Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged was - indeed, is - one of the
Universe's very small number of immortal beings.

        Most of those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope
with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed, he had come to hate
them, the load of serene bastards. He had his immortality inadvertently
thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle
accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands. The precise
details are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the
exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up
looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.

        To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously,
taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just
generally outliving the hell out of everybody.

        In the end, it was Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and
that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you
know you've taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that
however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will
never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it
describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move
relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the Long Dark Teatime
of the Soul.

        So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear
at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe
in general, and everybody in it in particular.

        This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing
that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive
him on forever. It was this:

        He would insult the Universe.

        That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually,
personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit
his teeth over) in Alphabetical Order.

	When people protested to him, as they sometimes had done, that the
plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the
number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix
them with a steely look and say, "A man can dream, can't he?"

	And so he had started out. He equipped a spaceship that was built
to last with a computer capable of handling all the data processing
involved in keeping track of the entire population of the known Universe
and working out the horrifically complicated routes involved.

				   * * *


	 "Well, this is an interesting incident, Brian," said one radio
commentator to another. "I don't think there have been any mysterious
materialisations on the pitch since, oh since, well I don't think there
have been any - have there? - that I recall?"

         "Edgbaston, 1932?"

         "Ah, now what happened then...?"

         "Well, Peter, I think it was Canter facing Willcox coming up to
bowl from the pavilion end when a spectator suddenly ran straight across
the pitch."

         There was a pause whilst the first commentator considered this.

         "Ye..e...s..." he said, "yes, there's nothing actually very
mysterious about that, is there? He didn't actually materialise, did he?
Just ran on."

         "No, that's true, but he did claim to have seen something
materialise on the pitch."

         "Ah, did he?"

         "Yes. An alligator, I think, of some description."

         "Ah. And had anyone else noticed it?"

         "Apparently not. And no one was able to get a very detailed
description from him, so only the most perfunctory search was made."

         "And what happened to the man?"

        "Well, I think someone offered to take him off and give him some
lunch, but he explained that he'd already had a rather good one, so the
matter was dropped and Warwickshire went on to win by three wickets."

         "So, not very like this current instance. For those of you who've
just tuned in, you may be interested to know that, er... two men, two
rather scruffily attired men, and indeed a sofa - a Chesterfield I think?"

         "Yes, a Chesterfield."

         "Have just materialised here in the middle of Lord's Cricket
Ground.  But I don't think they meant any harm, they've been very
good-natured about it, and..."

         "Sorry, can I interrupt you a moment Peter and say that the sofa
has just vanished."

         "So it has. Well that's one mystery less. Still, it's definitely
one for the record books I think, particularly occurring at this dramatic
moment in play, England now needing only twenty-four runs to win the
series.  The men are leaving the pitch in the company of a police officer,
and I think everyone's settling down now and play is about to resume."

				   * * *

	``An SEP,'' he said, ``is something that we can't see, or don't
see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody
else's problem. That's what SEP means. Somebody Else's Problem.  The brain
just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you
won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to
catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.''

                                   * * *

	The technology involved in making anything invisible is so
infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand million,
nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine
thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a billion it is much
simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.
The ultra-famous sciento-magician Effrafax of Wug once bet his life that,
given a year, he could render the great megamountain Magramal entirely
invisible.

	Having spent most of the year jiggling around with immense
Lux-O-Valves and Refracto-Nullifiers and Spectrum-Bypass-O-Matics, he
realized, with nine hours to go, that he wasn't going to make it.

	So, he and his friends, and his friends' friends, and his friends'
friends' friends, and his friends' friends' friends' friends, and some
rather less good friends of theirs who happened to own a major stellar
trucking company, put in what now is widely recognized as being the
hardest night's work in history, and, sure enough, on the following day,
Magramal was no longer visible. Effrafax lost his bet --- and therefore
his life --- simply because some pedantic adjudicating official noticed
(a) that when walking around the area that Magramal ought to be he didn't
trip over or break his nose on anything, and (b) a suspicious-looking
extra moon.

	The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more
effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single
torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition
not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't
explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and
simple Somebody Else's Problem field on it, then people would have walked
past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed
that the thing was there.

                                   * * *



	The Bistromathic Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast
interstellar distances without all that dangerous mucking about with
Improbability Factors.

	Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of 
understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that 
time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in 
space, and that space was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's 
movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but 
depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.

	The first non-absolute number is the number of people for whom the
table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three
telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to
the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who
subsequently join them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of
people who leave when they see who else has turned up.

