The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1)

by Douglas Adams

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper,

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change,

it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they want to be. Mr Prosser wanted to be at point D. Point D wasn’t anywhere in particular, it was just any convenient point a very long way from points A, B and C.

‘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.’

He struck most of the friends he had made on Earth as an eccentric, but a harmless one – an unruly boozer with some oddish habits. For instance he would often gatecrash university parties, get badly drunk and start making fun of any astrophysicists he could find till he got thrown out.

It was Arthur’s accepted role to lie squelching in the mud making occasional demands to see his lawyer, his mother, or a good book; it was Mr Prosser’s accepted role to tackle Arthur with the occasional new ploy such as the For the Public Good talk, or the March of Progress talk, the They Knocked My House Down Once You Know, Never Looked Back talk and various other cajoleries and threats; and it was the bulldozer drivers’ accepted role to sit around drinking coffee and experimenting with union regulations to see how they could turn the situation to their financial advantage.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

‘How would you react if I said that I’m not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse?’ Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, taking a pull of beer. ‘Why – do you think it’s the sort of thing you’re likely to say?’

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t. And still nothing happened.

Zaphod Beeblebrox was on his way from the tiny spaceport on Easter Island (the name was an entirely meaningless coincidence – in Galacticspeke, easter means small, flat and light brown) to the Heart of Gold island, which by another meaningless coincidence was called France.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippy, good-timer, (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.

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.

The President in particular is very much a figurehead – he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage.

His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had – he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud.

If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.

Haley Pinson, is that you?

‘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.’

Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason why he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.

Beeblebrox, the man who invented the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, ex-confidence trickster, once described by Eccentrica Gallumbits as the Best Bang since the Big One, and recently voted the Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe for the seventh time…has he got an answer this time?

One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.

he had turned unfathomability into an art form.

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

And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before – and thus was the Empire forged.

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?

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was, Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

‘You know,’ said Arthur thoughtfully, ‘all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.’

‘Perhaps I’m old and tired,’ he continued, ‘but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.

‘What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, 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.’

‘What did he say?’ whispered Ford in astonishment. ‘He said it isn’t easy being a cop.’ ‘Well surely that’s his problem, isn’t it?’ ‘I’d have thought so.’