The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Illustrated Edition

by Douglas Adams

‘Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything.’ ‘But the plans were on display . . .’ ‘On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.’ ‘That’s the display department.’ ‘With a torch.’ ‘Ah, well the lights had probably gone.’ ‘So had the stairs.’ ‘But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.’

‘Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.’ ‘Very deep,’ said Arthur, ‘you should send that in to the Reader’s Digest. They’ve got a page for people like you.’

Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall,or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.

‘Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. ‘The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

‘You know,’ said Arthur, ‘it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.’ ‘Why, what did she tell you?’ ‘I don’t know, I didn’t listen.’

‘If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.’ Zaphod glared at her again, then laughed.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

‘Life,’ said Marvin dolefully, ‘loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.’

Its main console was installed in a specially designed executive office, mounted on an enormous executive desk of finest ultramahogany topped with rich ultrared leather.

Their names were Lunkwill and Fook.

It said: ‘What is this great task for which I, Deep Thought, the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space, have been called into existence?’

‘And are you not,’ said Fook leaning anxiously forward, ‘a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?’

‘You know nothing of future time,’ pronounced Deep Thought, ‘and yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it will be my fate eventually to design.’

‘I am Majikthise!’ announced the older one. ‘And I demand that I am Vroomfondel!’ shouted the younger one. Majikthise turned on Vroomfondel. ‘It’s all right,’ he explained angrily, ‘you don’t need to demand that.’ ‘All right!’ bawled Vroomfondel banging on a nearby desk. ‘I am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand, that is a solid fact! What we demand is solid facts!’ ‘No we don’t!’ exclaimed Majikthise in irritation. ‘That is precisely what we don’t demand!’ Scarcely pausing for breath, Vroomfondel shouted, ‘We don’t demand solid facts! What we demand is a total absence of solid facts. I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!’ ‘But who the devil are you?’ exclaimed an outraged Fook. ‘We,’ said Majikthise, ‘are Philosophers.’ ‘Though we may not be,’ said Vroomfondel waving a warning finger at the programmers. ‘Yes we are,’ insisted Majikthise. ‘We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!’ ‘What’s the problem?’ said Lunkwill. ‘I’ll tell you what the problem is, mate,’ said Majikthise, ‘demarcation, that’s the problem!’ ‘We demand,’ yelled Vroomfondel, ‘that demarcation may or may not be the problem!’

‘You just let the machines get on with the adding up,’ warned Majikthise, ‘and we’ll take care of the eternal verities, thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do, mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job, aren’t we? I mean what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?’

‘All right,’ said Deep Thought. ‘The Answer to the Great Question . . .’ ‘Yes . . . !’ ‘Of Life, the Universe and Everything . . .’ said Deep Thought. ‘Yes . . . !’ ‘Is . . .’ said Deep Thought, and paused. ‘Yes . . . !’ ‘Is . . .’ ‘Yes . . . !!! . . . ?’ ‘Forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.’ ‘And are you?’ ‘No. That’s where it all falls down, of course.’ ‘Pity,’ said Arthur with sympathy. ‘It sounded like quite a good lifestyle otherwise.’

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time. A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl’hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G’Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother. The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in the Vl’hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries. Eventually of course, after their galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own galaxy – now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across – which happened to be the Earth – where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. Those who stud...

How many roads must a man walk down? Forty-two. Excellent, excellent, that’ll fox ’em. Frankie baby, we are made!’

‘Because there are some things you have to do even if you are an enlightened liberal cop who knows all about sensitivity and everything!’

suffering from an acute attack of no curiosity.

‘The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Enquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.