	The second non-absolute number is the given time of arrival, which
is now known to be one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a
recipriversexclusion, a number whose existence can only be defined as
being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of
arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any
member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusions now play a vital
part in many branches of maths, including statistics and accountancy and
also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem
field.

	The third and most mysterious piece of non-absoluteness of all
lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost
of each item, the number of people at the table, and what they are each
prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any
money is only a sub-phenomenon in this field.)

	The baffling discrepancies which used to occur at this point
remained uninvestigated for centuries simply because no one took them
seriously. They were at the time put down to such things as politeness,
rudeness, meanness, flashness, tiredness, emotionality, or the lateness of
the hour, and completely forgotten about on the following morning. They
were never tested under laboratory conditions, of course, because they
never occurred in laboratories - not in reputable laboratories at least.

	And so it was only with the advent of pocket computers that the
startling truth became finally apparent, and it was this:

	Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of
restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on
any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.

	This single fact took the scientific world by storm. It completely
revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good
restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity
and heart failure and the science of maths was put back by years.

	Slowly, however, the implications of the idea began to be
understood. To begin with it had been too stark, too crazy, too much what
the man in the street would have said, "Oh yes, I could have told you
that," about. Then some phrases like "Interactive Subjectivity Frameworks"
were invented, and everybody was able to relax and get on with it.

	The small groups of monks who had taken up hanging around the
major research institutes singing strange chants to the effect that the
Universe was only a figment of its own imagination were eventually given a
street theatre grant and went away.

				   * * *


	Another world, another day, another dawn.

	The early morning's thinnest sliver of light appeared silently.

	Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen
nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and
slightly damp.

	There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the
possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.

	The moment passed as it regularly did on Squornshellous Zeta,
without incident.

	The mist clung to the surface of the marshes. The swamp trees were
grey with it, the tall reeds indistinct. It hung motionless like held
breath.

	Nothing moved.

	There was silence.

	The sun struggled feebly with the mist, tried to impart a little
warmth here, shed a little light there, but clearly today was going to be
just another long haul across the sky.

	Nothing moved.

	Again, silence.

	Nothing moved.

	Silence.

	Very often on Squornshellous Zeta, whole days would go on like
this, and this was indeed going to be one of them.

	Fourteen hours later the sun sank hopelessly beneath the opposite
horizon with a sense of totally wasted effort.

                                   * * *

	Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in
an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we
live, most things one could possibly imagine, and a lot of things one
would rather not, grow somewhere. A forest was discovered recently in
which most of the trees grew ratchet screwdrivers as fruit. The life cycle
of ratchet screwdriver fruit is quite interesting. Once picked it needs a
dark dusty drawer in which it can lie undisturbed for years. Then one
night it suddenly hatches, discards its outer skin which crumbles into
dust, and emerges as a totally unidentifiable little metal object with
flanges at both ends and a sort of ridge and a sort of hole for a screw.
This, when found, will get thrown away. No one knows what it is supposed
to gain from this. Nature, in her infinite wisdom, is presumably working
on it.

	No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from their
lives either. They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures which live
quiet private lives in the marshes of Squornshellous Zeta. Many of them
get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them
seem to mind and all of them are called Zem.

                                   * * *

	``You have something on your mind, I think,'' said the mattress
floopily.

	``More than you can possibly imagine,'' dreaded Marvin. ``My
capacity for mental activity of all kinds is as boundless as the infinite
reaches of space itself. Except of course for my capacity for happiness.''

	Stomp, stomp, he went.

	``My capacity for happiness,'' he added, ``you could fit into a
matchbox without taking out the matches first.''

	The mattress globbered. This is the noise made by a live,
swamp-dwelling mattress that is deeply moved by a story of personal
tragedy. The word can also, according to The Ultra-Complete Maximegalon
Dictionary of Every Language Ever, mean the noise made by the Lord High
Sanvalvwag of Hollop on discovering that he has forgotten his wife's
birthday for the second year running. Since there was only ever one Lord
High Sanvalvwag of Hollop, and he never married, the word is only ever
used in a negative or speculative sense, and there is an ever-increasing
body of opinion which holds that The Ultra-Complete Maximegalon Dictionary
is not worth the fleet of lorries it takes to cart its microstored edition
around in. Strangely enough, the dictionary omits the word ``floopily'',
which simply means ``in the manner of something which is floopy''.

                                   * * *

	``I gave a speech once,'' he said suddenly, and apparently
unconnectedly. ``You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but
that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough
estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you
an example. Think of a number, any number.''

	``Er, five,'' said the mattress.

	``Wrong,'' said Marvin. ``You see?''

	The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was
in the presence of a not unremarkable mind. It willomied along its entire
length, sending excited little ripples through its shallow algae-covered
pool.

