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

by Douglas Adams

Ford Prefect’s expense accounts were notoriously complex and difficult affairs and he had found, on the whole, that the lobby robots were ill-equipped to understand the arguments he wished to put forward in relation to them, and he preferred, therefore, to make his entrance by another route.

A staircase had been moved a few inches to the left. A ceiling had been lowered slightly. A lobby had been remodeled. All these things were not worrying in themselves, though they were a little disorienting. The thing that was worrying was the decor. It used to be brash and glitzy. Expensive—because the Guide sold so well throughout the civilized and postcivilized Galaxy—but expensive and fun. Wild games machines lined the corridors. Insanely painted grand pianos hung from ceilings, vicious sea creatures from the planet Viv reared up out of pools in tree-filled atria, robot butlers in stupid shirts roamed the corridors seeking whose hands they might press frothing drinks into. People used to have pet vastdragons on leads and pterospondes on perches in their offices. People knew how to have a good time, and if they didn’t there were courses they could sign up for which would put that right.

There was none of that, now.

Ford hurled himself desperately sideways and somersaulted toward the statue of Leda and the Octopus, which also wasn’t there. He rolled and hurtled around the room in a kind of random panic, tripped, spun, hit the window, which fortunately was built to withstand rocket attacks, rebounded and fell in a bruised and winded heap behind a smart gray crushed-leather sofa, which hadn’t been there before. After a few seconds he slowly peeked up above the top of the sofa. As well as there being no drinks trolley and no Leda and the Octopus, there had also been a startling absence of gunfire. He frowned. This was all utterly wrong.

“The Galaxy is changing,” said Harl. “We’ve got to change with it. Go with the market. The market is moving up. New aspirations. New technology. The future is…”

“Don’t tell me about the future,” said Ford. “I’ve been all over the future. Spend half my time there. It’s the same as anywhere else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air.”

“The reason we don’t sell billions and billions of Guides,” continued Harl, after wiping his mouth, “is the expense. What we do is we sell one Guide billions and billions of times. We exploit the multidimensional nature of the Universe to cut down on manufacturing costs. And we don’t sell to penniless hitchhikers. What a stupid notion that was! Find the one section of the market that, more or less by definition, doesn’t have any money, and try to sell to it. No. We sell to the affluent business traveler and his vacationing wife in a billion, billion different futures. This is the most radical, dynamic and thrusting business venture in the entire multidimensional infinity of space-time-probability ever.”

There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe.

The truth of the matter was that all sorts of highly dodgy stuff went on behind the cheery, happy-go-lucky front that the Guide liked to put up—or used to like to put up before this new InfiniDim Enterprises bunch marched in and started to make the whole thing highly dodgy. There were all kinds of tax scams and rackets and graft and shady deals supporting the shining edifice, and down in the secure research and data processing levels of the building was where it all went on.

When the Guide moved on, taking its building with it, it left a little like a thief in the night. Exactly like a thief in the night in fact. It usually left in the very early hours of the morning, and the following day there always turned out to be a very great deal of stuff missing. Whole cultures and economies would collapse in its wake, often within a week, leaving once-thriving planets desolate and shell-shocked but still somehow feeling they had been part of some great adventure.

The computer terminals that lined the gray walls were windows onto every aspect of the Guide’s operations. Here, on the left-hand side of the room, reports were gathered over the Sub-Etha-Net from field researchers in every corner of the Galaxy, fed straight up into the network of sub-editors’ offices, where they had all the good bits cut out by secretaries because the sub-editors were out having lunch. The remaining copy would then be shot across to the other half of the building—the other leg of the H—which was the legal department. The legal department would cut out anything that was still even remotely good from what remained and fire it back to the offices of the executive editors, who were also out at lunch. So the editors’ secretaries would read it and say it was stupid and cut most of what was left.

you are reading this on planet Earth then: A. Good luck to you. There is an awful lot of stuff you don’t know anything about, but you are not alone in this. It’s just that in your case the consequences of not knowing any of this stuff are particularly terrible, but then, hey, that’s just the way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated. B. Don’t imagine you know what a computer terminal is.

It wasn’t the normal universe he knew. It was a universe of densely enfolded worlds, of wild topographies, towering mountain peaks, heart-stopping ravines, of moons shattering off into seahorses, hurtful blurting crevices, silently heaving oceans and bottomless hurtling hooping funts.

Five minutes later he was out of there. About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred ownership of the entire organization into his own name, but he doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn’t want it anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights at the office, not to mention massive and time-consuming fraud investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted something that nobody other than the computer would notice: that was the bit that took thirty seconds.

