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

by Douglas Adams

a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye.

‘Ford,’ he said, ‘you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.’

‘Please relax,’ said the voice pleasantly, like a stewardess in an airliner with only one wing and two engines one of which is on fire, ‘you are perfectly safe.’

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 was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so – but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence the act.

‘Magrathea is a myth, a fairy story, it’s what parents tell their kids about at night if they

want them to grow up to become economists, it’s…’

felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was. ‘Is there any tea on this spaceship?’ he asked.

In order that some sense of mystery should still be preserved, no revelation will yet be made concerning whose upper arm sustains the bruise. This fact may safely be

made the subject of suspense since it is of no significance whatsoever.

However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

The voice was old, courteous, almost charming, but was underscored with quite unmistakable menace.

‘Hey, this is terrific!’ he said. ‘Someone down there is trying to kill us!’ ‘Terrific,’ said Arthur. ‘But don’t you see what this means?’ ‘Yes. We’re going to die.’ ‘Yes, but apart from that.’ ‘Apart from that?’ ‘It means we must be on to something!’ ‘How soon can we got off it?’

‘I can’t either,’ said Arthur, who felt it was time he began to assert himself.

‘At an improbability factor,’ cut in Eddie, who hadn’t changed a bit,

And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more.

I’m quite dizzy with anticipation…

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 think you’ve got problems,’ said Marvin as if he was addressing a newly occupied coffin,

Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying, ‘Blood…blood…blood…blood…’

‘Because…because…I think it might be because if I knew I wouldn’t be able to look for them.’ ‘What are you, crazy?’ ‘It’s a possibility I haven’t ruled out yet,’

whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book, and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make a fool of themselves in public.

‘the recession came and we decided it would save a lot of bother if we just slept through it.

‘Is it?’ asked the old man mildly. ‘I’m sorry, I’m a bit out of touch.’

‘Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent,’

But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.

The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star

Spangled Banner’, but in fact the message was this: So long, and thanks for all the fish.

In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioural research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misi...

‘Look,’ said Arthur, ‘would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?’

Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

‘I think this is getting needlessly messianic.’

Arthur felt extraordinarily lonely stuck up in the air above it all without so much as a body to his name,

Does it really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don’t get up and go to work?

‘We’re going to get lynched, aren’t we?’ he whispered.

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.’

‘No,’ said the old man, ‘that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.’

‘Why?’ said Arthur, sharply. ‘No – we already thought of that one,’

And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise,’ said Frankie.

‘Yes, an electronic brain,’ said Frankie, ‘a simple one would suffice.’ ‘A simple one!’ wailed Arthur.

‘you’d just have to program it to say What? and I don’t understand and Where’s the tea? – who’d know the difference?’ ‘What?’ cried Arthur, backing away still further.

‘Hey, listen! I think we’ve got enough problems of our own having you shooting at us, so if you could avoid laying your problems on us as well, I think we’d all find it easier to cope!’

‘Perhaps it’s a trap.’ ‘They haven’t the wit.’