                                   * * *

	``There was a bridge built across the marshes. A cyberstructured
hyperbridge, hundreds of miles in length, to carry ion-buggies and
freighters over the swamp.''

	``A bridge?'' quirruled the mattress. ``Here in the swamp?''

	``A bridge,'' confirmed Marvin, ``here in the swamp. It was going
to revitalize the economy of the Squornshellous System. They spent the
entire economy of the Squornshellous System building it. They asked me to
open it. Poor fools.''

	It began to rain a little, a fine spray slid through the mist.

	``I stood on the platform. For hundreds of miles in front of me,
and hundreds of miles behind me, the bridge stretched.''
	
	``Did it glitter?'' enthused the mattress.

	``It glittered.''

	``Did it span the miles majestically?''

	``It spanned the miles majestically.''

	``Did it stretch like a silver thread far out into the invisible
mist?''

	``Yes,'' said Marvin. ``Do you want to hear this story?''

	``I want to hear your speech,'' said the mattress.

	``This is what I said. I said, `I would like to say that it is a
very great pleasure, honour and privilege for me to open this bridge, but
I can't because my lying circuits are all out of commission. I hate and
despise you all. I now declare this hapless cyberstructure open to the
unthinkable abuse of all who wantonly cross her.' And I plugged myself
into the opening circuits.''

	Marvin paused, remembering the moment.

	The mattress flurred and glurried. It flolloped, gupped and
willomied, doing this last in a particularly floopy way.

	``Voon,'' it wurfed at last. ``And it was a magnificent
occasion?''

	``Reasonably magnificent. The entire thousand-mile-long bridge
spontaneously folded up its glittering spans and sank weeping into the
mire, taking everybody with it.''

                                   * * *

	The legendary and gigantic Starship Titanic was a majestic and
luxurious cruise liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid
complexes of Artifactovol.  It was sensationally beautiful, staggeringly
huge and more pleasantly equipped than any ship in history, but it had the
misfortune to be built in the very earliest days of Improbability Physics,
long before this difficult and cussed branch of knowledge was fully, or at
all, understood.

        The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build
a prototype Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly, to
ensure that it was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever go wrong
with any part of the ship.

        They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and
circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was
Infinitely Improbable was very likely to happen almost immediately.

        The Starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty sight as it lay
beached like a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale among the laser-lit tracery
of its construction gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles of
light against the deep interstellar blackness; but when it launched, it
did not even manage to complete its very first radio message - an SOS -
before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.

                                   * * *

	The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the
subject of flying.

	There is an art, it says, or rather a knack to flying.

	The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and
miss.

	Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it.

	The first part is easy.

	All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward
with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to
hurt.

	That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground.

	Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying
properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

	Clearly, it's the second point, the missing, which presents the
difficulties.

	One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's
no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You
have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when
you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or
about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss
it.

	It is notoriously difficult to prise your attention away from
these three things during the split second you have at your disposal.
Hence most people's failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this
exhilarating and spectacular sport.

	If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention
momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of
legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phyllum and/or personal
inclination) or a bomb going off in your vicinity, or by suddenly spotting
an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in
your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing
just a few inches above it in what might seem to be a slightly foolish
manner.

	This is a moment for superb and delicate concentration.

	Bob and float, float and bob.

	Ignore all considerations of your own weight and simply let
yourself waft higher.

	Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because
they are unlikely to say anything helpful.

	They are most likely to say something along the lines of, ``Good
God, you can't possibly be flying!''

	It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly
be right.

	Waft higher and higher.

	Try a few swoops, gentle ones at first, then drift above the
treetops breathing regularly.

	Do not wave at anybody.

	When you have done this a few times you will find the moment of
distraction rapidly becomes easier and easier to achieve.

	You will then learn all sorts of things about how to control your
flight, your speed, your manoeuvrability, and the trick usually lies in
not thinking too hard about whatever you want to do, but just allowing it
to happen as if it was going to anyway.

	You will also learn how to land properly, which is something you
will almost certainly cock up, and cock up badly, on your first attempt.

	There are private flying clubs you can join which help you achieve
the all-important moment of distraction. They hire people with surprising
bodies or opinions to leap out from behind bushes and exhibit and/or
explain them at the crucial moments. Few genuine hitch-hikers will be able
to afford to join these clubs, but some may be able to get temporary
employment at them.

                                   * * *


	``Yes,'' said Ford, with a sudden and unexpected fierceness,
``I've understood it all perfectly well. That's why I want to have as many
drinks and dance with as many girls as possible while there are still any
left. If everything you've shown us is true ...''

	``True? Of course it's true.''

	``... then we don't stand a whelk's chance in a supernova.''

