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

by Douglas Adams

Lallafa had lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa. He lived there, and he wrote his poems there. He wrote them on pages made of dried habra leaves, without the benefit of education or correcting fluid. He wrote about the light in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the darkness in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the girl who had left him and precisely what he thought about that. Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and watered the lives of many people whose lives might otherwise have been darker and dryer. Then, shortly after the invention of time travel, some major correcting fluid manufacturers wondered whether his poems might have been better still if he had had access to some high-quality correcting fluid, and whether he might be persuaded to say a few words to that effect. They traveled the time waves; they found him. They explained the situation—with some difficulty—to him, and did indeed persuade him. In fact they persuaded him to such effect that he became extremely rich at their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write with such precision never got around to leaving him, and in fact they moved out of the forest to a rather nice pad in town and he frequently commuted to the future to do talk shows, on which he sparkled wittily. He never got around to writing the poems, of course, which ...

So a lot of history is now gone forever.

“I got yanked involuntarily back into the physical world,” pursued Agrajag, “as a bunch of petunias. In, I might add, a bowl. This particular happy little lifetime started off with me, in my bowl, unsupported, three hundred miles above the surface of a particularly grim planet. Not a naturally tenable position for a bowl of petunias, you might think. And you’d be right. That life ended a very short while later, three hundred miles lower. In, I might again add, the fresh wreckage of a whale. My spirit brother.”

This is another example that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will employ anybody who wants to walk straight in off the street and get ripped off, especially if they happen to walk in off the street during the afternoon, when very few of the regular staff members are there. There is a fundamental point here: The history of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of idealism, struggle, despair, passion, success, failure and enormously long lunch breaks.

People had been dropping in on the party now for some years, fashionable gate-crashers from other worlds, and for some time it had occurred to the partygoers as they had looked out at their own world beneath them, with its wrecked cities, its ravaged avocado farms and blighted vineyards, its vast tracts of new desert, its seas full of cracker crumbs and worse, that their world was in some tiny and almost imperceptible ways not quite as much fun as it had been. Some of them had begun to wonder if they could manage to stay sober for long enough to make the entire party spaceworthy and maybe take it off to some other people’s worlds where the air might be fresher and give them fewer headaches.

Very soon it would be time to gather up hats and coats and stagger blearily outside to find out what time of day it was, what time of year it was and whether in any of this burnt and ravaged land there was a taxi going anywhere.

The party blundered helplessly across the sky like a man leaning against an unexpectedly open door. It spun and wobbled on its hover jets. It tried to right itself and wronged itself instead. It staggered back across the sky again. For a while these staggerings continued, but clearly they could not continue for long. The party was now a mortally wounded party. All the fun had gone out of it, as the occasional broken-backed pirouette could not disguise. The longer, at this point, that it avoided the ground, the heavier was going to be the crash when finally it hit it.

Even as the starship Bistromath flickered into objective being on the top of a small cliff on the mile-wide asteroid that pursued a lonely and eternal path in orbit around the enclosed star system of Krikkit, its crew was aware that they were in time only to be witnesses to an unstoppable historic event. They didn’t realize they were going to see two. They stood cold, lonely and helpless on the cliff edge and watched the activity below. Lances of light wheeled in sinister arcs against the void from a point only about a hundred yards below and in front of them. They stared into the blinding event.

Apart from anything else, the mere coordination of an entire planet’s military strategy was only taking up a tiny part of its formidable mind, and the rest of it had become extremely bored. Having solved all the major mathematical, physical, chemical, biological, sociological, philosophical, etymological, meteorological and psychological problems of the Universe except his own, three times over, he was severely stuck for something to do, and had taken up composing short dolorous ditties of no tone, or indeed tune.

“You expect me to believe that you are bright enough to invent something that brilliant and be too dumb to realize it would take you with it as well? That’s not just stupid, that is spectacularly obtuse.”

“I’m afraid,” he said at last, “that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about the same Universe.” He paused again. Disappointment crept into Arthur’s face and snuggled down into its accustomed place. “Except,” said Prak, struggling to sort a thought out, “if it happened, it seems that the Question and the Answer would just cancel each other out, and take the Universe with them, which would then be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. It is possible that this has already happened,” he added with a weak smile, “but there is a certain amount of uncertainty about it.”

For Jane With thanks to Rick and Heidi for the loan of their stable event to Mogens and Andy and all at Huntsham Court for a number of unstable events and especially to Sonny Mehta for being stable through all events.

Gone was the ragged threadbare dressing gown, smeared with the mud of a hundred worlds, stained with junk food condiment from a hundred grimy spaceports, gone was the tangled mane of hair, gone the long and knotted beard, flourishing ecostructure and all. Instead, there was Arthur Dent, smooth and casual in corduroys and a bulky sweater. His hair was cropped and washed, his chin clean-shaven. Only the eyes still said that whatever it was the Universe thought it was doing to him, he would still like it please to stop. They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience.

