The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #1-5)

by Douglas Adams

Arthur blinked at it. “What a strange book. How did we get a lift then?”

“Great guys,” said Ford. “They’re the best cooks and the best drink mixers and they don’t give a wet slap about anything else. And they’ll always help hitchhikers aboard, partly because they like the company, but mostly because it annoys the Vogons. Which is exactly the sort of thing you need to know if you’re an impoverished hitchhiker trying to see the marvels of the Universe for less than thirty Altairian dollars a day. And that’s my job. Fun, isn’t it?”

“The Babel fish,” said The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, “is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. “Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. “The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’ “ ‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’ “ ‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” Arthur let out a low groan. He was horrified to discover that the kick through hyperspace hadn’t killed him. He was now six light-years from the place that the Earth would have been if it still existed. The Earth.

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, because there was no one left to make an outcry. From now on Nelson’s Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind—his mind, stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.

Arthur had jammed himself against the door to the cubicle, trying to hold it closed, but it was ill fitting. Tiny furry little hands were squeezing themselves through the cracks, their fingers were ink-stained; tiny voices chattered insanely. Arthur looked up. “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.”

Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea…and turn it on! He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long-sought-after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air. 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 smart-ass.

“Five to one against and falling…” she said, “four to one against and falling…three to one…two…one…probability factor of one to one…we have normality, I repeat we have normality.” She turned her microphone off—then turned it back on—with a slight smile and continued: “Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem. Please relax. You will be sent for soon.”

Whatever Zaphod’s qualities of mind might include—dash, bravado, conceit—he was mechanically inept and could easily blow the ship up with an extravagant gesture. Trilllian had come to suspect that the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.

“I’m not getting you down at all, am I?” he said pathetically. “No no, Marvin,” lilted Trillian, “that’s just fine, really….” “I wouldn’t like to think I was getting you down.” “No, don’t worry about that,” the lilt continued, “you just act as comes naturally and everything will be just fine.” “You’re sure you don’t mind?” probed Marvin. “No, no, Marvin,” lilted Trillian, “that’s just fine, really…just part of life.” Marvin flashed her an electronic look. “Life,” said Marvin, “don’t talk to me about life.”

“It says: ‘Sensational new breakthrough in Improbability Physics. As soon as the ship’s drive reaches Infinite Improbability it passes through every point in the Universe. Be the envy of other major governments.’

One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.

The peculiar man waved a lazy wave at Ford and with an appalling affectation of nonchalance said, “Ford, hi, how are you? Glad you could drop in.” Ford was not going to be outcooled. “Zaphod,” he drawled, “great to see you, you’re looking well, the extra arm suits you. Nice ship you’ve stolen.”

And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of specialist industry: custom-made luxury planet building. The home of this industry was the planet Magrathea, where hyperspatial engineers sucked matter through white holes in space to form it into dream planets—gold planets, platinum planets, soft rubber planets with lots of earthquakes—all lovingly made to meet the exacting standards that the Galaxy’s richest men naturally came to expect. But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a billion hungry worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they labored into the night over smug little treatises on the value of a planned political economy.

“The fires of dawn…!” breathed Zaphod. “The twin suns of Soulianis and Rahm…!” “Or whatever,” said Ford quietly. “Soulianis and Rahm!” insisted Zaphod.

“No, wait…I’ll tell you something,” said Zaphod. “I freewheel a lot. I get an idea to do something, and, hey, why not, I do it. I reckon I’ll become President of the Galaxy, and it just happens, it’s easy. I decide to steal this ship. I decide to look for Magrathea, and it all just happens. Yeah, I work out how it can best be done, right, but it always works out. It’s like having a Galacticredit card which keeps on working though you never send off the checks. And then whenever I stop and think—why did I want to do something?—how did I work out how to do it?—I get a very strong desire just to stop thinking about it. Like I have now. It’s a big effort to talk about it.” Zaphod paused for a while. For a while there was silence. Then he frowned and said, “Last night I was worrying about this again. About the fact that part of my mind just didn’t seem to work properly. Then it occurred to me that the way it seemed was that someone else was using my mind to have good ideas with, without telling me about it. I put the two ideas together and decided that maybe that somebody had locked off part of my mind for that purpose, which was why I couldn’t use it. I wondered if there was a way I could check.

“And there it was,” said Zaphod, “clear as day. A whole section in the middle of both brains that related only to each other and not to anything else around them. Some bastard had cauterized all the synapses and electronically traumatized those two lumps of cerebellum.”

