Life, the Universe and Everything (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #3)

by Douglas Adams

Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know you’ve taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this. He would insult the Universe. That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order.

“The point is, you see,” said Ford, “that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.”

“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 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 Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.

And there’s nothing that depresses me more than seeing a planet being destroyed. Except possibly still being on it when it happens.

Arthur had adopted his normal crisis role, which was to stand with his mouth hanging open and let it all wash over him.

The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a trillion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.

The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what is more can be run for over a hundred years on a single flashlight battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting or can’t explain.

The most extraordinary thing about it was that it looked only partly like a spaceship with guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches and so on, and a great deal like a small, upended Italian bistro. Ford and Arthur gazed up at it with wonderment and deeply offended sensibilities.

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 while his house is burning down.

“Tough. Look, there’s somewhere you can take us where we can have fun, I’m trying to think of it; we can get drunk and maybe listen to some extremely evil music. Hold on, I’ll look it up.” He dug out his copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and zipped through those parts of the index primarily concerned with sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

“Hey,” he said, lighting accidentally on one particular reference entry, “Eccentrica Gallumbits, did you ever meet her? The triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six. Some people say her erogenous zones start some four miles from her actual body. Me, I disagree, I say five.”

“My doctor says that I have a malformed public duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fiber,” he muttered to himself, “and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.”

Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer’s movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants.

Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single statement took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it.

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

(A forest was discovered recently in which most of the trees grew ratchet screwdrivers as fruit. The life cycle of ratchet screwdriver fruit is quite interesting. Once picked it needs a dark dusty drawer in which it can lie undisturbed for years. Then one night it suddenly hatches, discards its outer skin that crumbles into dust, and emerges as a totally unidentifiable little metal object with flanges at both ends and a sort of ridge and a sort of a hole for a screw. This, when found, will get thrown away. No one knows what it is supposed to gain from this. Nature, in her infinite wisdom, is presumably working on it.)

The mattress flolloped around. This is a thing that only live mattresses in swamps are able to do, which is why the word is not in common usage.

The mattress globbered. This is the noise made by a live, swamp-dwelling mattress that is deeply moved by a story of personal tragedy. The word can also, according to the Ultra-Complete Maximegalon Dictionary of Every Language Ever, mean the noise made by the Lord High Sanvalvwag of Hollop on discovering that he has forgotten his wife’s birthday for the second year running. Since there was only ever one Lord High Sanvalvwag of Hollop and he never married, the word is only used in a negative or speculative sense, and there is an ever-increasing body of opinion that holds that the Ultra-Complete Maximegalon Dictionary is not worth the fleet of trucks it takes to cart its microstored edition around in.

Strangely enough, the dictionary omits the word “floopily,” which simply means “in the manner of something which is floopy.”

The mattress flurred and glurried. It flolloped, gupped and willomied, doing this last in a particularly floopy way.

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.

He leaned tensely against the corridor wall and frowned like a man trying to unbend a corkscrew by telekinesis.

It was conclusively proved that more people watched the Tri-D television coverage of the launch than actually existed at the time, and this has now been recognized as the greatest achievement ever in the science of audience research.

In real life it wasn’t a ship he would have set foot in for all the rice wine in China. “Extremely rickety” was one phrase that sprang to mind and “Please may I get out?” was another.

For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned round. “It’ll have to go,” the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home. On the way back they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life-forms.

His eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. He wasn’t certain if this was because they were trying to see more clearly, or if they simply wanted to leave at this point.

He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and he would rather have had a chaperon.

Where it wasn’t black you were inclined to wish that it was, because the colors with which some of the unspeakable details were picked out ranged horribly across the whole spectrum of eye-defying colors, from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead, taking in Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow, Burnt Hombre and Gan Green on the way.

The history of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of idealism, struggle, despair, passion, success, failure and enormously long lunch breaks.

There was a sound he couldn’t immediately identify, partly because he didn’t know the tune “I Left My Leg in Jaglan Beta” and partly because the band playing it was very tired, and some members of it were playing in three-four time, some in four-four, and some in a kind of pie-eyed πr2, each according to the amount of sleep he’d managed to grab recently.

He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of himself to see where he might be hurt. 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.

The prevailing view seemed to be that his opinion was not worth a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys.

The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend of Striterax was just to be born. They didn’t like it, they got resentful.

“then we shall all be destroyed; we shall all die. Surely we care about that?” “Not enough to want to get killed over it,” said Ford.