There was the door to Harl’s office, with a slight layer of dust around it. Ford knew that this dust consisted of billions of tiny molecular robots that had crawled out of the woodwork, built one another, rebuilt the door, disassembled one another and then crept back into the woodwork again and just waited for damage. Ford wondered what kind of life that was, but not for long because he was a lot more concerned about what his own life was like at that moment. He took a deep breath and started his run.

“Oh, she’s all over the continuum these days. We can’t get the tri-d TV stations out here of course, thank the Great Green Arkleseizure, but you hear her on the radio, gallivanting here and there through space-time. She wants to settle down and find herself a steady era, that young lady does. It’ll all end in tears. Probably already has.”

Oddly, the man’s face was now only a couple of feet away. He seemed in one way to be a perfectly normal shape, but his body was sitting cross-legged on a pole forty feet away while his face was only two feet from Arthur’s. Without moving his head, and without seeming to do anything odd at all, he stood up and stepped onto the top of another pole. Either it was just the heat, thought Arthur, or space was a different shape for him.

Arthur got terribly excited. This was exactly the sort of thing he’d been promised in the brochure. Here was a man who seemed to be moving through some kind of Escher space saying really profound things about all sorts of stuff. It was unnerving, though. The man was now stepping from pole to ground, from ground to pole, from pole to pole, from pole to horizon and back: he was making complete nonsense of Arthur’s spatial universe. “Please stop!” Arthur said, suddenly.

“You come to me for advice, but you can’t cope with anything you don’t recognize. Hmmm. So we’ll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual, I suppose.”

‘Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.’ That’s it. It’s what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.”

“Well, thank you for your help,” said Arthur. “Don’t mention it,” said the man on the pole, and vanished.

Arthur threw the book across the room, sold the room and left. He started to travel with wild abandon, trading in more and more spit, toenails, fingernails, blood, hair, anything that anybody wanted, for tickets. For semen, he discovered, he could travel first class. He settled nowhere, but only existed in the hermetic, twilight world of the cabins of hyperspatial starships, eating, drinking, sleeping, watching movies, only stopping at spaceports to donate more DNA and catch the next long-haul ship out. He waited and waited for another accident to happen.

Arthur Dent, because of the sheer boredom of endless interstellar flight was the only one on board who actually had familiarized himself with the ship’s safety procedures in case of an unscheduled landing, was the sole survivor. He lay dazed, broken and bleeding in a sort of fluffy pink plastic cocoon with “Have a nice day” printed in more than three thousand different languages all over it. Black, roaring silences swam sickeningly through his shattered mind. He knew with a kind of resigned certainty that he would survive, because he had not yet been to Stavromula Beta. After what seemed an eternity of pain and darkness, he became aware of quiet shapes moving around him.

He suddenly remembered the floor-display panel in the elevator. It hadn’t had a thirteenth floor. He’d thought no more about it because, having spent fifteen years on the rather backward planet Earth, where they were superstitious about the number thirteen, he was used to being in buildings that numbered their floors without it. No reason for that here, though. The windows of the thirteenth floor, he could not help noticing as he flashed swiftly by them, were darkened. What was going on in there? He started to remember all the stuff that Harl had been talking about. One new, multidimensional Guide spread across an infinite number of universes. It had sounded, the way Harl had put it, like wild meaninglessness dreamed up by the marketing department with the backing of the accountants. If it was any more real than that, then it was a very weird and dangerous idea. Was it real? What was going on behind the darkened windows of the sealed-off thirteenth floor?

Ford was hanging from the towel, gripping to its seams. Other hitchhikers had seen fit to modify their towels in exotic ways, weaving all kinds of esoteric tools and utilities and even computer equipment into their fabric. Ford was a purist. He liked to keep things simple. He carried a regular towel from a regular domestic soft-furnishings shop. It even had a kind of blue and pink floral pattern despite his repeated attempts to bleach and stonewash it. It had a couple of pieces of wire threaded into it, a bit of flexible writing stick, and also some nutrients soaked into one of the corners of the fabric so he could suck on it in an emergency, but otherwise it was a simple towel you could dry your face on.

The building had been sturdily reinforced when it was completely rebuilt after the Frogstar attack and was probably the most heavily armored publishing company in the business, but there was always, he thought, some weakness in any system designed by a corporate committee. He had already found one of them. The engineers who designed the windows had not expected them to be hit by a rocket from short range from the inside, so the window had failed.

