CHEERLEADER: Oh People who wait in the Shadow of Deep Thought! Honoured Descendants of Vroomfondel and Majikthise the Greatest and Most Truly Interesting Pundits the Universe has ever known . . . the Time of Waiting is over!
F/X: PEAK CHEERING
CHEERLEADER: Seven and a half million years our race has waited for this Great and Hopefully Englightening Day! The Day of the Answer!
F/X: CHEERING PEAKS
CHEERLEADER: Never again will we wake up in the morning and think ‘Who am I?’, ‘What is the purpose in Life?’, ‘Does it really, Cosmically Speaking, matter if I don’t get up and go to work?’ For today we will finally learn, once and for all, the plain and simple answer to all these Nagging Little Problems of Life, the Universe and Everything! From today we can enjoy our games of Brockian Ultra-Cricket in the firm and comfortable knowledge that the meaning of Life is now well and Truly Sorted Out!
F/X: WILD CHEERING. THE CHEERING SUDDENLY DROPS INTO THE BACKGROUND AS WE SWITCH TO AN INTERNAL SCENE
ONE: Seventy five thousand generations ago our ancestors set this programme in motion.
THREE: An awesome project.
F/X: DEEP THOUGHT CLEARS HIS THROAT
TWO: Deep Thought prepares to speak.
DEEP THOUGHT: Good Evening.
ONE: Good Evening . . . Oh Deep Thought. . . do you have . . .
DEEP THOUGHT: An answer for you? Yes, I have.
THREE: There really is one?
DEEP THOUGHT: There really is one.
ONE: To Everything? To the great question of Life, the Universe and Everything?
DEEP THOUGHT: Yes.
TWO: And are you ready to give it to us?
DEEP THOUGHT: I am.
ONE: Now?
DEEP THOUGHT: Now.
ONE: Wow.
(Pause)
DEEP THOUGHT: Though I don’t think you’re going to like it.
TWO: Doesn’t matter! We must know it!
DEEP THOUGHT: Now?
TWO: Yes! Now!
DEEP THOUGHT: All right
(Pause)
ONE: Well?
DEEP THOUGHT: You’re really not going to like it.
TWO: Tell us!!!!
DEEP THOUGHT: All right. The Answer to Everything . . .
TWO: Yes . . . !
DEEP THOUGHT: Life, The Universe and Everything . . .
ONE: Yes . . . !
DEEP THOUGHT: Is . . .
THREE: Yes . . . !
DEEP THOUGHT: IS . . .
ONE/TWO: Yes . . . !!!
DEEP THOUGHT: Forty two.
(Pause. Actually quite a long one)
TWO: We’re going to get lynched, you know that.
DEEP THOUGHT: It was a tough assignment.
ONE/TWO: Forty two!!
DEEP THOUGHT: I think the problem such as it was was too broadly based. You never actually stated what the question was.
TWO: But it was the Ultimate Question, the Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything!
DEEP THOUGHT: Exactly. Now you know that the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is forty two, all you need to do now is find out what the Ultimate Question is.
TWO: All right, all right, all right. Can you please . . . tell us . . . the Question?
DEEP THOUGHT: The Ultimate Question?
TWO: Yes.
DEEP THOUGHT: Of Life, the Universe?
DEEP THOUGHT: Of Life, the Universe?
ONE: And everything?
DEEP THOUGHT: And everything.
TWO: Yes.
DEEP THOUGHT: Tricky.
TWO: But can you do it?
DEEP THOUGHT: . . . No.
ONE/TWO: (Slumping) Oh God . . .
DEEP THOUGHT: But I’ll tell you who can.
TWO: Who? Tell us, tell us.
DEEP THOUGHT: I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me. A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate – and yet I will design it for you. A computer which can calculate the question to the Ultimate answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself will form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten million year programme. Yes, I shall design this computer for you, and I shall name it for you. And it shall be called the Earth.
TWO: Oh. What a dull name.
F/X: TAPE TURNS OFF
SLARTIBARTFAST: So there you have it. Deep Thought designed it, we built it and you lived on it.
ARTHUR: And the Vogons came and destroyed it five minutes before the programme was completed.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Yes. Ten million years of planning and work gone just like that. Well, that’s bureaucracy for you.
ARTHUR: You know, 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.
SLARTIBARTFAST: No, that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.
ARTHUR: Well . . . perhaps that means that somewhere . . . outside the Universe . . .
SLARTIBARTFAST: Maybe. Who cares? Perhaps I’m old and tired, 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 say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me – I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway. Where’s the sense in that? None that I’ve been able to make out. I’ve been doing fjords all my life . . . for a fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award. In this replacement Earth we’re building they’ve given me Africa to do and of course I’m doing it with all fjords again because I happen to like them and I’m old fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it’s not equatorial enough. What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.
ARTHUR: And are you?
SLARTIBARTFAST: No. That’s where it all falls down of course.
ARTHUR: Pity, it sounded like quite a good lifestyle otherwise.
