The Hitchhiker's Guide to the G - Douglas Adams, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxyfor Jonny Brock and Clare Gorstand all other Arlingtoniansfor tea, sympathy, and a sofaFar out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end ofthe western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregardedyellow sun.Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million milesis an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they stillthink digital watches are a pretty neat idea.This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: mostof the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of thesewere largely concerned with the movements of small green piecesof paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the smallgreen pieces of paper that were unhappy.And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, andmost of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a bigmistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. Andsome said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that noone should ever have left the oceans.And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one manhad been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to benice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in asmall cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was thathad been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how theworld could be made a good and happy place. This time it wasright, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed toanything.Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone-about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the ideawas lost forever.This is not her story.But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and someof its consequences.It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker'sGuide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published onEarth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen orheard of by any Earthman.Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come outof the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor - of which noEarthman had ever heard either.Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highlysuccessful one - more popular than the Celestial Home CareOmnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in ZeroGravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy ofphilosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More ofGod's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer EasternRim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplantedthe great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository ofall knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions andcontains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate,it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two importantrespects.First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the wordsDon't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of itsextraordinary consequences, and the story of how theseconsequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkablebook begins very simply.It begins with a house.The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village.It stood on its own and looked over a broad spread of WestCountry farmland. Not a remarkable house by any means - it wasabout thirty years old, squattish, squarish, made of brick, andhad four windows set in the front of a size and proportion whichmore or less exactly failed to please the eye.The only person for whom the house was in any way special wasArthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the onehe lived in. He had lived in it for about three years, ever sincehe had moved out of London because it made him nervous andirritable. He was about thirty as well, dark haired and never-quite at ease with himself. The thing that used to worry him mostwas the fact that people always used to ask him what he waslooking so worried about. He worked in local radio which healways used to tell his friends was a lot more interesting thanthey probably thought. It was, too - most of his friends workedin advertising.It hadn't properly registered with Arthur that the council wantedto knock down his house and build an bypass instead.At eight o'clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel verygood. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round hisroom, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, andstomped off to the bathroom to wash.Toothpaste on the brush - so. Scrub.Shaving mirror - pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For amoment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroomwindow. Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent's bristles.He shaved them off, washed, dried, and stomped off to the kitchento find something pleasant to put in his mouth.Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee. Yawn.The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment insearch of something to connect with.The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one.He stared at it."Yellow," he thought and stomped off back to his bedroom to getdressed.Passing the bathroom he stopped to drink a large glass of water,and another. He began to suspect that he was hung over. Why washe hung over? Had he been drinking the night before? He supposedthat he must have been. He caught a glint in the shaving mirror."Yellow," he thought and stomped on to the bedroom.He stood and thought. The pub, he thought. Oh dear, the pub. Hevaguely remembered being angry, angry about something that seemedimportant. He'd been telling people about it, telling peopleabout it at great length, he rather suspected: his clearestvisual recollection was of glazed looks on other people's faces.Something about a new bypass he had just found out about. It hadbeen in the pipeline for months only no one seemed to have knownabout it. Ridiculous. He took a swig of water. It would sortitself out, he'd decided, no one wanted a bypass, the councildidn't have a leg to stand on. It would sort itself out.God what a terrible hangover it had earned him though. He lookedat himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stuck out his tongue."Yellow," he thought. The word yellow wandered through his mindin search of something to connect with.Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in frontof a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path.Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he wasa carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specificallyhe was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council.Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a directmale-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though interveninggenerations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that hehad no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the onlyvestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were apronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for littlefur hats.He was by no means a great warrior: in fact he was a nervousworried man. Today he was particularly nervous and worriedbecause something had gone seriously wrong with his job - whichwas to see that Arthur Dent's house got cleared out of the waybefore the day was out."Come off it, Mr Dent,", he said, "you can't win you know. Youcan't lie in front of the bulldozer indefinitely." He tried tomake his eyes blaze fiercely but they just wouldn't do it.Arthur lay in the mud and squelched at him."I'm game," he said, "we'll see who rusts first.""I'm afraid you're going to have to accept it," said Mr Prossergripping his fur hat and rolling it round the top of his head,"this bypass has got to be built and it's going to be built!""First I've heard of it," said Arthur, "why's it going to bebuilt?"Mr Prosser shook his finger at him for a bit, then stopped andput it away again."What do you mean, why's it got to be built?" he said. "It's abypass. You've got to build bypasses."Bypasses are devices which allow some people to drive from pointA to point B very fast whilst other people dash from point B topoint A very fast. People living at point C, being a pointdirectly in between, are often given to wonder what's so greatabout point A that so many people of point B are so keen to getthere, and what's so great about point B that so many people ofpoint A are so keen to get there. They often wish that peoplewould just once and for all work out where the hell they wantedto be.Mr Prosser wanted to be at point D. Point D wasn't anywhere inparticular, it was just any convenient point a very long way frompoints A, B and C. He would have a nice little cottage at pointD, with axes over the door, and spend a pleasant amount of timeat point E, which would be the nearest pub to point D. His wifeof course wanted climbing roses, but he wanted axes. He didn'tknow why - he just liked axes. He flus...
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