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“It’s impossible to say,” said Slartibartfast. “That’s one of them. Strange but true. At least, I think it’s strange,” he added, “and I am assured that it’s true.”
The sun struggled feebly with the mist, tried to impart a little warmth here, shed a little light there, but clearly today was going to be just another long haul across the sky. Nothing moved. Again, silence. Nothing moved. Silence. Nothing moved. Very often on Sqornshellous Zeta, whole days would go on like this, and this was indeed going to be one of them. Fourteen hours later the sun sank hopelessly beneath the opposite horizon with a sense of totally wasted effort. And a few hours later it reappeared, squared its shoulders and started on up the sky again.
Strangely enough, the dictionary omits the word “floopily,” which simply means “in the manner of something which is floopy.”
You should be more mattresslike. We live quiet retired lives in the swamp, where we are content to flollop and vollue and regard the wetness in a fairly floopy manner. Some of us are killed, but all of us are called Zem, so we never know which and globbering is thus kept to a minimum.
Ha, but my life is but a box of wormgears.”
“You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.” “Er, five,” said the mattress. “Wrong,” said Marvin. “You see?”
It gupped.
There is an art, it says, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it. The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt.
One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.