	``A what?'' said Arthur sharply again. He had been following the
conversation doggedly up to this point, and was keen not to lose the
thread now.

	``A whelk's chance in a supernova,'' repeated Ford without losing
momentum. ``The ...''

	``What's a whelk got to do with a supernova?'' said Arthur.

	``It doesn't,'' said Ford levelly, ``stand a chance in one.''

	He paused to see if the matter was now cleared up. The freshly
puzzled looks clambering across Arthur's face told him that it wasn't.

	``A supernova,'' said Ford as quickly and as clearly as he could,
``is a star which explodes at almost half the speed of light and burns
with the brightness of a billion suns and then collapses as a super-heavy
neutron star. It's a star which burns up other stars, got it? Nothing
stands a chance in a supernova.''

	``I see,'' said Arthur.

	``The ...''

	``So why a whelk particularly?''

	``Why not a whelk? Doesn't matter.''

	Arthur accepted this, and Ford continued, picking up his early
fierce momentum as best he could.

	``The point is,'' he said, ``that people like you and me,
Slartibartfast, and Arthur --- particularly and especially Arthur --- are
just dilettantes, eccentrics, layabouts, fartarounds if you like.''

	Slartibartfast frowned, partly in puzzlement and partly in
umbrage. He started to speak.

	``--- ...'' is as far as he got.

	``We're not obsessed by anything, you see,'' insisted Ford.

	``...''

	``And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession.
They care, we don't. They win.''

	``I care about lots of things,'' said Slartibartfast, his voice
trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty.

	``Such as?''

	``Well,'' said the old man, ``life, the Universe. Everything,
really.  Fjords.''

	``Would you die for them?''

	``Fjords?'' blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. ``No.''

	``Well then.''

	``Wouldn't see the point, to be honest.''

	``And I still can't see the connection,'' said Arthur, ``with
whelks.''

	Ford could feel the conversation slipping out of his control, and
refused to be sidetracked by anything at this point.

	``The point is,'' he hissed, ``that we are not obsessive people,
and we don't stand a chance against ...''

	``Except for your sudden obsession with whelks,'' pursued Arthur,
``which I still haven't understood.''

	``Will you please leave whelks out of it?''

	``I will if you will,'' said Arthur. ``You brought the subject
up.''

	``It was an error,'' said Ford, ``forget them. The point is
this.''

	He leant forward and rested his forehead on the tips of his
fingers.

	``What was I talking about?'' he said wearily.

	``Let's just go down to the party,'' said Slartibartfast, ``for
whatever reason.'' He stood up, shaking his head.

	``I think that's what I was trying to say,'' said Ford.

                                   * * *

	Time travel is increasingly regarded as a menace. History is being
polluted.

	The Encyclopedia Galactica has much to say on the theory and
practice of time travel, most of which is incomprehensible to anyone who
hasn't spent at least four lifetimes studying advanced hypermathematics,
and since it was impossible to do this before time travel was invented,
there is a certain amount of confusion as to how the idea was arrived at
in the first place. One rationalization of this problem states that time
travel was, by its very nature, discovered simultaneously at all periods
of history, but this is clearly bunk.

	The trouble is that a lot of history is now quite clearly bunk as
well.

	Here is an example. It may not seem to be an important one to some
people, but to others it is crucial. It is certainly significant in that
it was the single event which caused the Campaign for Real Time to be set
up in the first place (or is it last? It depends which way round you see
history as happening, and this too is now an increasingly vexed question).

	There is, or was, a poet. His name was Lallafa, and he wrote what
are widely regarded throughout the Galaxy as being the finest poems in
existence, the Songs of the Long Land.

	They are/were unspeakably wonderful. That is to say, you couldn't
speak very much of them at once without being so overcome with emotion,
truth and a sense of wholeness and oneness of things that you wouldn't
pretty soon need a brisk walk round the block, possibly pausing at a bar
on the way back for a quick glass of perspective and soda. They were that
good.

	Lallafa had lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa. He
lived there, and he wrote his poems there. He wrote them on pages made of
dried habra leaves, without the benefit of education or correcting fluid.
He wrote about the light in the forest and what he thought about that. He
wrote about the darkness in the forest, and what he thought about that. He
wrote about the girl who had left him and precisely what he thought about
that.

	Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News
of them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and
watered the lives of many people whose lives might otherwise have been
darker and drier.

	Then, shortly after the invention of time travel, some major
correcting fluid manufacturers wondered whether his poems might have been
better still if he had had access to some high-quality correcting fluid,
and whether he might be persuaded to say a few words on that effect.

