At school. Bored. Have proof. Have typed the following from memory:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested to this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained. Lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable; even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
And then one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl, sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly knew what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally realized how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
This is not her story.
But it is the story of the terrible, stupid catastrophe, and some of its consequences.
It is also the story of a book – a book called the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and before the terrible stupid catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
In fact, it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor, of which no Earthman had ever heard either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, but it is also a highly successful one. More popular than the Celestial Homecare Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-Three More Things to do in Zero-Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some more of God’s Greatest Mistakes, and Who is this God Person, Anyway?
In some of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions, and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in
two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper, and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.
The story of this terrible stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inexplicably intertwined with this remarkable book 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 out over a broad spread of West Country farmland.
Not a remarkable house, by any means. It was about thirty years old, squattish, squarish, made of brick, and had four windows set in the front of a size and proportion that more or less exactly failed to please the eye.
The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in. He had lived in it for about three years, ever since he had moved out of London because it made him nervous and irritable. He was about thirty as well, tall, dark haired, and never quite at ease with himself.
The thing that used to worry him the most was the fact that people were always asking him what it was he was looking so worried about.
He worked in local radio, which he always used to tell people was a lot more interesting than they probably thought. He was right, too – most of his friends worked in advertising.
On Wednesday night it had rained heavily; the lane was wet and muddy. But the Thursday morning sun shone brightly on Arthur Dent’s house for what was to be the last time.
It hadn’t properly registered with Arthur yet that the council wanted to knock it down and build a bypass instead.
At eight o’clock on Thursday morning, Arthur didn’t feel very good. He woke up blearily, got out of bed, walked blearily across his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.
Toothpaste on the brush, so, scrub.
Shaving mirror, pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window. Properly adjusted it reflected Arthur Dent’s bristles. He shaved them off, washed, dried, and stomped off to the kitchen to find something pleasant to put in his mouth.
Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee – yawn.
The word “bulldozer” wandered through his mind for a moment in search 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 get dressed.
Passing the bathroom, he stopped to drink a large glass of water, and another. He began to suspect that he was hung over. Why was he hung over? Had he been drinking the night before? He supposed that he must have been. He caught a glint in the shaving mirror. Yellow, he thought, and stomped off to the bedroom.
He stood and thought. The pub, he thought. Oh dear, the pub. He vaguely recalled being angry about something, angry about something that had seemed important. He’d been talking about it, talking about it at great length, he rather suspected. His clearest visual recollection was of glazed looks on other people’s faces...............................
helpmesavemeplease?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?
No comments:
Post a Comment