P.A. VOICE: (Paging) Attention please Slartibartfast. Would Slartibartfast and the visiting Earth creature please report immediately, repeat immediately, to the works reception area. The mice aren’t wanting to hang about in this dimension all day.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Come on, I suppose we’d better go and see what they want.
ARTHUR: I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. As soon as I reach some kind of definite policy about what is my kind of music and my kind of restaurant and my kind of overdraft, people start blowing up my kind of planet and throwing me out of their kind of spaceships. It’s so hard to build up anything coherent. I’m sorry all this must sound rather fatuous to you.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Yes, I thought so.
ARTHUR: Just forget I ever said it.
GRAMS: NARRATOR BACKGROUND
NARRATOR: It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated. For instance, at the very moment that Arthur Dent said ‘I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle’ a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle. The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time . . . and a dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl’hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G’Gugvant leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green, sweet-smelling steam, and with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in his s
ickly broiling vapour and at that very moment, the words ‘I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle’ drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately in the Vl’hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war. Eventually of course, after their galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our Galaxy, now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the planet Earth, where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but are powerless to prevent it. ‘It’s just life,’ they say. Meanwhile, Arthur Dent is about to discover the answer to the disturbing question posed in last week’s instalment. Are his companions Ford, Zaphod and Trillian lying bleeding to death in a subterranean corridor, or have they merely slipped out for a quick meal somewhere?
F/X: HUM OF DOOR OPENING. SUBDUED BUZZING OF DINING ROOM
TRILLIAN: (At a slight distance) Arthur! You’re safe!
ARTHUR: (Slightly startled) Am I? Oh good.
FORD: Hi Arthur, come and join us.
ARTHUR: Ford! Trillian! Zaphod! What happened to you?
ZAPHOD: Well our hosts here attacked us with a fantastic Dismodulating Anti Phase stun ray and then invited us to this amazingly keen meal by way of making it up to us.
ARTHUR: Hosts? What hosts? I can’t see any hosts?
BENJY MOUSE: (Not quite certain about the voice treatment here yet. Obviously it has to suggest mouse-likeness, but it shouldn’t sound silly, as they are actually quite relaxed and sophisticated mice) Welcome to lunch, Earth Creature.
ARTHUR: What? Who said that? Ugh! There’s a mouse on the table.
FORD: Oh, haven’t you found out yet, Arthur?
ARTHUR: What? Oh I see, yes . . . yes, I just wasn’t quite prepared for the full reality of it.
TRILLIAN: Arthur, let me introduce you. This is Benjy Mouse.
BENJY: Hi.
TRILLIAN: And this is Frankie mouse.
FRANKIE: Nice to meet you.
TRILLIAN: It seems they control quite a large sector of the Universe in our dimension.
ARTHUR: But aren’t they . . .
TRILLIAN: Yes, they are the mice I took with me from the Earth. It seems our whole journey has been stage managed from the beginning.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Er, excuse me . . .
BENJY: Yes, thank you, Slartibartfast, you may go.
SLARTIBARTFAST: (Slightly surprised and crestfallen) What? Oh . . . oh very well. Thank you sir, I’ll . . . I’ll just go and get on with some of my fjords then.
FRANKIE: Er, in fact that won’t be necessary. We won’t be requiring the new Earth after all. We’ve had this rather interesting proposition put to us.
SLARTIBARTFAST: What? You can’t mean that. I’ve got a thousand glaciers poised and ready to roll over Africa.
FRANKIE: Well, perhaps you can take a quick skiing holiday before you dismantle them.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Skiing holiday! Those glaciers are works of art! Elegantly sculptured contours, soaring pinnacles of ice, deep majestic ravines, it would be sacrilege to go skiing on High Art.
FRANKIE: (Firmly) Thank you Slartibartfast, that will be all.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Yes sir, thank you very much sir. Well, goodbye Earthman. Hope the lifestyle comes together.
F/X: DOOR HUMS OPEN WITH GRINDING SOUND
ARTHUR: Goodbye then. Sorry about the fjords.
BENJY: Now to business.
FORD and ZAPHOD: To business.
F/X: GLASSES CLINK
BENJY: I beg your pardon?
FORD: I’m sorry, I thought you were proposing a toast.
BENJY: Now, Earth Creature, we have, as you know, been more or less running your planet for the last ten million years in order to find this wretched thing called the Ultimate Question.
ARTHUR: Why?
FRANKIE: No, we already thought of that one, but it doesn’t fit the answer. ‘Why?’, ‘Forty two’. You see, it doesn’t work.
ARTHUR: No, I mean why have you been doing it?
FRANKIE: Well, eventually just habit I think, to be brutally honest. And this is more or less the point. We’re sick to the teeth of the whole thing and the prospect of doing it all over again on account of those whinnet-ridden Vogons quite frankly gives me the screaming heeby-jeebies, you know what I mean?
BENJY: We’ve been offered a quite enormously fat contract to do the 5D TV chat show and lecture circuit, and I’m very much inclined to take it.