	They travelled the time waves, they found him, they explained the
situation - with some difficulty - to him, and did indeed persuade him. In
fact they persuaded him to such an effect that he became extremely rich at
their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write
which such precision never got around to leaving him, and in fact they
moved out of the forest to a rather nice pad in town and he frequently
commuted to the future to do chat shows, on which he sparkled wittily.

	He never got around to writing the poems, of course, which was a
problem, but an easily solved one. The manufacturers of correcting fluid
simply packed him off for a week somewhere with a copy of a later edition
of his book and a stack of dried habra leaves to copy them out on to,
making the odd deliberate mistake and correction on the way.

	Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others
argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what's
changed? The first people say that that isn't the point. They aren't quite
sure what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn't it. They
set up the Campaign for Real Time to try to stop this sort of thing going
on. Their case was considerably strengthened by the fact that a week after
they had set themselves up, news broke that not only had the great
Cathedral of Chalesm been pulled down in order to build a new ion
refinery, but that the construction of the refinery had taken so long, and
had had to extend so far back into the past in order to allow ion
production to start on time, that the Cathedral of Chalesm had now never
been built in the first place. Picture postcards of the cathedral suddenly
became immensely valuable.

	So a lot of history is now gone for ever. The Campaign for Real
Timers claim that just as easy travel eroded the differences between one
country and another, and between one world and another, so time travel is
now eroding the differences between one age and another. ``The past,''
they say, ``is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly
the same there.''

                                   * * *

	``You turned my skin into a bag for keeping interesting stones in.
I happen to know that because in my next life I came back as a fly again
and you swatted me. Again. Only this time you swatted me with the bag
you'd made of my previous skin.

	``Arthur Dent, you are not merely a cruel and heartless man, you
are also staggeringly tactless.''

	The voice paused whilst Arthur gawped.

	``I see you have lost the bag,'' said the voice. ``Probably got
bored with it, did you?''

	Arthur shook his head helplessly. He wanted to explain that he had
been in fact very fond of the bag and had looked after it very well and
had taken it with him wherever he went, but that somehow every time he
travelled anywhere he seemed inexplicably to end up with the wrong bag and
that, curiously enough, even as they stood there he was just noticing for
the first time that the bag he had with him at the moment appeared to be
made out of rather nasty fake leopard skin, and wasn't the one he'd had a
few moments ago before he arrived in this whatever place it was, and
wasn't one he would have chosen himself and heaven knew what would be in
it as it wasn't his, and he would much rather have his original bag back,
except that he was of course terribly sorry for having so peremptorily
removed it, or rather its component parts, i.e. the rabbit skin, from its
previous owner, viz. the rabbit whom he currently had the honour of
attempting vainly to address.

	All he actually managed to say was ``Erp''.

                                   * * *

	``Tell me it was a coincidence, Dent,'' it said. ``I dare you to
tell me it was a coincidence!''

	``It was a coincidence,'' said Arthur quickly.

	``It was not!'' came the answering bellow.

	``It was,'' said Arthur, ``it was ...''

	``If it was a coincidence, then my name,'' roared the voice, ``is
not Agrajag!!!''

	``And presumably,'' said Arthur, ``you would claim that that was
your name.''

	``Yes!'' hissed Agrajag, as if he had just completed a rather deft
syllogism.

	``Well, I'm afraid it was still a coincidence,'' said Arthur.

                                   * * *

	Although it has been said that on Earth alone in our Galaxy is
Krikkit (or cricket) treated as fit subject for a game, and that for this
reason the Earth has been shunned, this does only apply to our Galaxy, and
more specifically to our dimension. In some of the higher dimensions they
feel they can more or less please themselves, and have been playing a
peculiar game called Brockian Ultra-Cricket for whatever their
transdimensional equivalent of billions of years is.

	``Let's be blunt, it's a nasty game'' (says The Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy) ``but then anyone who has been to any of the higher
dimensions will know that they're a pretty nasty heathen lot up there who
should just be smashed and done in, and would be, too, if anyone could
work out a way of firing missiles at right-angles to reality.''

	This is another example of the fact that The Hitch Hiker's Guide
to the Galaxy will employ anybody who wants to walk straight in off the
street and get ripped off, especially if they happen to walk in off the
street during the afternoon, when very few of the regular staff are there.

	There is a fundamental point here.

	The history of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of
idealism, struggle, despair, passion, success, failure, and enormously
long lunch-breaks.

	The earliest origins of the Guide are now, along with most of its
financial records, lost in the mists of time.

	For other, and more curious theories about where they are lost,
see below.

	Most of the surviving stories, however, speak of a founding editor
called Hurling Frootmig.

	Hurling Frootmig, it is said, founded the Guide, established its
fundamental principles of honesty and idealism, and went bust.