He wracked his brains for a moment or so before he got it. The thing they wouldn’t be expecting him to do was to be there in the first place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, so he was winning already. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Another completely unlooked for result was that Ford Prefect, stranded thirteen stories up a heavily armored building armed with nothing but a towel and a credit card, was nevertheless able to clamber through a supposedly rocket-proof window to safety. He closed the window neatly after him, having first allowed Colin to follow him through, and then started to look around for this bird thing. The thing he realized about the windows was this: because they had been converted into openable windows after they had first been designed to be impregnable, they were, in fact, much less secure than if they had been designed as openable windows in the first place.

The room, like every other room in this building now, was done out in some appallingly tasteful gray. There were a few charts and drawings on the wall. Most of them were meaningless to Ford, but then he came across something that was obviously a mock-up for a poster of some kind.

Odd, thought Ford. He looked around to see what it was that Colin might have been reacting to. Then he saw something that he hadn’t noticed before, lying quietly on top of a work bench. It was circular and black and about the size of a small side plate. Its top and its bottom were smoothly convex so that it resembled a small lightweight throwing discus. Its surfaces seemed to be completely smooth, unbroken and featureless. It was doing nothing. Then Ford noticed that there was something written on it. Strange. There hadn’t been anything written on it a moment ago and now suddenly there was. There just didn’t seem to have been any observable transition between the two states. All it said, in small, alarming letters, was a single word: Panic.

Panic, the Guide Mk II said. Ford began to do as he was told. He had just remembered why the sluglike creatures looked familiar. Their color scheme was a kind of corporate gray, but in all other respects they looked exactly like Vogons.

“Not the same species, Arthur,” Trillian had answered. “When I decided I wanted a child they ran all sorts of genetic tests on me and could find only one match anywhere. It was only later that it dawned on me. I double-checked and I was right. They don’t usually like to tell you, but I insisted.”

“Yes. But she wasn’t quite as random as her name suggests, because, of course, you were the only homo sapiens donor. I must say, though, it seems you were quite a frequent flyer.”

“But when…how long…?” “You mean, what age is she?” “Yes.” “The wrong one.” “What do you mean?” “I mean that I haven’t any idea.” “What?” “Well, in my time line I think it’s about ten years since I had her, but she’s obviously quite a lot older than that. I spend my life going backward and forward in time, you see. The job. I used to take her with me when I could, but it just wasn’t always possible. Then I used to put her into day-care time zones, but you just can’t get reliable time tracking now. You leave them there in the morning, you’ve simply no idea how old they’ll be in the evening. You complain till you’re blue in the face but it doesn’t get you anywhere. I left her at one of the places for a few hours once, and when I came back she’d passed puberty. I’ve done all I can, Arthur, it’s over to you. I’ve got a war to cover.”

He sighed as he sat nursing the chipped and bent knife. He was going to love her if it killed him, or her, or both. It wasn’t easy being a father. He knew that no one had ever said it was going to be easy, but that wasn’t the point because he’d never asked about being one in the first place. He was doing his best.

The common ground between them, apart from the fact that they had almost identical genes, was about the size of a pebble. Or rather, it was about the size of Trillian and of her they had slightly differing views.

She could pick up Sub-Etha TV on a small Flex-O-Panel which had been surgically implanted in her wrist, but that didn’t cheer her up at all because it was full of news of insanely exciting things happening in every other part of the Galaxy than here.

The villagers were absolutely hypnotized by all these wonderful magic images flashing over her wrist. They had only ever seen one spaceship crash, and it had been so frightening, violent and shocking and had caused so much horrible devastation, fire and death that, stupidly, they had never realized it was entertainment.

“It’s just a watch,” he said. “It’s to tell the time.” “I know that,” she said. “But you keep on fiddling with it, and it still doesn’t tell the right time. Or even anything like it.” She brought up the display on her wrist panel, which automatically produced a readout of local time. Her wrist panel had quietly got on with the business of measuring the local gravity and orbital momentum, and had noticed where the sun was and tracked its movement in the sky, all within the first few minutes of Random’s arrival. It had then quickly picked up clues from its environment as to what the local unit conventions were and reset itself appropriately. It did this sort of thing continually, which was particularly valuable if you did a lot of traveling in time as well as space.

“So what are all these numbers?” asked Random. Arthur took it from her. “These numbers around the edge mark the hours. In the little window on the right it says THU, which means Thursday, and the number is fourteen, which means it’s the fourteenth day of the month of MAY, which is what it says in this window over here.

Arthur suggested they go for a walk. He felt there were things they should discuss, and for once Random seemed, if not precisely amenable and willing, then at least not growling. From Random’s point of view this was also all very weird. It wasn’t that she wanted to be difficult, as such, it was just that she didn’t know how or what else to be.

