The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

by Douglas Adams

‘Going to watch the match this afternoon, then?’ Ford glanced round at him. ‘No, no point,’ he said, and looked back out of the window. ‘What’s that, foregone conclusion then you reckon, sir?’ said the barman. ‘Arsenal without a chance?’ ‘No, no,’ said Ford, ‘it’s just that the world’s about to end.’ ‘Oh yes, sir, so you said,’ said the barman, looking over his glasses this time at Arthur. ‘Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did.’ Ford looked back at him, genuinely surprised. ‘No, not really,’ he said. He frowned.

a mind-buggering noise

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

‘this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of.’

It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.’ ‘What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?’ ‘You ask a glass of water.’ Arthur thought about this.

Arthur Dent sat and quivered. He had no idea what he was in for, but he knew that he hadn’t liked anything that had happened so far and didn’t think things were likely to change.

The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch sensitive – you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.

‘If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.’

He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

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?

‘Earthman,’ he said, ‘it is sometimes hard to follow your mode of speech. Remember I have been asleep inside this planet of Magrathea for five million years and know little of these early sixties sit coms of which you speak.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

In fact to see anything much uglier than a Vogon ship you would have to go inside it and look at a Vogon.

He sat still and ignored the thought furiously. It nagged at him. He ignored it. It nagged at him. He ignored it. It nagged at him. He gave in to it.

‘Listen, three eyes,’ he said, ‘don’t you try to outweird me. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.’

‘Beeblebrox, over here!’ he shouted. Zaphod eyed him with distrust as another bomb blast rocked the building. ‘No,’ called Zaphod, ‘Beeblebrox over here! Who are you?’ ‘A friend!’ shouted back the man. He ran towards Zaphod. ‘Oh yeah?’ said Zaphod. ‘Anyone’s friend in particular, or just generally well-disposed to people?’

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

A party of smartly dressed young dogs stopped throwing rolls at each other and started throwing rolls at the stage. They yapped and barked unintelligibly. ‘Yes,’ said Max, ‘well, this is all your fault, you realize that?

At short intervals along the moving catwalk, wide transparent tubes led down to floor level. Zaphod stepped off the catwalk into one of these and floated gently downwards. The others followed. Thinking back to this later, Arthur Dent thought it was the single most enjoyable experience of his travels in the Galaxy.

‘We have a thing on Earth . . .’ began Arthur. ‘Had,’ corrected Zaphod. ‘. . . called tact. Oh never mind. Look, I just don’t know.’

‘Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, “Do what you like guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple.” Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting, “Gotcha.” It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.’

History is never altered, you see, it just fits together like a jigsaw. Funny old thing, life, isn’t it?’ He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant privet bush where it hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and didn’t stop till it was set upon and eaten by a fox which choked on one of its bones and died on the bank of a stream which subsequently washed it away. During the following weeks Ford Prefect swallowed his pride and struck up a relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on Golgafrincham, and he was terribly upset when she suddenly passed away as a result of drinking water from a pool that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox. The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the letter Q into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

‘You’re very strange,’ she said. ‘No, I’m very ordinary,’ said Arthur, ‘but some very strange things have happened to me. You could say I’m more differed from than differing.’