ZAPHOD: (Promptingly, because there’s something in it for them) I would, wouldn’t you, Ford?
FORD: Oh yes, jump at it like a shot.
FRANKIE: I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth it’s that the entire multi-dimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs; and if it comes to a choice between spending 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.
ARTHUR: But that’s exactly the attitude those philosophers took. Does no one in this galaxy do anything other than appear on chat shows?
FRANKIE: The point is this . . . we are in a position to give you a very important commission. We still want to find the Ultimate Question because it gives us a lot of bargaining muscle with the 5D TV companies, so it’s worth a lot of money. (They giggle avariciously) I mean quite clearly if we’re sitting there looking very relaxed in the studio mentioning that we happen to know the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything and then eventually have to admit that it’s forty two, then I think the show’s probably quite short.
ARTHUR: Yes, but doesn’t that mean you’ve got to go through your whole ten million year programme again?
FRANKIE: We think there might be a short cut. Your agent . . .
ZAPHOD: That’s me.
ARTHUR: (Startled) Is it?
FRANKIE: Your agent has suggested that both you and Earth girl, as last generation products of the computer matrix are probably in an ideal position to find the question for us and find it quickly. Go out and find it for us and we’ll make you a reasonably rich man.
ZAPHOD: We’re holding out for extremely rich.
FRANKIE: All right, extremely rich. You drive a hard bargain, Beeblebrox.
F/X: SIRENS GO OFF
P.A. VOICE: Emergency, emergency . . . hostile ship has landed on planet. Intruders now within works reception area. Defence stations, defence stations.
BENJY: Hell’s bells, what is it now? trillian Zaphod! Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
ZAPHOD: Police. Hell and bat’s do’s. We’ve got to get out.
BENJY: Police?
ZAPHOD: Yeah, it’s this wretched space craft we’ve stolen. I left them a note explaining how they could make a profit on the insurance claim but it doesn’t seem to have worked.
FORD: Come on then! Let’s move.
F/X: CHAIRS AND TABLES KNOCKED BACK AS THEY JUMP TO THEIR FEET
FRANKIE: Earthman, find us the question!
ARTHUR: How?
FRANKIE: Er . . . no that doesn’t work either.
ZAPHOD: We’ll find it. Come on, get out of here!
FORD: Thanks for the meal guys. Sorry we’ve got to rush.
F/X: THEY ALL RUN OUT OF THE ROOM
(Fade out. Fade in)
F/X: RUNNING FEET
FORD: Which way you reckon, Zaphod?
ZAPHOD: At a wild guess I’d say down here.
ZAPHOD: You want to try a guess at all, Ford?
FORD: OK this way.
BANG BANG: (Cop, similar) We don’t want to shoot you, Beeblebrox.
ZAPHOD: Suits me fine.
TRILLIAN: We’re cornered.
ZAPHOD: Hell, I’ve dropped my adrenalin pills. All right, behind this computer bank, get down.
F/X: EXTREMELY VICIOUS SOUNDING ZAP GUN, DISCHARGES ACROSS THE STEREO IMAGE (ALL RIGHT, IT FIRES)
ARTHUR: Hey, they’re shooting at us.
ZAPHOD: Yeah.
ARTHUR: I thought they said they didn’t want to do that.
TRILLIAN: Yeah, I thought they said that.
ZAPHOD: (Shouting) Hey, I thought you said you didn’t want to shoot us!
SHOOTY: (Shouting) It isn’t easy being a cop!
FORD: What did he say?
ZAPHOD: He said it isn’t easy being a cop.
FORD: Well surely that’s his problem, isn’t it?
ZAPHOD: I’d have thought so.
FORD: (Shouting) Hey listen, I think we’ve got enough problems of our own with you shooting at us, so if you could avoid laying your problems on us as well I think we’d probably find it easier to cope!
BANG BANG: (Shouting) Now see here, buddy, you’re not dealing with any dumb two bit trigger pumping morons with low hair lines, little piggy eyes and no conversation, we’re a couple of intelligent caring guys who you’d probably quite like if you met us socially.
SHOOTY: That’s right, I’m really sensitive.
BANG BANG: I don’t go around gratuitously shooting people and then bragging about it in seedy space rangers’ bars. I go around gratuitously shooting people and then agonise about it afterwards to my girlfriend.
SHOOTY: And I write novels!
BANG BANG: Yeah, he writes them in crayon.
SHOOTY: Though I haven’t had any of them published yet, so I’d better warn you I’m in a meeeeen mood.
FORD: Who are these guys?
ZAPHOD: I think I preferred it when they were shooting.
BANG BANG: (Shouting) So are you going to come quietly or are you going to let us blast you out?
FORD: (Shouting) Which would you rather?
F/X: FUSILLADE OF VICIOUS ELECTRIC GUNFIRE WHICH CARRIES ON FOR A WHILE
(Pause as the echoes die away)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Original Radio Scripts Page 10