Chapter 2

Here’s what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless liquid made by the fermentation of sugars that has an intoxicating effect on some life forms.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink ever is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster^[31]. It says that the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like your brains are smashed by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

The Guide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you’ll have to pay for one, and what organizations will help you recover afterwards.

The Guide even tells you how you can mix one yourself.

Take the juice from one bottle of that Janx Spirit, it says. Pour into it some water from the seas of Santraginus V. Add three cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin and four liters of Fallian marsh gas into the mixture. Add a drop of Qualactin Hypermint extract, smelling of all the dark Qualactin Zones, sweet and mystic. Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve in the drink. Sprinkle it with Zamphuor. Add an olive. Drink… but… very carefully…

Now you see why The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sells much better than the Encyclopedia Galactica.

* * *

“Six pints of beer,” said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. “And quickly please – the world’s about to end^[32].”

The barman of the Horse and Groom was an old man. He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at Ford Prefect. Ford ignored him and stared out of the window, so the barman looked instead at Arthur who shrugged and said nothing.

So the barman said, “Oh yes, sir? Nice weather for it,” and started pouring pints. Then he tried again, “Going to watch the match this afternoon?”

Ford glanced at him. “No, no point^[33],” he said, and looked back out of the window.

“Why is that, sir?” said the barman. “Arsenal^[34] has no chance?”

“No, no,” said Ford, “it’s just that the world’s about to end.”

“Oh yes, sir, so you said,” said the barman, looking this time at Arthur. “Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did.”^[35]

Ford looked back at him, surprised. “No, not really,” he said and frowned.

The barman sighed. “There you are, sir, six pints,” he said.

Arthur smiled at him and shrugged again. He turned and smiled at the rest of the pub just in case any of them had heard what was going on.

None of them had, and none of them could understand what he was smiling at them for.

A man sitting next to Ford at the bar looked at the two men, looked at the six pints, and grinned a stupid hopeful grin at them.

“Get off^[36], they’re ours,” said Ford, giving him a look that would scare an Algolian Suntiger. Ford put a five-pound note on the bar. He said, “Keep the change.^[37] You’ve got ten minutes left to spend it.”

The barman simply decided to walk away for a while.

“Ford,” said Arthur, “would you please tell me what the hell is going on?”

“Drink it,” said Ford, “you’ve got three pints.”

“Three pints?” said Arthur. “At lunchtime?”

The man next to Ford grinned again and nodded happily. Ford ignored him. He said, “Time is an illusion, especially lunchtime.”

“Very deep thought,” said Arthur, “you should send it to the Reader’s Digest^[38].”

“Drink it.”

“Why three pints?”

“Muscle relaxant.^[39] You’ll need it.”

“Muscle relaxant?”

“Muscle relaxant.”

Arthur stared into his beer. “Did I do anything wrong today,” he said, “or has the world always been like this?”

“All right,” said Ford, “I’ll try to explain. How long have we known each other?”

“How long?” Arthur thought. “For about five years, maybe six,” he said. “Most of it seemed to make some sense at the time^[40].”

“All right,” said Ford. “What if I said that I’m not from Guildford, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse?”

Arthur shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, drinking beer. “Why?”

Ford gave up. It really wasn’t important at the moment when the world was about to end. He just said: “Drink it. The world’s about to end.”

Arthur gave the rest of the pub another smile. The rest of the pub frowned at him. A man waved at him to stop smiling at them and mind his own business^[41].

“This must be Thursday,” said Arthur over his beer. “I never liked Thursdays.”

Chapter 3

On this particular Thursday, something was moving quietly through the ionosphere^[42] many miles above the surface of the planet located near star Sol^[43]; several somethings in fact, several dozen huge yellow somethings, huge as office buildings, silent as birds. They moved easily, taking their time^[44], grouping, preparing. The planet beneath them didn’t know of their presence, which was just how they wanted it to be. The huge yellow somethings went unnoticed even over Cape Canaveral^[45].

