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The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
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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 for this problem, but most of these were largely concered 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.
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‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
‘Oh that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. -
During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been “disappointed” by the poem’s reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenberg, Essex, England, in the destruction of planet Earth.
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“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”
“Why, what did she tell you?” “I don’t know, I didn’t listen.” -
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says that if you hold a lungful of air you can survive in the total vacuum of space for about thirty seconds. However, it does go on to say that what with space being the mind-boggling size it is the chances of getting picked up by another ship within those thirty seconds are two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand, seven hundred and nine to one against. By a totally staggering coincidence, that is also the telephone number of an Islington flat where Arthur once went to a very good party and met a very nice girl whom he totally failed to get off with – she went off with a gate-crasher.
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A computer chattered to itself in alarm as it noticed an airlock open and close itself for no apparent reason. This was because reason was in fact out to lunch.
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A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothing of an inch wide, and quite a lot of millions of light-years from end to end. As it closed up, lots of paper hats and party balloons fell out of it and drifted off through the Universe. A team of seven three-foot-high market analysts fell out of it and died, partly of asphyxiation, partly of surprise. Two hundred and and thirty-nine thousand lightly fried eggs fell out of it too, materializing in a large wobbly heap on the famine-struck land of Poghril in the Pansel system. The whole Poghril tribe had died out form famine except for one last man who died of cholesterol poisoning some weeks later. The nothingth of a second for which the hole existed reverberated backward and forward through time in a most improbable fashion. Somewhere in the deeply remote past it seriously traumatized a small random group of atoms drifting through the empty sterility of space and made them cling together in the most extraordinarlily unlikely patterns. These patterns quickly learned to copy themselves (this was part of what was so extraordinary about the patterns) and went on to cause massive trouble on every planet they drifted onto. That was how life began in the Universe.
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The highest prime number coalesced quietly in a corner and hid itself away for ever.
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“Yes,” said a passing maniac. “Who was that?” asked Arthur. “Who–the man with the five heads and the elderberry bush full of kippers?” “Yes.” “I don’t know. Just someone.” “Ah.”
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“Ford!” he said, “there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want tot talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”