Douglas Adams. Life, the Universe, and Everything
For Sally
Chapter 1
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent
waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
It wasn't just that the cave was cold, it wasn't just that it was damp and
smelly. It was the fact that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there
wasn't a bus due for two million years.
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.
He was stranded in prehistoric Earth as the result of a complex sequence
of events which had involved him being alternately blown up and insulted in
more bizarre regions of the Galaxy than he ever dreamt existed, and though his
life had now turned very, very, very quiet, he was still feeling jumpy.
He hadn't been blown up now for five years.
Since he had hardly seen anyone since he and Ford Prefect had parted
company four years previously, he hadn't been insulted in all that time
either.
Except just once.
It had happened on a spring evening about two years previously.
He was returning to his cave just a little after dusk when he became aware
of lights flashing eerily through the clouds. He turned and stared, with hope
suddenly clambering through his heart. Rescue. Escape. The castaway's
impossible dream - a ship.
And as he watched, as he stared in wonder and excitement, a long silver
ship descended through the warm evening air, quietly, without fuss, its long
legs unlocking in a smooth ballet of technology.
It alighted gently on the ground, and what little hum it had generated
died away, as if lulled by the evening calm.
A ramp extended itself.
Light streamed out.
A tall figure appeared silhouetted in the hatchway. It walked down the
ramp and stood in front of Arthur.
"You're a jerk, Dent," it said simply.
It was alien, very alien. It had a peculiar alien tallness, a peculiar
alien flattened head, peculiar slitty little alien eyes, extravagantly draped
golden ropes with a peculiarly alien collar design, and pale grey-green alien
skin which had about it that lustrous shine which most grey-green faces can
only acquire with plenty of exercise and very expensive soap.
Arthur boggled at it.
It gazed levelly at him.
Arthur's first sensations of hope and trepidation had instantly been
overwhelmed by astonishment, and all sorts of thoughts were battling for the
use of his vocal chords at this moment.
"Whh ...?" he said.
"Bu ... hu ... uh ..." he added.
"Ru ... ra ... wah ... who?" he managed finally to say and lapsed into a
frantic kind of silence. He was feeling the effects of having not said
anything to anybody for as long as he could remember.
The alien creature frowned briefly and consulted what appeared to be some
species of clipboard which he was holding in his thin and spindly alien hand.
"Arthur Dent?" it said.
Arthur nodded helplessly.
"Arthur Philip Dent?" pursued the alien in a kind of efficient yap.
"Er ... er ... yes ... er ... er," confirmed Arthur.
"You're a jerk," repeated the alien, "a complete asshole."
"Er ..."
The creature nodded to itself, made a peculiar alien tick on its clipboard
and turned briskly back towards the ship.
"Er ..." said Arthur desperately, "er ..."
"Don't give me that!" snapped the alien. It marched up the ramp, through
the hatchway and disappeared into the ship. The ship sealed itself. It started
to make a low throbbing hum.
"Er, hey!" shouted Arthur, and started to run helplessly towards it.
"Wait a minute!" he called. "What is this? What? Wait a minute!"
The ship rose, as if shedding its weight like a cloak to the ground, and
hovered briefly. It swept strangely up into the evening sky. It passed up
through the clouds, illuminating them briefly, and then was gone, leaving
Arthur alone in an immensity of land dancing a helplessly tiny little dance.
"What?" he screamed. "What? What? Hey, what? Come back here and say that!"
He jumped and danced until his legs trembled, and shouted till his lungs
rasped. There was no answer from anyone. There was no one to hear him or speak
to him.
The alien ship was already thundering towards the upper reaches of the
atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void which separates the very
few things there are in the Universe from each other.
Its occupant, the alien with the expensive complexion, leaned back in its
single seat. His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He was a man
with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to
admit, but it was at least a purpose and it did at least keep him on the move.
Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was --indeed, is - one of the
Universe's very small number of immortal beings.
Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but
Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of
serene bastards. He had had his immortality thrust upon him by an unfortunate
accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of
rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no
one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it
happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both,
trying.
Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some light
jazz on the ship's stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it
hadn't been for Sunday afternoons, he really could have done.
To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks,
cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving
the hell out of everybody.
In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that
terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2.55, when you know that
you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you
stare at any given paragraph in the papers 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.
So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other
people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general,
and everyone in it in particular.
This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing which
would drive him on, an
d 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.
When people protested to him, as they sometimes had done, that the plan
was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of
people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a
steely look and say, "A man can dream can't he?"
And so he started out. He equipped a spaceship that was built to last with
the computer capable of handling all the data processing involved in keeping
track of the entire population of the known Universe and working out the
horrifically complicated routes involved.
His ship fled through the inner orbits of the Sol star system, preparing
to slingshot round the sun and fling itself out into interstellar space.
"Computer," he said.
"Here," yipped the computer.
"Where next?"
"Computing that."
Wowbagger gazed for a moment at the fantastic jewellery of the night, the
billions of tiny diamond worlds that dusted the infinite darkness with light.
Every one, every single one, was on his itinerary. Most of them he would be
going to millions of times over.
He imagined for a moment his itinerary connecting up all the dots in the
sky like a child's numbered dots puzzle. He hoped that from some vantage point
in the Universe it might be seen to spell a very, very rude word.
The computer beeped tunelessly to indicate that it had finished its
calculations.
"Folfanga," it said. It beeped.
"Fourth world of the Folfanga system," it continued. It beeped again.
"Estimated journey time, three weeks," it continued further. It beeped
again.
"There to meet with a small slug," it beeped, "of the genus ARth-Urp-Hil+
Ipdenu."
"I believe," it added, after a slight pause during which it beeped, "that
you had decided to call it a brainless prat."
Wowbagger grunted. He watched the majesty of creation outside his window
for a moment or two.
"I think I'll take a nap," he said, and then added, "what network areas
are we going to be passing through in the next few hours?"
The computer beeped.
"Cosmovid, Thinkpix and Home Brain Box," it said, and beeped.
"Any movies I haven't seen thirty thousand times already?"
"No."
"Uh."
"There's Angst in Space. You've only seen that thirty-three thousand five
hundred and seventeen times."
"Wake me for the second reel."
The computer beeped.
"Sleep well," it said.
The ship fled on through the night.
Meanwhile, on Earth, it began to pour with rain and Arthur Dent sat in his
cave and had one of the most truly rotten evenings of his entire life,
thinking of things he could have said to the alien and swatting flies, who
also had a rotten evening.
The next day he made himself a pouch out of rabbit skin because he thought
it would be useful to keep things in.
Chapter 2
This morning, two years later than that, was sweet and fragrant as he
emerged from the cave he called home until he could think of a better name for
it or find a better cave.
Though his throat was sore again from his early morning yell of horror, he
was suddenly in a terrifically good mood. He wrapped his dilapidated dressing
gown tightly around him and beamed at the bright morning.
The air was clear and scented, the breeze flitted lightly through the tall
grass around his cave, the birds were chirruping at each other, the
butterflies were flitting about prettily, and the whole of nature seemed to be
conspiring to be as pleasant as it possibly could.
It wasn't all the pastoral delights that were making Arthur feel so
cheery, though. He had just had a wonderful idea about how to cope with the
terrible lonely isolation, the nightmares, the failure of all his attempts at
horticulture, and the sheer futurelessness and futility of his life here on
prehistoric Earth, which was that he would go mad.
He beamed again and took a bite out of a rabbit leg left over from his
supper. He chewed happily for a few moments and then decided formally to
announce his decision.
He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and
hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He
spread his arms out wide.
"I will go mad!" he announced.
"Good idea," said Ford Prefect, clambering down from the rock on which he
had been sitting.