The only place they registered was on a small black device called a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic which blinked quietly. It lay in the darkness inside Ford Prefect’s leather backpack. The contents of his bag were quite interesting, in fact, and would have made any Earth physicist’s eyes pop out of his head. Besides the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic he had an Electronic Thumb – a short black rod, smooth, with a couple of switches at one end; he also had a device which looked like a large electronic calculator. This had about a hundred small buttons and a screen on which any of a million “pages” could immediately appear. It looked very complicated, and this was one of the reasons why its plastic cover had the words Don’t Panic on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable book that ever came out of the great publishing house of Ursa Minor – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would need several very large buildings to carry it in.

Besides that, in Ford Prefect’s bag there were a few pens, a notepad, and a large bath towel from Marks & Spencer^[46].

* * *

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is the most useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly because it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you travel across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant sandy beaches of Santraginus V; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow river Moth; wet it for use in fighting; wrap it round your head to avoid the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a stupid animal, it thinks that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal^[47], and of course dry yourself with it if it’s still clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has great psychological value. For some reason, if a non-hitchhiker (a strag) sees that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically think that he also has a toothbrush, soap, tin of biscuits, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather clothes, space suit etc., etc. Then the strag will happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the Galaxy and still know where his towel is is clearly a remarkable man. Thus there’s a phrase which has got into hitchhiking slang: “Hey, you know Ford Prefect? That’s a guy who really knows where his towel is.”

* * *

Lying quietly on top of the towel in Ford Prefect’s backpack, the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic began to blink more quickly. Miles above the surface of the planet the huge yellow somethings began to spread out.

“You got a towel with you?” said Ford Prefect suddenly to Arthur.

Arthur, struggling through his third pint, looked round at him. “Why? No. Should I have?” He had given up being surprised any longer.

Ford clicked his tongue in irritation. “Drink up^[48],” he said.

At that moment the dull sound of a crash from outside was heard over the low hum of the pub, over the sound of the jukebox, over the sound of the man next to Ford drinking the whisky Ford had eventually bought him.

Arthur jumped to his feet. “What’s that?” he yelled.

“Don’t worry,” said Ford, “they haven’t started yet.”

“Thank God for that,” said Arthur and relaxed.

“It’s probably just your house being knocked down,” said Ford, finishing his last pint.

“What?” shouted Arthur. Suddenly Ford’s spell was broken. Arthur looked wildly around him and ran to the window.

“My God, they are! They’re knocking my house down. What the hell am I doing in the pub, Ford?”

“It hardly makes any difference at this stage,” said Ford, “let them have their fun.”

“Fun?” yelled Arthur. “Fun?” He quickly looked out of the window again to check if they were talking about the same thing. “Damn their fun!” he shouted and ran out of the pub angrily waving an almost empty beer glass. He made no friends at all in the pub that lunchtime.

“Stop, you vandals!” yelled Arthur. “Stop!”

Ford had to go after him. Turning quickly to the barman he asked for four packets of peanuts.

“There you are, sir,” said the barman, putting the packets on the bar, “twenty-eight pence if you’d be so kind.”

Ford was very kind – he gave the barman another five-pound note and told him to keep the change. The barman looked at it and then looked at Ford. He suddenly shivered: he had a momentary sensation which he didn’t understand because no one on Earth had ever had it before.

In moments of great stress, every life form gives out a tiny signal. This signal simply means how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn’t very far, so such signals are too tiny to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.

For a moment the barman was hit by a shocking sensation of distance. He didn’t know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with respect.

“Are you serious, sir?” he said in a small whisper that made the whole pub silent. “You think the world’s going to end?”

“Yes,” said Ford.

“This afternoon?”

“Yes,” he said happily, “in less than two minutes.”

The barman couldn’t believe it, but he couldn’t believe the sensation he had just had either.

“Isn’t there anything we can do about it then?” he said.

“No, nothing,” said Ford, stufnif g the peanuts into his pockets.

Someone in the bar suddenly laughed at how stupid everyone had become. The man sitting next to Ford was a bit drunk by now. His looked up at Ford.

“I thought,” he said, “that if the world was going to end, we had to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something.”

“If you like, yes,” said Ford.

“That’s what they told us in the army,” said the man and looked back down at his whisky. “Will that help?” asked the barman.