Arthur stared, frowning, out the window. A light, sunny spray of rain hung over the motorway. Two months he’d been back now. Slipping back into his old life had in fact been laughably easy. People had such extraordinarily short memories, including him. Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now seemed to him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped off television and now kept in the back of a cupboard without bothering to watch.

Arthur was at sea, could hardly speak, and felt it wiser therefore for the moment not to try. “It was very odd,” she said, much as one of the pursuing Egyptians might have said that the behavior of the Red Sea when Moses waved his rod at it was a little on the strange side. “Very odd,” she repeated, “for days before, the strangest feeling had been building in me, as if I was going to give birth. No, it wasn’t like that in fact, it was more as if I was being connected into something, bit by bit, no, not even that, it was as if the whole of the Earth, through me, was going to…”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is, as has been remarked before often and accurately, a pretty startling kind of a thing. It is, essentially, as the title implies, a guidebook. The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizable number of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this. The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem. This is: Change. Read it through again and you’ll get it.

Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent may have received an impression of his character and habits which, while it includes the truth and, of course, nothing but the truth, falls somewhat short, in its composition, of the whole truth in all its glorious aspects. And the reasons for this are obvious: editing, selection, the need to balance that which is interesting with that which is relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance.

The deep roar of the ocean. The break of waves on farther shores than thought can find. The silent thunders of the deep. And from among it, voices calling, and yet not voices, humming trillings, wordlings, and half-articulated songs of thought.

incomprehensible error messages. “It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see….” “You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?” “No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.” “Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.” “I did,” said Ford. “It is.” “So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?” “It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”

“Ford,” he said eventually, when it was all over, and Ford was hunting through a stack of cassettes for the tape of Casablanca, “how come, if…” “This is the big one,” said Ford. “This is the one I came back for. Do you realize I never saw it all the way through? I always missed the end. I saw half of it again the night before the Vogons came. When they blew the place up I thought I’d never get to see it. Hey, what happened with all that anyway?” “Just life,”

There remains little still to tell. Beyond what used to be known as the Limitless Lightfields of Flanux until the Gray Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine were discovered lying behind them, lie the Gray Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine. Within the Gray Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine lies the star named Zarss, around which orbits the planet Preliumtarn in which is the land of Sevorbeupstry, and it was to the land of Sevorbeupstry that Arthur and Fenchurch came at last, a little tired by the journey. And in the land of Sevorbeupstry, they came to the Great Red Plain of Rars, which was bounded on the south side by the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, on the farther side of which, according to the dying words of Prak, they would find in thirty-foot-high letters of fire God’s Final Message to His Creation.

They then discovered that they were not only not the first to make this journey, but that they were not the only ones making it now. Some way ahead of them an awkward low shape was heaving itself wretchedly along the ground, stumbling painfully slowly, half limping, half crawling. It was moving so slowly that before too long they caught the creature up and could see that it was made of worn, scarred, and twisted metal. It groaned at them as they approached it, collapsing in the hot, dry dust. “So much time,” it groaned, “oh, so much time. And pain as well, so much of that, and so much time to suffer in it, too. One or the other on its own I could probably manage. It’s the two together that really get me down. Oh, hello, you again.”

At last they reached the last of the little booths, set Marvin down between them, and rested in the shade. Fenchurch bought some cufflinks for Russell, cufflinks that had set in them little polished pebbles which had been picked up from the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, directly underneath the letters of fire in which were written God’s Final Message to His Creation.

They rounded the foot of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, and there was the Message written in blazing letters along the crest of the mountain. There was a little observation vantage point with a rail built along the top of a large rock facing it, from which you could get a good view. It had a little pay telescope for looking at the letters in detail, but no one would ever use it because the letters burned with the divine brilliance of the heavens and would, if seen through a telescope, have severely damaged the retina and optic nerve. They gazed at God’s Final Message to His Creation in wonderment, and were slowly and ineffably filled with a great sense of peace, and of final and complete understanding.

“The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation was awarded a huge research grant to design and produce synthetic personalities to order. The results were uniformly disastrous. All the ‘people’ and ‘personalities’ turned out to be amalgams of characteristics that simply could not co-exist in naturally occurring life forms. Most of them were just poor pathetic misfits, but some were deeply, deeply dangerous. Dangerous because they didn’t ring alarm bells in other people. They could walk through situations the way that ghosts walk through walls, because no one spotted the danger.

For Ron With grateful thanks to Sue Freestone and Michael Bywater for their support, help and constructive abuse.

Anything that happens, happens.

Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.

Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.

It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can’t. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

Tricia loved New York because loving New York was a good career move. It was a good retail move, a good cuisine move, not a good taxi move or a great quality of pavement move, but definitely a career move that ranked among the highest and the best.

She would have been called, if the language allowed, a rapidly rising anchor, but…hey, this is television, what does it matter? She was a rapidly rising anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.

