Life, the Universe, and Everything

by Douglas Adams

He wasn’t certain whether he had just got space-sickness or religion.

He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head whilst his house is burning down.

‘It’s a strange thing,’ said Arthur quietly, ‘that the further and faster one travels across the Universe, the more one’s position in it seems to be largely immaterial, and one is filled with a profound, or rather emptied of a …’

‘My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre,’ he muttered to himself, ‘and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.’

The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their writhings, a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, whilst the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn’t feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck to be made by this particular first duck anyway, and certainly not whilst it, the second duck, was busy flying.