who he was trying to reassure.
He frowned, then smiled, then tried to do both at once, failed, grasped hold of his fur hat and rolled it fitfully round the top of his head. He could only assume that he had just won.
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.
‘Time is an illusion. Lunchtime 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.’
‘Damn their fun!’ he shouted and ran out of the pub furiously waving a nearly empty beer glass. He made no friends at all in the pub that lunchtime.
Everything was ready, everything was prepared. He knew where his towel was.
‘I don’t know,’ said the voice on the PA, ‘apathetic bloody planet, I’ve no sympathy at all.’
There was a terrible ghastly silence. There was a terrible ghastly noise. There was a terrible ghastly silence. The Vogon Constructor Fleet coasted away into the inky starry void.
One of the side effects of work on the Heart of Gold was a whole string of pretty meaningless coincidences.
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?
‘If I asked you where the hell we were,’ said Arthur weakly, ‘would I regret it?’ Ford stood up. ‘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.’
‘I’m not panicking!’ ‘Yes you are.’ ‘All right, so I’m panicking, what else is there to do?’
‘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.
The Earth. Visions of it swam sickeningly through his nauseated mind. There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab – the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone. Nelson’s Column had gone! Nelson’s Column had gone and there would be no outcry,
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He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out.