She’d been born in a spaceship that had been going from somewhere to somewhere else, and when it had got to somewhere else, somewhere else had only turned out to be another somewhere that you had to get to somewhere else again from, and so on. It was her normal expectation that she was supposed to be somewhere else. It was normal for her to feel that she was in the wrong place. Then, constant time travel had only compounded this problem and had led to the feeling that she was not only always in the wrong place, but she was also almost always there at the wrong time. She didn’t notice that she felt this, because it was the only way she ever felt, just as it never seemed odd to her that nearly everywhere she went she needed either to wear weights or antigravity suits and usually special apparatus for breathing as well. The only places you could ever feel were right were worlds you designed for yourself to inhabit—virtual realities in the electric clubs.

“You’ve been watching it for over an hour,” said Arthur, quietly. “I know,” she said. “An hour is when the big hand has gone all the way around, yes?” “That’s right.” “Then I’ve been watching it for an hour and seventeen…minutes.” She smiled with a deep and mysterious pleasure and moved very slightly so that she was resting just a little against his arm. Arthur felt that a small sigh escaped from him that had been pent up inside his chest for weeks.

“You don’t understand! You don’t understand me, you don’t understand anything! I hate you for being so stupid!” She started to run hectically down the hill, still clutching the watch and shouting that she hated him. Arthur jumped up, startled and at a loss. He started to run after her through the stringy and clumpy grass. It was hard and painful for him. When he had broken his leg in the crash, it had not been a clean break, and it had not healed cleanly. He was stumbling and wincing as he ran. Suddenly she turned and faced him, her face dark with anger. She brandished the watch at him. “You don’t understand that there’s somewhere this belongs? Somewhere it works? Somewhere that it fits?”

“She had me because I was meant to make things fit for her. That was my job. But I fitted even worse than she did! So she just shut me off and carried on with her stupid life.” “What’s stupid about her life? She’s fantastically successful, isn’t she? She’s all over time and space, all over the Sub-Etha TV networks…” “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

“I’m so sorry,” she said again, sobbing. Arthur went up to her and put his arm around her shoulder. She didn’t resist or pull away. Then Arthur saw what it was she was so sorry about. In the pool of light thrown by a Lamuellan lantern lay Arthur’s watch. Random had forced the back off it with the back edge of the butter-spreading knife and all of the minute cogs and springs and levers were lying in a tiny cockeyed mess where she’d been fiddling with them. “I just wanted to see how it worked,” said Random, “how it all fitted together. I’m so sorry! I can’t get it back together. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. I’ll get it repaired! Really! I’ll get it repaired!”

Arthur wasn’t quite certain which he noticed as being missing first. When he noticed that the one wasn’t there, his mind instantly leapt to the other and he knew immediately that they were both gone and that something insanely bad and difficult to deal with would happen as a result. Random was not there. And neither was the parcel. He had left it up on a shelf all day, in plain view. It was an exercise in trust. He knew that one of the things he was supposed to do as a parent was to show trust in his child, to build a sense of trust and confidence into the bedrock of relationship between them. He had had a nasty feeling that that might be an idiotic thing to do, but he did it anyway, and sure enough it had turned out to be an idiotic thing to do. You live and learn. At any rate, you live. You also panic.

She turned her torch on. Almost at the same moment a fork of lightning ripped across the valley into which she was heading and startled her considerably. As the darkness shuddered back around her and a clap of thunder rolled out across the land, she felt suddenly rather small and lost with just a feeble pencil of light bobbing in her hand. Perhaps she should stop after all and open the parcel here. Or maybe she should go back and come out again tomorrow. It was only a momentary hesitation, though. She knew there was no going back tonight and sensed that there was no going back ever.

She played her torch around the surrounding trees, which were thin on the ground here, and mostly charred and broken. In the middle distance she thought she could see a jumbled outcrop of rock that might provide some shelter, and she started to pick her way toward it. All around she found the detritus that had been ejected from the ship as it broke up, before the final fireball. After she had moved two or three hundred yards from the edge of the crater, she came across the tattered fragments of some fluffy pink material, sodden, muddied and drooping among the broken trees. She guessed, correctly, that this must be the remains of the escape cocoon that had saved her father’s life. She went and looked at it more closely, and then noticed something close to it on the ground, half-covered in mud. She picked it up and wiped the mud off it. It was some kind of electronic device the size of a small book. Feebly glowing on its cover, in response to her touch, were some large friendly letters. They said DON’T PANIC. She knew what this was. It was her father’s copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“So what is it?” “What do you mean, what is it? Look, who are you? What were you doing in that box? Why have I spent a night running through the forest fending off demented squirrels to find that all I’ve got at the end of it is a bird asking me what rain is? It’s just water falling through the bloody air, that’s what it is. Anything else you want to know or can we go home now?”