Life, the Universe, and Everything

by Douglas Adams

It wasn’t just that the cave was cold, it wasn’t just that it was damp and smelly. It was the fact that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there wasn’t a bus due for two million years.

He had had his immortality inadvertently thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. 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.

He imagined for a moment his itinerary connecting up all the dots in the sky like a child’s numbered dots puzzle. He hoped that from some vantage point in the Universe it might be seen to spell a very very rude word.

‘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.’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Arthur, warily. ‘Yes,’ Ford assured him. ‘I won’t disturb you with the details because they would—’ ‘What?’ ‘Disturb you. But you may be interested to know that I am singlehandedly responsible for the evolved shape of the animal you came to know in later centuries as a giraffe.

‘The Guide says that there is an art to flying,’ said Ford, ‘or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.’

‘Arthur,’ said Ford. ‘Hello? Yes?’ said Arthur. ‘Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very very simple.’ ‘Ah, well I’m not sure I believe that.’

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.

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 Noël 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.

‘What in the name of Zarking fardwarks is the old fool doing?’ exploded Ford.

For a moment or two the old man didn’t reply. 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.

‘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 small groups of monks who had taken up hanging around the major research institutes singing strange chants to the effect that the Universe was only a figment of its own imagination were eventually given a street theatre grant and went away.

Arthur nodded again and looked round to Ford for help, but Ford was practising being sullen and getting quite good at it.

There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath. The moment passed, as it regularly did on Sqornshellous Zeta, without incident.

Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine, and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere.

Marvin paused again in his weary circular plod. ‘The dew,’ he observed, ‘has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning.’

‘I gave a speech once,’ he said suddenly, and apparently unconnectedly. ‘You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.’ ‘Er, five,’ said the mattress. ‘Wrong,’ said Marvin. ‘You see?’

There seemed to be girls sitting on top of them, or maybe they were meant to be angels. Angels are usually represented as wearing more than that, though.

It was hatred, implacable hatred. It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold. It was impersonal, not like a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal. And it was deadly – again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across a motorway is deadly.

‘One thing,’ he further added, ‘has suddenly ceased to lead to another’ – in contradiction of which he had another drink and slid gracelessly off his chair.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of flying. There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

He decided that there must be someone in the Universe feeling more wretched, miserable and forsaken than himself, and he determined to set out and find him. Halfway to the bridge it occurred to him that it might be Marvin, and he returned to bed.

Essex. ‘The Masters of Krikkit,’ breathed Slartibartfast in sepulchral tones.

‘Extremely rickety’ was one phrase which sprang to mind, and ‘Please may I get out?’ was another.

He was clearly a bounder and a cad. He seemed to think that the fact that he was the possessor of the finest legal mind ever discovered gave him the right to behave exactly as he liked, and unfortunately he appeared to be right.

We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.’

The Campaign for Real Timers claim that just as easy travel eroded the differences between one country and another, and between one world and another, so time travel is now eroding the differences between one age and another. ‘The past,’ they say, ‘is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there.’

The neon sign in the depths now suddenly lit up, bafflingly, with just three dots and a comma. Like this: . . . , Only in green neon.

‘Bet you weren’t expecting to see me again,’ said the monster, which Arthur couldn’t help thinking was a strange remark for it to make, seeing as he had never met the creature before. He could tell that he hadn’t met the creature before from the simple fact that he was able to sleep at nights.

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

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.

In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship – he merely left his office late one morning and has never since returned. Though well over a century has now passed, many members of the Guide staff still retain the romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a ham croissant, and will yet return to put in a solid afternoon’s work. Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr have therefore been designated acting editors, and Lig’s desk is still preserved the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign which says ‘Lig Lury Jr, Editor, Missing, presumed fed’.

Anyone who even notices, let alone calls attention to, the curious but utterly coincidental and meaningless fact that every world on which the Guide has ever set up an accounting department has shortly afterwards perished in warfare or some natural disaster is liable to get sued to smithereens.

He ran in a frenzy of fear. The land began to slide, and he suddenly felt the force of the word ‘landslide’ in a way which had never been apparent to him before. It had always just been a word to him, but now he was suddenly and horribly aware that sliding is a strange and sickening thing for land to do.

Wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting.

‘Where the Zarking photon have you been?’ hissed Ford, panic stricken.

He took Trillian’s elbow in his extremely large hand and the muscles in his upper arm moved around each other like a couple of Volkswagens parking.

A youngish-looking man came up to him, an aggressive-looking type with a hook mouth, a lantern nose, and small beady little cheekbones.

‘The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word “Fuck” In A Serious Screenplay. It’s very prestigious.’

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.

Slowly, incredibly, Arthur put up what now appeared to be his tiny little fists. ‘Want to make something of it?’ he said. ‘I beg your minuscule pardon?’ roared Thor. ‘I said,’ repeated Arthur, and he could not keep the quavering out of his voice, ‘do you want to make something of it?’ He waggled his fists ridiculously. Thor looked at him with incredulity. Then a little wisp of smoke curled upwards from his nostril. There was a tiny little flame in it too. He gripped his belt. He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was the sort of man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas with you.

The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend was to put him in a room on his own, because sooner or later he would simply beat himself up.

His fingers fumbled to release the safety catch and engage the extreme danger catch as Ford had shown him. He was shaking so much that if he’d fired at anybody at that moment he probably would have burnt his signature on them.

Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion was the better part of valour, so was cowardice the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a cupboard.

The latest one was a lullaby. ‘Now the world has gone to bed,’ Marvin droned, ‘Darkness won’t engulf my head, ‘I can see by infra-red, ‘How I hate the night.’ He paused to gather the artistic and emotional strength to tackle the next verse. ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, ‘Try to count electric sheep, ‘Sweet dream wishes you can keep, ‘How I hate the night.’

‘Kid, you know I’d love to.’ ‘But you’re not going to.’ ‘No.’ ‘I see.’ ‘You’re working well.’ ‘Yes,’ said Marvin. ‘Why stop now just when I’m hating it?’

‘Maybe,’ said Marvin with unexpected authority in his lugubrious voice, ‘it would be better if you monitored them from here. That young girl,’ he added unexpectedly, ‘is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.’

‘Well,’ said Arthur, ‘we should have a chat about it sometime. Over a cup of tea.’ There slowly materialized in front of them a small wooden table on which sat a silver teapot, a bone china milk jug, a bone china sugar bowl, and two bone china cups and saucers. Arthur reached forward, but they were just a trick of the light. He leaned back on the sofa, which was an illusion his body was prepared to accept as comfortable.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘The Ashes. I’ve got them. They were stolen by those white robots a moment ago. I’ve got them in this bag. They were part of the Key to the Slo-Time envelope, you see, and, well, anyway you can guess the rest, the point is I’ve got them and what should I do with them?’ The policeman told him, but Arthur could only assume that he was speaking metaphorically.