“No,” said Ford and gave him a friendly smile. “Excuse me, I’ve got to go.” With a wave, he left.

The pub was silent for a moment longer, failing to understand that in a minute and a half they would suddenly turn into hydrogen, ozone and carbon monoxide^[49].

Then the barman cleared his throat. He heard himself say: “Last orders, please.”

* * *

The huge yellow machines began to go down and to move faster.

Ford knew they were there. This wasn’t the way he had wanted it.

Running up the road, Arthur had almost reached his house. He didn’t notice how cold it had suddenly become, he didn’t notice the wind, he didn’t notice the sudden rain. He didn’t notice anything but the bulldozers rolling over what had been his home.

“You barbarians!” he yelled. “I’ll sue the council!”

Ford was running after him very fast. Very, very fast.

“I’ll kill you!” yelled Arthur.

Arthur didn’t notice that the men were actually running away from the bulldozers; he didn’t notice that Mr. Prosser was staring into the sky. What Mr. Prosser had noticed was those huge yellow somethings that were moving through the clouds. Impossibly huge yellow somethings.

“And then I’ll do it again!” yelled Arthur, still running, “until I… until you…”

Arthur tripped and fell on his back. At last he noticed that something was going on. He looked up.

“What the hell’s that?” he shrieked.

Whatever it was moved across the sky and tore it apart with terrible noise.

It’s difficult to say exactly what the people on the surface of the planet were doing now because they didn’t really know what they were doing. None of it made any sense: running into houses, running out of houses, screaming at the noise. All around the world city streets filled with people, cars crashed into each other as the noise fell on them.

Only one man stood and watched the sky, with terrible sadness in his eyes and rubber plugs in his ears^[50]. He knew exactly what was happening and had known since his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic had started blinking in the night and woken him up. It was what he had waited for all these years, but when he had got the signal, sitting alone in his small dark room, coldness had gripped his heart. Of all the races in the Galaxy who could have come and said a big hello to planet Earth, he thought, it just didn’t have to be the Vogons.

Still he knew what he had to do. As the Vogon craft moved through the air high above him, he opened his bag. He threw away a couple of things. He wouldn’t need them where he was going. Everything was ready, everything was prepared.

He knew where his towel was.

* * *

A sudden silence hit the Earth. It was worse than the noise. For a while nothing happened.

The great ships hung in the air, over every nation on Earth. They hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, against the law of nature. Many people went into shock as their minds tried to understand what they were looking at. The ships just hung in the sky.

And still nothing happened.

Then there was a whisper, a sudden whisper of sound. Every hi-fi system in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder in the world quietly turned itself on. Every tin can, every dust bin, every window, every car, every wine glass, every piece of rusty metal became activated.

Before the Earth was gone, it turned into the greatest public address system^[51] ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no siren, just a simple message.

“People of Earth, your attention please,” a voice said, and it was wonderful. Wonderful, perfect sound.

“This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,” the voice continued. “As you know, the plans for development of the regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route^[52] through your star system, and your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take less that two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.”

The public address ended.

Terror moved slowly through the crowds of the people of Earth. They started to panic, but there was nowhere to run to.

Seeing all this, the Vogons turned on their public address again. It said: “There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the plans and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri^[53] for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to complain, and it’s too late to start making a fuss^[54] about it now.”

The public address was silent again and its echo drifted across the land. The huge ships turned slowly in the sky. On the underside of each ship a hatchway^[55] opened, an empty black space.

By this time somebody somewhere had used a radio transmitter and sent a message back to the Vogon ships, on behalf of^[56] the planet. Nobody ever heard what it said, they only heard the answer.

The public address was turned on again. The voice was annoyed. It said:

“What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven’s sake^[57], mankind, it’s only four light years away! I’m sorry, but if you don’t take any interest in the local affairs, that’s your own problem. Energize the demolition beams.”

Light poured out of the hatchways.

“I don’t know,” said the voice on the PA again, “bloody apathetic planet, I’ve no sympathy at all.” It cut off.^[58]

There was a terrible silence.

There was a terrible noise.

There was a terrible silence.

The Vogon Constructor fleet moved away into the black starry void.