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In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
2 Like all Vogon ships it looked as if it had been not so much designed as congealed. The unpleasant yellow lumps and edifices which protruded from it at unsightly angles would have disfigured the looks of most ships, but in this case that was sadly impossible. Uglier things have been spotted in the skies, but not by reliable witnesses. In fact to see anything much uglier than a Vogon ship you would have to go inside it and look at a Vogon.
If you are wise, however, this is precisely what you will avoid doing because the average Vogon will not think twice before doing something so pointlessly hideous to you that you will wish you had never been born – or (if you are a clearer minded thinker) that the Vogon had never been born.
Aesthetics and technology were closed books to him and, had he had his way, burnt and buried books as well.
When Arthur had been a boy at school, long before the Earth had been demolished, he had used to play football. He had not been at all good at it, and his particular speciality had been scoring own goals in important matches. Whenever this happened he used to experience a peculiar tingling round the back of his neck that would slowly creep up across his cheeks and heat his brow. The image of mud and grass and lots of little jeering boys flinging it at him suddenly came vividly to his mind at this moment.
’ ‘If you ever find you need help again, you know, if you’re in trouble, need a hand out of a tight corner . . .’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘Please don’t hesitate to get lost.’
when a recent edition of Playbeing magazine headlined an article with the words ‘When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta you are tired of life’, the suicide rate there quadrupled overnight.
‘But sir,’ it squealed, ‘I just heard on the sub-etha radio report. It said you were dead . . .’ ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Zaphod, ‘I just haven’t stopped moving yet.
We’ve got to get to Zarniwoop.’ ‘Why?’ said Marvin dolefully. ‘I don’t know,’ said Zaphod, ‘but when I find him, he’d better have a very good reason for me wanting to see him.’
It seemed to Zaphod as he lay there panting with fear and exhaustion that Marvin seemed a mite more cheerful than usual. Eventually he realized this wasn’t so. The robot just seemed cheerful in comparison with his own mood.
‘It says I only inhibit it. I pointed out that in fact I was meant to inhabit it, and it said that that was exactly the sort of smart-alec remark that got right up a body’s left nostril, and so we left it.
Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
Four inert bodies sank through spinning blackness. Consciousness had died, cold oblivion pulled the bodies down and down into the pit of unbeing.
The fronting for the eighty-yard-long marble-topped bar had been made by stitching together nearly twenty thousand Antarean Mosaic Lizard skins, despite the fact that the twenty thousand lizards concerned had needed them to keep their insides in.
‘If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?’
This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space– time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.
‘Would you like to see the menu,’ he said, ‘or would you like to meet the Dish of the Day?’
‘Good evening,’ it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, ‘I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?’
’ ‘You mean they want to arrest me over the phone?’ said Zaphod. ‘Could be. I’m a pretty dangerous dude when I’m cornered.’ ‘Yeah,’ said a voice from under the table, ‘you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.’
you?’ ‘“Reverse primary thrust, Marvin,” that’s what they say to me. “Open airlock number three, Marvin. Marvin, can you pick up that piece of paper?” Can I pick up that piece of paper! Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to . . .’
’ ‘I’m in the car park,’ said Marvin. ‘The car park?’ said Zaphod. ‘What are you doing there?’ ‘Parking cars, what else does one do in a car park?’
The first thing they saw on leaving the lift was a long concrete wall with over fifty doors in it offering lavatory facilities for all of fifty major lifeforms. Nevertheless, like every car park in the Galaxy throughout the entire history of car parks, this car park smelt predominantly of impatience.
‘The first ten million years were the worst,’ said Marvin, ‘and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.’
‘It’s the wild colour scheme that freaks me,’ said Zaphod whose love affair with this ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight. ‘Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?’
Frantic enquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light-years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.
‘What,’ said Trillian in a small quiet voice, ‘does sundive mean?’ ‘It means,’ said Marvin, ‘that the ship is going to dive into the sun. Sun . . . Dive. It’s very simple to understand. What do you expect if you steal Hotblack Desiato’s stunt ship?’
The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. ‘Make it evil,’ he’d been told. ‘Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sorts of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with.’
Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in ouisghian zodahs.
‘I read of one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole. Killed ten billion people.’ ‘That’s mad,’ said Mella. ‘Yes, only scored thirty points too.’