	There followed many years of penury and heart-searching during
which he consulted friends, sat in darkened rooms in illegal states of
mind, thought about this and that, fooled about with weights, and then,
after a chance encounter with the Holy Lunching Friars of Voondon (who
claimed that just as lunch was at the centre of a man's temporal day, and
man's temporal day could be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so
Lunch should

	(a) be seen as the centre of a man's spiritual life, and

	(b) be held in jolly nice restaurants), he refounded the Guide,
laid down its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and where you
could stuff them both, and led the Guide on to its first major commercial
success.

	He also started to develop and explore the role of the editorial
lunch-break which was subsequently to play such a crucial part in the
Guide's history, since it meant that most of the actual work got done by
any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices on an
afternoon and saw something worth doing.

	Shortly after this, the Guide was taken over by Megadodo
Publications of Ursa Minor Beta, thus putting the whole thing on a very
sound financial footing, and allowing the fourth editor, Lig Lury Jr, to
embark on lunch-breaks of such breathtaking scope that even the efforts of
recent editors, who have started undertaking sponsored lunch-breaks for
charity, seem like mere sandwiches in comparison.

	In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship --- he merely
left his office late one morning and has never since returned. Though well
over a century has now passed, many members of the guide staff still
retain the romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a ham
croissant, and will yet return to put in a solid afternoon's work.

	Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr have therefore
been designated Acting Editors, and Lig's desk is still preserved the way
he left it, with the addition of a small sign which says ``Lig Lury Jr,
Editor, Missing, presumed Fed''.

	Some very scurrilous and subversive sources hint at the idea that
Lig actually perished in the Guide's first extraordinary experiments in
alternative book-keeping. Very little is known of this, and less still
said. Anyone who even notices, let alone calls attention to, the curious
but utter coincidental and meaningless fact that every world on which the
Guide has ever set up an accounting department has shortly afterwards
perished in warfare or some natural disaster, is liable to get sued to
smithereens.

	It is an interesting though utterly unrelated fact that the two or
three days prior to the demolition of the planet Earth to make way for a
new hyperspace bypass saw a dramatic upsurge in the number of UFO
sightings there, not only above Lords Cricket Ground in St. John's Wood,
London, but also above Glastonbury in Somerset.

	Glastonbury had long been associated with myths of ancient kings,
witchcraft, ley-lines an wart curing, and had now been selected as the
site for the new Hitch Hiker's Guide financial records office, and indeed,
ten years' worth of financial records were transferred to a magic hill
just outside the city mere hours before the Vogons arrived.

	None of these facts, however strange or inexplicable, is as
strange or inexplicable as the rules of the game of Brockian
Ultra-Cricket, as played in the higher dimensions. A full set of rules is
so massively complicated that the only time they were all bound together
in a single volume, they underwent gravitational collapse and became a
Black Hole.

	A brief summary, however, is as follows:

	Rule One: Grow at least three extra legs. You won't need them, but
it keeps the crowds amused.

	Rule Two: Find one good Brockian Ultra-Cricket player. Clone him
off a few times. This saves an enormous amount of tedious selection and
training.

	Rule Three: Put your team and the opposing team in a large field
and build a high wall round them.

	The reason for this is that, though the game is a major spectator
sport, the frustration experienced by the audience at not actually being
able to see what's going on leads them to imagine that it's a lot more
exciting than it really is. A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum
game experiences far less life-affirmation than a crowd that believes it
has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.

	Rule Four: Throw lots of assorted items of sporting equipment over
the wall for the players. Anything will do --- cricket bats, basecube
bats, tennis guns, skis, anything you can get a good swing with.

	Rule Five: The players should now lay about themselves for all
they are worth with whatever they find to hand. Whenever a player scores a
``hit'' on another player, he should immediately run away and apologize
from a safe distance.

	Apologies should be concise, sincere and, for maximum clarity and
points, delivered through a megaphone.

	Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins.

	Curiously enough, the more the obsession with the game grows in
the higher dimensions, the less it is actually played, since most of the
competing teams are now in a state of permanent warfare with each other
over the interpretation of these rules. This is all for the best, because
in the long run a good solid war is less psychologically damaging than a
protracted game of Brockian Ultra-Cricket.

                                   * * *

	The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its
fourth generation, and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody
did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago, and there has
been no follow-up.

	The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but
if you don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't go and
look, because you won't enjoy it.

	There have recently been some bangs and flashes up in the clouds,
and there is one theory that this is a battle being fought between the
fleets of several rival carpet-cleaning companies who are hovering over
the thing like vultures, but you shouldn't believe anything you hear at
parties, and particularly not anything you hear at this one.