Arthur tried to gauge the speed at which they were traveling, but the blackness outside was absolute and he was denied any reference points. The sense of motion was so soft and slight he could almost believe they were hardly moving at all. Then a tiny glow of light appeared in the far distance and within seconds had grown so much in size that Arthur realized it was traveling toward them at a colossal speed, and he tried to make out what sort of craft it might be. He peered at it, but was unable to discern any clear shape, and suddenly gasped in alarm as the aircar dipped sharply and headed downward in what seemed certain to be a collision course. Their relative velocity seemed unbelievable, and Arthur had hardly time to draw breath before it was all over. The next thing he was aware of was an insane silver blur that seemed to surround him. He twisted his head sharply round and saw a small black point dwindling rapidly in the distance behind them, and it took him several seconds to realize what had happened.

opened his eyes again. They were still in the silver tunnel, threading and weaving their way through what appeared to be a crisscross warren of converging tunnels. When they finally stopped it was in a small chamber of curved steel. Several tunnels also had their termini here, and at the farther end of the chamber Arthur could see a large circle of dim irritating light. It was irritating because it played tricks with the eyes, it was impossible to focus on it properly or tell how near or far it was. Arthur guessed (quite wrongly) that it might be ultraviolet. Slartibartfast turned and regarded Arthur with his solemn old eyes.

“I should warn you that the chamber we are about to pass into does not literally exist within our planet. It is a little too…large. We are about to pass through a gateway into a vast tract of hyperspace. It may disturb you.” Arthur made nervous noises. Slartibartfast touched a button and added, not entirely reassuringly, “It scares the willies out of me. Hold tight.”

“You just let the machines get on with the adding up,” warned Majikthise, “and we’ll take care of the eternal verities, thank you very much. You want to check your legal position, you do, mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job, aren’t we? I mean, what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?” “That’s right,” shouted Vroomfondel, “we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”

“All I wanted to say,” bellowed the computer, “is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” He paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone’s attention, before continuing more quietly. “But the program will take me a little while to run.” Fook glanced impatiently at his watch. “How long?” he said. “Seven and half million years,” said Deep Thought. Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other. “Seven and a half million years!” they cried in chorus. “Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I? And it occurs to me that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy in general. Everyone’s going to have their own theories about what answer I’m eventually going to come up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?” The two philosophers gaped at him. “Bloody hell,” said Majikthise, “now that is what I call thinking. Here, Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?”

Slartibartfast’s study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library.

“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. Look, why don’t you sit yourself down over there and let me plug you in?”

“Never again,” cried the man, “never again will we wake up in the morning and think Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Does it really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don’t get up and go to work? For today we will finally learn once and for all the plain and simple answer to all these nagging little problems of Life, the Universe and Everything!”

The room was much as Slartibartfast had described it. In seven and a half million years it had been well looked after and cleaned regularly every century or so. The ultramahogany desk was worn at the edges, the carpet a little faded now, but the large computer terminal sat in sparkling glory on the desk’s leather top, as bright as if it had been constructed yesterday.

“And you’re ready to give it to us?” urged Loonquawl. “I am.” “Now?” “Now,” said Deep Thought. They both licked their dry lips. “Though I don’t think,” added Deep Thought, “that you’re going to like it.”

“The Answer to the Great Question…” “Yes…!” “Of Life, the Universe and Everything…” said Deep Thought. “Yes…!” “Is…” said Deep Thought, and paused. “Yes…!” “Is…” “Yes…!!!…?” “Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

“I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me,” intoned Deep Thought, his voice regaining its accustomed declamatory tones. “A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate—and yet I will design it for you. A computer that can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year program! Yes! I shall design this computer for you. And I shall name it also unto you. And it shall be called…the Earth.”

So there you have it,” said Slartibartfast, making a feeble and perfunctory attempt to clear away some of the appalling mess of his study. He picked up a piece of paper from the top of a pile, but then couldn’t think of anywhere else to put it, so he put it back on top of the original pile which promptly fell over. “Deep Thought designed the Earth, we built it and you lived on it.”

“In this replacement Earth we’re building they’ve given me Africa to do and of course I’m doing it with all fjords again because I happen to like them, and I’m old-fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it’s not equatorial enough. Equatorial!” He gave a hollow laugh. “What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”

“Come,” said Slartibartfast, “you are to meet the mice. Your arrival on the planet has caused considerable excitement. It has already been hailed, so I gather, as the third most improbable event in the history of the Universe.” “What were the first two?” “Oh, probably just coincidences,” said Slartibartfast carelessly.

