The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams [0]
“Hitchhiker fans rejoice!… If you were hoping for more of the same zany, nonsensical mayhem produced in the earlier books, you’re in luck.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“It is Mr. Adams’s genius to hurl readers into a plot that seems to go everywhere and nowhere, then suddenly drop the pieces into place, click, click, click, like tumblers in a lock…. Delightful.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“A winner… The humor is hilarious, the cliffhangers are cliff-hanging, and overall it’s classic Hitchhiker’s shtick…. For those of you wondering about Elvis’s whereabouts—well, read Mostly Harmless.”
—The Boston Phoenix
“The universe, the parallel universes, the pasts, the presents and the futures, indeed the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash is hilariously up for grabs in Mostly Harmless.”
—The Denver Post
Books by Douglas Adams
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING
SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH
DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY
THE LONG DARK TEA-TIME OF THE SOUL
MOSTLY HARMLESS
THE SALMON OF DOUBT
THE ULTIMATE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
THE ORIGINAL HITCHHIKER RADIO SCRIPTS
THE MEANING OF LIFF (with John Lloyd)
LAST CHANCE TO SEE (with Mark Carwardine)
THE DEEPER MEANING OF LIFF (with John Lloyd)
Books published by The Random House Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1–800–733–3000.
To Jane and James
with many thanks
to Geoffrey Perkins for achieving the Improbable
to Paddy Kingsland, Lisa Braun and Alick Hale Munro for helping him
to John Lloyd for his held with the original Milliways script
to Simon Brett for starting the whole thing off
to the Paul Simon album One Trick Pony which I played incessantly while writing this book. Five years is far too long
And with very special thanks to Jacqui Graham for infinite patience, kindness and food in adversity
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another which states that this has already happened.
Chapter 1
The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.
The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
However, the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being the puzzling place it is, other explanations are constantly being sought.
For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.
For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two—and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.
And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet—especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program.
And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make