	One of the problems, and it's one which is obviously going to get
worse, is that all the people at the party are either the children or the
grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of the people who wouldn't leave
in the first place, and because of all the business about selective
breeding and regressive genes and so on, it means that all the people now
at the party are either absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering
idiots, or, more and more frequently, both.

	Either way, it means that, genetically speaking, each succeeding
generation is now less likely to leave than the preceding one.

	So other factors come into operation, like when the drink is going
to run out.

	Now, because of certain things which have happened which seemed
like a good idea at the time (and one of the problems with a party which
never stops is that all the things which only seem like a good idea at
parties continue to seem like good ideas), that point seems still to be a
long way off.

                                   * * *


	``My planet was blown up one morning,'' said Arthur, who had found
himself quite unexpectedly telling the little man his life story or, at
least, edited highlights of it, ``that's why I'm dressed like this, in my
dressing gown. My planet was blown up with all my clothes in it, you see.
I didn't realize I'd be coming to a party.''

	The little man nodded enthusiastically.

	``Later, I was thrown off a spaceship. Still in my dressing gown.
Rather than the space suit one would normally expect. Shortly after that I
discovered that my planet had originally been built for a bunch of mice.
You can imagine how I felt about that. I was then shot at for a while and
blown up. In fact I have been blown up ridiculously often, shot at,
insulted, regularly disintegrated, deprived of tea, and recently I crashed
into a swamp and had to spend five years in a damp cave.''

                                   * * *

	It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just
with potatoes.

	For instance, there was once an insanely aggressive race of people
called the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax. That was just the name of
their race. The name of their army was something quite horrific. Luckily
they lived even further back in Galactic history than anything we have so
far encountered --- twenty billion years ago --- when the Galaxy was young
and fresh, and every idea worth fighting for was a new one.

	And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were
good at, and being good at it, they did a lot. They fought their enemies
(i.e. everybody else), they fought each other. Their planet was a complete
wreck. The surface was littered with abandoned cities which were
surrounded by abandoned war machines, which were in turn surrounded by
deep bunkers in which the Silastic Armorfiends lived and squabbled with
each other.

	The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend was just
to be born. They didn't like it, they got resentful. And when an
Armorfiend got resentful, someone got hurt. An exhausting way of life, one
might think, but they did seem to have an awful lot of energy.

	The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend was to put him
into a room of his own, because sooner or later he would simply beat
himself up.

	Eventually they realized that this was something they were going
to have to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had
to carry a weapon as part of his normal Silastic work (policemen, security
guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty-five
minutes every day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or
her surplus aggressions.

	For a while this worked well, until someone thought that it would
be much more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot the
potatoes instead.

	This led to a renewed enthusiasm for shooting all sorts of things,
and they all got very excited at the prospect of their first major war for
weeks.

                                   * * *

	``Trillian,'' whispered Ford Prefect to her.

	``Yes?'' she said.

	``What are you doing?''

	``Thinking.''

	``Do you always breathe like that when you're thinking?''

	``I wasn't aware that I was breathing.''

	``That's what worried me.''

                                   * * *


	``It's the robots, sir,'' said one voice. ``There's something
wrong with them.''

	``What, exactly?''

	These were the voices of two War Command Krikkiters. All the War
Commanders lived up in the sky in the Robot War Zones, and were largely
immune to the whimsical doubts and uncertainties which were afflicting
their fellows down on the surface of the planet.

	``Well, sir I think it's just as well that they are being phased
out of the war effort, and that we are now going to detonate the supernova
bomb. In the very short time since we were released from the envelope -''

	``Get to the point.''

	``The robots aren't enjoying it, sir.''

	``What?''

	``The war, sir, it seems to be getting them down. There's a
certain world-weariness about them, or perhaps I should say
Universe-weariness.''

	``Well, that's all right, they're meant to be helping to destroy
it.''

	``Yes, well they're finding it difficult, sir. They are afflicted
with a certain lassitude. They're just finding it hard to get behind the
job. They lack oomph.''

	``What are you trying to say?''

	``Well, I think they're very depressed about something, sir.''

	``What on Krikkit are you talking about?''

	``Well, in the few skirmishes they've had recently, it seems that
they go into battle, raise their weapons to fire and suddenly think, why
bother? What, cosmically speaking, is it all about? And they just seem to
get a little tired and a little grim.''

	``And then what do they do?''

	``Er, quadratic equations mostly, sir. Fiendishly difficult ones
by all accounts. And then they sulk.''

	``Sulk?''

	``Yes, sir.''

	``Whoever heard of a robot sulking?''

                                   * * *

	``I better go get them,'' asserted Zaphod. ``Er, maybe they need
some help, right?''