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

“We have to have something that sounds good,” said Benjy. “Something that sounds good?” exclaimed Arthur. “A Question to the Ultimate Answer that sounds good? From a couple of mice?” The mice bristled. “Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise,” said Frankie.

“So your brain was an organic part of the penultimate configuration of the computer program,” said Ford, rather lucidly he thought.

“Well,” said Arthur doubtfully.

“We don’t want to shoot you, Beeblebrox!” shouted the figure. “Suits me fine!” shouted Zaphod back, and dived down a wide gap between two data process units. The others swerved in behind him. “There are two of them,” said Trillian. “We’re cornered.” They squeezed themselves down in an angle between a large computer data bank and the wall. They held their breath and waited. Suddenly the air exploded with energy bolts as both the cops opened fire on them simultaneously. “Hey, they’re shooting at us,” said Arthur, crouching in a tight ball. “I thought they said they didn’t want to do that.” “Yeah, I thought they said that,” agreed Ford. Zaphod stuck a head up for a dangerous moment. “Hey,” he said, “I thought you said you didn’t want to shoot us!” and ducked again. They waited. 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.”

“Hey, listen! I think we’ve got enough problems of our own having you shooting at us, so if you could avoid laying your problems on us as well, I think we’d all find it easier to cope!”

“Now see here, guy,” said the voice, “you’re not dealing with any dumb two-bit trigger-pumping morons with low hairlines, little piggy eyes and no conversation, we’re a couple of intelligent caring guys that you’d probably quite like if you met us socially! I don’t go around gratuitously shooting people and then bragging about it afterward in seedy space-rangers bars, like some cops I could mention! I go around shooting people gratuitously and then I agonize about it afterward for hours to my girlfriend!” “And I write novels!” chimed in the other cop.

A millisecond later the air about them started to fry again, as bolt after bolt of Kill-O-Zap hurled itself into the computer bank in front of them. The fusillade continued for several seconds at unbearable intensity. When it stopped, there were a few seconds of near-quietness as the echoes died away. “You still there?” called one of the cops. “Yes,” they called back. “We didn’t enjoy doing that at all,” shouted the other cop. “We could tell,” shouted Ford.

“Because,” shouted the cop, “it’s going to be very intelligent, and quite interesting and humane! Now—either you all give yourselves up now and let us beat you up a bit, though not very much of course because we are firmly opposed to needless violence, or we blow up this entire planet and possibly one or two others we noticed on our way out here!” “But that’s crazy!” cried Trillian. “You wouldn’t do that!” “Oh yes, we would,” shouted the cop, “wouldn’t we?” he asked the other one. “Oh yes, we’d have to, no question,” the other one called back. “But why?” demanded Trillian. “Because there are some things you have to do even if you are an enlightened liberal cop who knows all about sensitivity and everything!”

“I just don’t believe these guys,” muttered Ford,

But the end never came, at least not then.

Ford could sense it and found it most mysterious—a ship and two policemen seemed to have gone spontaneously dead. In his experience the Universe simply didn’t work like that.

“Marvin!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing?” “Don’t feel you have to take any notice of me, please,” came a muffled drone. “But how are you, metalman?” said Ford. “Very depressed.” “What’s up?” “I don’t know,” said Marvin, “I’ve never been there.” “Why,” said Ford squatting down beside him and shivering, “are you lying face down in the dust?” “It’s a very effective way of being wretched,” said Marvin. “Don’t pretend you want to talk to me, I know you hate me.” “No, I don’t.” “Yes, you do, everybody does. It’s part of the shape of the Universe. I only have to talk to somebody and they begin to hate me. Even robots hate me. If you just ignore me I expect I shall probably go away.” He jacked himself up to his feet and stood resolutely facing the opposite direction. “That ship hated me,” he said dejectedly, indicating the policecraft. “That ship?” said Ford in sudden excitement. “What happened to it? Do you know?” “It hated me because I talked to it.”

That night, as the Heart of Gold was busy putting a few light-years between itself and the Horsehead Nebula, Zaphod lounged under the small palm tree on the bridge trying to bang his brain into shape with massive Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters; Ford and Trillian sat in a corner discussing life and matters arising from it; and Arthur took to his bed to flip through Ford’s copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry 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?” He got no further before the ship’s intercom buzzed into life. “Hey, Earthman? You hungry, kid?” said Zaphod’s voice. “Er, well, yes, a little peckish, I suppose,” said Arthur. “Okay, baby, hold tight,” said Zaphod. “We’ll take in a quick bite at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.”

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another which states that this has already happened.

The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.