Arthur's brain somersaulted. His jaw did press-ups.
"I went mad for a while," said Ford, "did me no end of good."
"You see," said Ford, "- ..."
"Where have you been?" interrupted Arthur, now that his head had finished
working out.
"Around," said Ford, "around and about." He grinned in what he accurately
judged to be an infuriating manner. "I just took my mind off the hook for a
bit. I reckoned that if the world wanted me badly enough it would call back.
It did."
He took out of his now terribly battered and dilapidated satchel his Sub+
Etha Sens-O-Matic.
"At least," he said, "I think it did. This has been playing up a bit." He
shook it. "If it was a false alarm I shall go mad," he said, "again."
Arthur shook his head and sat down. He looked up.
"I thought you must be dead ..." he said simply.
"So did I for a while," said Ford, "and then I decided I was a lemon for a
couple of weeks. A kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a
gin and tonic."
Arthur cleared his throat, and then did it again.
"Where," he said, "did you ...?"
"Find a gin and tonic?" said Ford brightly. "I found a small lake that
thought it was a gin and tonic, and jumped in and out of that. At least, I
think it thought it was a gin and tonic."
"I may," he added with a grin which would have sent sane men scampering
into trees, "have been imagining it."
He waited for a reaction from Arthur, but Arthur knew better than that.
"Carry on," he said levelly.
"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."
"And this is you sane again, is it?" said Arthur. "I ask merely for
information."
"I went to Africa," said Ford.
"Yes?"
"Yes."
"What was that like?"
"And this is your cave is it?" said Ford.
"Er, yes," said Arthur. He felt very strange. After nearly four years of
total isolation he was so pleased and relieved to see Ford that he could
almost cry. Ford was, on the other hand, an almost immediately annoying
person.
"Very nice," said Ford, in reference to Arthur's cave. "You must hate it."
Arthur didn't bother to reply.
"Africa was very interesting," sai
d Ford, "I behaved very oddly there."
He gazed thoughtfully into the distance.
"I took up being cruel to animals," he said airily. "But only," he added,
"as a hobby."
"Oh yes," said Arthur, warily.
"Yes," Ford assured him. "I won't disturb you with the details because
they would -"
"What?"
"Disturb you. But you may be interested to know that I am singlehandedly
responsible for the evolved shape of the animal you came to know in later
centuries as a giraffe. And I tried to learn to fly. Do you believe me?"
"Tell me," said Arthur.
"I'll tell you later. I'll just mention that the Guide says ..."
"The ...?"
"Guide. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You remember?"
"Yes. I remember throwing it in the river."
"Yes," said Ford, "but I fished it out."
"You didn't tell me."
"I didn't want you to throw it in again."
"Fair enough," admitted Arthur. "It says?"
"What?"
"The Guide says?"
"The Guide says 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." He
smiled weakly. He pointed at the knees of his trousers and held his arms up to
show the elbows. They were all torn and worn through.
"I haven't done very well so far," he said. He stuck out his hand. "I'm
very glad to see you again, Arthur," he added.
Arthur shook his head in a sudden access of emotion and bewilderment.
"I haven't seen anyone for years," he said, "not anyone. I can hardly even
remember how to speak. I keep forgetting words. I practise you see. I practise
by talking to ... talking to ... what are those things people think you're mad
if you talk to? Like George the Third."
"Kings?" suggested Ford.
"No, no," said Arthur. "The things he used to talk to. We're surrounded by
them for heaven's sake. I've planted hundreds myself. They all died. Trees! I
practise by talking to trees. What's that for?"
Ford still had his hand stuck out. Arthur looked at it with
incomprehension.
"Shake," prompted Ford.
Arthur did, nervously at first, as if it might turn out to be a fish. Then
he grasped it vigorously with both hands in an overwhelming flood of relief.
He shook it and shook it.
After a while Ford found it necessary to disengage. They climbed to the
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