	``Maybe,'' said Marvin with unexpected authority in his lugubrious
voice, ``it would be better if you monitored them from here. That young
girl,'' he added unexpectedly, ``is one of the least benightedly
unintelligent life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to
be able to avoid meeting.''

	Zaphod took a moment or two to find his way through this
labyrinthine string of negatives and emerged at the other end with
surprise.

	``Trillian?'' he said. ``She's just a kid. Cute, yeah, but
temperamental.  You know how it is with women. Or perhaps you don't. I
assume you don't. If you do I don't want to hear about it. Plug us in.''

                                   * * *

	``It's ... well, it's a long story,'' he said, ``but the Question
I would like to know is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and
Everything. All we know is that the Answer is Forty-Two, which is a little
aggravating.''

	Prak nodded again.

	``Forty-Two,'' he said. ``Yes, that's right.''

	He paused. Shadows of thought and memory crossed his face like the
shadows of clouds crossing the land.

	``I'm afraid,'' he said at last, ``that the Question and the
Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes
knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about
the same universe.''

	He paused again. Disappointment crept into Arthur's face and
snuggled down into its accustomed place.

	``Except,'' said Prak, struggling to sort a thought out, ``if it
happened, it seems that the Question and the Answer would just cancel each
other out and take the Universe with them, which would then be replaced by
something even more bizarrely inexplicable. It is possible that this has
already happened,'' he added with a weak smile, ``but there is a certain
amount of Uncertainty about it.''

                                   * * *

	``Do you know,'' said Prak, ``the story of the Reason?''

	Arthur said that he didn't, and Prak said that he knew that he
didn't.

	He told it.

	One night, he said, a spaceship appeared in the sky of a planet
which had never seen one before. The planet was Dalforsas, the ship was
this one. It appeared as a brilliant new star moving silently across the
heavens.

	Primitive tribesmen who were sitting huddled on the Cold Hillsides
looked up from their steaming night-drinks and pointed with trembling
fingers, swearing that they had seen a sign, a sign from their gods which
meant that they must now arise at last and go and slay the evil Princes of
the Plains.

	In the high turrets of their palaces, the Princes of the Plains
looked up and saw the shining star, and received it unmistakably as a sign
from their gods that they must now go and set about the accursed Tribesmen
of the Cold Hillsides.

	And between them, the Dwellers in the Forest looked up into the
sky and saw the sign of the new star, and saw it with fear and
apprehension, for though they had never seen anything like it before, they
too knew precisely what it foreshadowed, and they bowed their heads in
despair.

	They knew that when the rains came, it was a sign.

	When the rains departed, it was a sign.

	When the winds rose, it was a sign.

	When the winds fell, it was a sign.

	When in the land there was born at midnight of a full moon a goat
with three heads, that was a sign.

	When in the land there was born at some time in the afternoon a
perfectly normal cat or pig with no birth complications at all, or even
just a child with a retrousse nose, that too would often be taken as a
sign.

	So there was no doubt at all that a new star in the sky was a sign
of a particularly spectacular order.

	And each new sign signified the same thing --- that the Princes of
the Plains and the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides were about to beat the
hell out of each other again.

	This in itself wouldn't be so bad, except that the Princes of the
Plains and the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides always elected to beat the
hell out of each other in the Forest, and it was always the Dwellers in
the Forest who came off worst in these exchanges, though as far as they
could see it never had anything to do with them.

	And sometimes, after some of the worst of these outrages, the
Dwellers in the Forest would send a messenger to either the leader of the
Princes of the Plains or the leader of the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides
and demand to know the reason for this intolerable behaviour.

	And the leader, whichever one it was, would take the messenger
aside and explain the Reason to him, slowly and carefully and with great
attention to the considerable detail involved.

	And the terrible thing was, it was a very good one. It was very
clear, very rational, and tough. The messenger would hang his head and
feel sad and foolish that he had not realized what a tough and complex
place the real world was, and what difficulties and paradoxes had to be
embraced if one was to live in it.

	``Now do you understand?'' the leader would say.

	The messenger would nod dumbly.

	``And you see these battles have to take place?''

	Another dumb nod.

	``And why they have to take place in the forest, and why it is in
everybody's best interest, the Forest Dwellers included, that they
should?''

	``Er ...''

	``In the long run.''

	``Er, yes.''

	And the messenger did understand the Reason, and he returned to
his people in the Forest. But as he approached them, as he walked through
the Forest and amongst the trees, he found that all he could remember of
the Reason was how terribly clear the argument had seemed. What it
actually was he couldn't remember at all.

	And this, of course, was a great comfort when next the Tribesmen
and the Princes came hacking and burning their way through the Forest,
killing every Forest Dweller in their way.

                                   * * *