Life, the Universe, and Everything

by Douglas Adams

The alien ship was already thundering towards the upper reaches of the atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void which separates the very few things there are in the Universe from each other.

The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.

‘Africa was very interesting,’ said Ford, ‘I behaved very oddly there.’ He gazed thoughtfully into the distance. ‘I took up being cruel to animals,’ he said airily. ‘But only,’ he added, ‘as a hobby.’

Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.

‘Well, this is an interesting incident, Brian,’ said one radio commentator to another. ‘I don’t think there have been any mysterious materializations on the pitch since, oh since, well I don’t think there have been any – have there? – that I recall?’ ‘Edgbaston, 1932?’

‘People who talk to themselves on the phone,’ said Ford, ‘never learn anything to their advantage.’

A glummer look replaced the already glum look on Arthur Dent’s face.

‘And the time at which I would like you to shut up about it,’ continued Ford in a low growl, ‘is now.’

Ford was beginning to behave rather strangely, or rather not actually beginning to behave strangely but beginning to behave in a way which was strangely different from the other strange ways in which he more regularly behaved.

‘You’re a jerk, Dent,’ said the boy, ‘a complete asshole.’

Suddenly Arthur remembered that the Earth was going to be demolished again in two days’ time, and just this once didn’t feel too bad about it.

‘An SEP,’ he said, ‘is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.’

I must say, I’m rather fond of cricket, though I wouldn’t like anyone outside this planet to hear me saying that. Oh dear no.’

Ford was humming something. It was just one note repeated at intervals. He was hoping that somebody would ask him what he was humming, but nobody did. If anybody had asked him he would have said he was humming the first line of a Noe¨l Coward song called ‘Mad About the Boy’ over and over again. It would then have been pointed out to him that he was only singing one note, to which he would have replied that for reasons which he hoped would be apparent, he was omitting the ‘about the boy’ bit. He was annoyed that nobody asked.

They were robots, white robots. What was most extraordinary about them was that they appeared to have come dressed for the occasion. Not only were they white, but they carried what appeared to be cricket bats, and not only that, but they also carried what appeared to be cricket balls, and not only that but they wore white ribbing pads round the lower parts of their legs. These last were extraordinary because they appeared to contain jets which allowed these curiously civilized robots to fly down from their hovering spaceship and start to kill people, which is what they did.

Arthur had adopted his normal crisis role, which was to stand with his mouth hanging open and let it all wash over him.

The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand million, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a billion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.

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.

We can get drunk and maybe listen to some extremely evil music. Hold on, I’ll look it up.’ He dug out his copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and zipped through those parts of the index primarily concerned with sex and drugs and rock and roll.

‘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.’

‘Bistromathics,’ he said. ‘The most powerful computational force known to parascience.

Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.

The early morning’s thinnest sliver of light appeared silently. Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.

Nature, in her infinite wisdom, is presumably working on it.

He resumed his walk, as if inspired by this conversational outburst to fresh heights of gloom and despondency.

‘My capacity for mental activity of all kinds is as boundless as the infinite reaches of space itself. Except of course for my capacity for happiness.’ Stomp, stomp, he went. ‘My capacity for happiness,’ he added, ‘you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.’

Strangely enough, the dictionary omits the word ‘floopily’, which simply means ‘in the manner of something which is floopy’.

The mattress flurred and glurried. It flolloped, gupped and willomied, doing this last in a particularly floopy way.

And it was deadly – again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across a motorway is deadly.

It had indeed been an error. It had been late one night – of course. It had been a difficult day – of course. There had been soulful music playing on the ship’s sound system – of course. And he had, of course, been slightly drunk.

‘Excitement and adventure and really wild things,’

DO NOT WAVE AT ANYBODY.

Arthur could almost imagine Paul McCartney sitting with his feet up by the fire one evening, humming it to Linda and wondering what to buy with the proceeds, and thinking probably Essex.

‘The game you know as cricket,’ he said, and his voice still seemed to be wandering lost in subterranean passages, ‘is just one of those curious freaks of racial memory which can keep images alive in the mind aeons after their true significance has been lost in the mists of time. Of all the races in the Galaxy, only the English could possibly revive the memory of the most horrific wars ever to sunder the Universe and transform it into what I’m afraid is generally regarded as an incomprehensibly dull and pointless game.

They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost immediately.

the Galactic Fleet Battleships – the GSS Daring, the GSS Audacity and the GSS Suicidal Insanity –

On the way back they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.

‘It’s all right,’ she said in a voice which would have calmed the Big Bang down.

He had been planning to learn to play the octaventral heebie-phone – a pleasantly futile task, he knew, because he had the wrong number of mouths.

‘We’re not obsessed by anything, you see,’ insisted Ford. ‘. . .’ ‘And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.’

The Encyclopaedia Galactica has much to say on the theory and practice of time travel, most of which is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t spent at least four lifetimes studying advanced hypermathematics, and since it was impossible to do this before time travel was invented, there is a certain amount of confusion as to how the idea was arrived at in the first place.

He dropped into a kind of alert crouch that he had once seen somebody do on television, but it must have been someone with stronger knees.

It was the product of a mind that was not merely twisted, but actually sprained.

Where it wasn’t black you were inclined to wish that it was, because the colours with which some of the unspeakable details were picked out ranged horribly across the whole spectrum of eye-defying colours, from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead.

is liable to get sued to smithereens.

None of these facts, however strange or inexplicable, is as strange or inexplicable as the rules of the game of Brockian Ultra-Cricket, as played in the higher dimensions. A full set of rules is so massively complicated that the only time they were all bound together in a single volume, they underwent gravitational collapse and became a black hole.

Whenever a player scores a ‘hit’ on another player, he should immediately run away and apologize from a safe distance.

RULE SIX: The winning team shall be the first team that wins.

The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow-up.

some members of it were playing in three-four time, some in four-four, and some in a kind of pie-eyed πr2