The word was out that maybe, just maybe, a British accent would fit. The hair, the skin tone and the bridgework would have to be up to American network standards, but there had been a lot of British accents up there thanking their mothers for their Oscars, a lot of British accents singing on Broadway, some unusually big audiences tuning in to British accents in wigs on “Masterpiece Theatre.” British accents were telling jokes on David Letterman and Jay Leno. Nobody understood the jokes but they were really responding to the accents, so maybe it was time, just maybe.

Tricia didn’t particularly want to have a nice day. She was busy. She also didn’t want to talk to Gail Andrews. She had a very strict cut-off point as far as fraternizing with the Christians was concerned. Her colleagues called her interview subjects Christians and would often cross themselves when they saw one walking innocently into the studio to face Tricia, particularly if Tricia was smiling warmly and showing her teeth.

Gail Andrews had taken it all reasonably well. She was just starting to recover from the initial onslaught, when she made the rather serious mistake of trying to shake Tricia off by talking smoothly about diurnal arcs, right ascensions and some of the more abstruse areas of three-dimensional trigonometry. To her shock she discovered that everything she delivered to Tricia came right back at her with more spin on it than she could cope with.

She didn’t know quite what to make out of all this sudden niceness and was determined not to be wrong-footed by it. People in New York were not nice to each other without reason.

“I know that astrology isn’t a science,” said Gail. “Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or—what’s that strange thing you British play?” “Er, cricket? Self-loathing?” “Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people. “So when you got so, I don’t know, so emotionally focused on stars and planets this morning, I began to think, she’s not angry about astrology, she really is angry and unhappy about actual stars and planets. People usually only get that unhappy and angry when they’ve lost something. That’s...

“Okay,” she said, suddenly blurting it out. “I don’t know how you worked it out, but…” “I didn’t work it out, as you put it. I just listened to what you were saying.” “What I lost, I think, was a whole other life.” “Everybody does that. Every moment of every day. Every single decision we make, every breath we draw, opens some doors and closes many others. Most of them we don’t notice. Some we do. Sounds like you noticed one.”

Tricia laughed. “Probably not. I never quite went and found out for real. Never quite did it. Story of my life. Never quite did the real thing. That’s why I’m in television, I guess. Nothing is real.”

Tricia shot up out of her seat. She couldn’t even bear to think of all the messages she’d heard for Mr. MacManus and Mr. Miller. “Only we have to hurry,” said the chauffeur. “As I heard it Mr. Martin thinks it might be worth trying a British accent. His boss at the network is dead against the idea. That’s Mr. Zwingler, and I happen to know he’s flying out to the coast this evening because I’m the one has to pick him up and take him to the airport.”

Tricia sighed. “Look, I’m really sorry about this morning and…” “Don’t say another word. I’m fine. It’s only astrology. It’s harmless. It’s not the end of the world.” “Thanks.” On an impulse, Tricia gave her a hug.

The first thing to realize about parallel universes, the Guide says, is that they are not parallel. It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either, but it is easiest if you don’t try to realize that until a little later, after you’ve realized that everything you’ve realized up to that moment is not true.

The precise causal connection between this tiny biological happenstance and a few other minor variations that exist in that slice of the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash—such as Tricia McMillan failing to leave with Zaphod Beeblebrox, abnormally low sales of pecan-flavored ice cream and the fact that the Earth on which all this occurred did not get demolished by the Vogons to make way for a new hyperspace bypass—is currently sitting at number 4,763,984,132 on the research project priority list at what was once the history department of the University of MaxiMegalon, and no one currently at the prayer meeting by the poolside appears to feel any sense of urgency about the problem.

Tricia began to feel that the world was conspiring against her. She knew that this was a perfectly normal way to feel after an overnight flight going east, when you suddenly have a whole other mysteriously threatening day to deal with for which you are not the least bit prepared. But still.

She then spent another hour dithering about what to wear. At last she settled on a smart little black dress she’d got in New York. She phoned a friend to see who was likely to be at the club that evening, and was told that it was closed this evening for a private wedding party. She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from the supermarket. You get one of those carts, which simply will not go in the direction you push it, and end up just having to buy completely different stuff. What do you do with it? What do you do with the recipe? She didn’t know. Anyway, that night an alien spacecraft landed on her lawn.

“So when Venus is rising in Capricorn, for instance, that is from Earth. How does that work if we are out on Rupert? What if the Earth is rising in Capricorn? It is hard for us to know. Among the things we have forgotten, which we think are many and profound, is trigonometry.” “Let me get this straight,” said Tricia. “You want me to come with you to…Rupert…” “Yes.” “To recalculate your horoscopes for you to take account of the relative positions of Earth and Rupert?” “Yes.”

“I’m your girl,” said Tricia,

As she boarded the craft that would take her off to the farthest limits of the solar system, the first thing that met her eyes was a bank of video monitors across which thousands of images were sweeping. A fourth alien was sitting watching them, but was focused on one particular screen that held a steady image. It was a replay of the impromptu interview which Tricia had just conducted with his three colleagues. He looked up when he saw her apprehensively climbing in. “Good evening, Ms. McMillan,” he said. “Nice camera work.”