The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Douglas Adams
Dedication
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another which states that this has already happened.
| Location: 6 |
Date: January 29, 2016 |
Chapter 1
For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two—and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was. And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet—especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program. And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense. Sadly, however, just before the critical moment of read-out, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished by the Vogons to make way—so they claimed—for a new hyperspace bypass, and so all hope of discovering a meaning for life was lost for ever. Or so it would seem.
Notes:😂😂
| Location: 7 |
Date: October 3, 2016 |
Chapter 2
The Heart of Gold ’s Improbability Drive made it the most powerful and unpredictable ship in existence. There was nothing it couldn’t do, provided you knew exactly how improbable it was that the thing you wanted it to do would even happen.
| Location: 12 |
Date: November 26, 2016 |
“Share and Enjoy” is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints Division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium-size planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years. The motto stands—or rather stood—in three-mile-high illuminated letters near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax. Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the offices of many talented young Complaints executives—now deceased. The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read “Go stick your head in a pig,” and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration.
| Location: 13 |
Date: November 26, 2016 |
Chapter 15
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother.
| Location: 75 |
Date: December 4, 2016 |
The major problem is quite simply one of grammar,
| Location: 75 |
Date: December 4, 2016 |
the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
| Location: 75 |
Date: December 4, 2016 |
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering. It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is (wioll haven be) enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe. This is, many would say, impossible. In it, guests take (willan on-take) their places at table and eat (willan on-eat) sumptuous meals while watching (willing watchen) the whole of creation explode around them. This, many would say, is equally impossible. You can arrive (mayan arrivan on-when) for any sitting you like without prior (late fore-when) reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were when you return to your own time (you can have on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome). This is, many would now insist, absolutely impossible. At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with (mayan meetan con with dinan on when) a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time. This, it can be explained patiently, is also impossible. You can visit it as many times as you like (mayan onvisit re-onvisiling… and so on—for further tense correction consult Dr. Streetmentioner’s book) and be sure of never meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment this usually causes. This, even if the rest were true, which it isn’t, is patently impossible, say the doubters. All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for. This, many claim, is not merely impossible but clearly insane, which is why the advertising executives of the star system of Bastablon came up with this slogan: “If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”
| Location: 76 |
Date: December 4, 2016 |
Chapter 16
At the End of the Universe you have to use the past tense a lot,” said Zaphod, “’cause everything’s been done, you know.
| Location: 80 |
Date: December 4, 2016 |
Chapter 17
open airlock number three, Marvin. Marvin, can you pick up that piece of paper?’ Can I pick up that piece of paper! Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to…
| Location: 96 |
Date: December 6, 2016 |
Chapter 20
The Milliways Lunch Menu quotes, by permission, a passage from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The passage is this: The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question, “How can we eat?”, the second by the question, “Why do we eat?” and the third by the question, “Where shall we have lunch?” The Menu goes on to suggest that Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, would be a very agreeable and sophisticated answer to that third question.
| Location: 108 |
Date: December 7, 2016 |
Chapter 21
It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in “It’s a nice day,” or “You’re very tall,” or “So this is it, we’re going to die.” His first theory was that if human beings didn’t keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this—“If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working
| Location: 115 |
Date: December 9, 2016 |
A junior Disaster Area accountant, visiting the shipyard where this ship was being constructed, had demanded to know of the works foreman why the hell they were fitting an extremely expensive teleport into a ship which only had one important journey to make, and that unmanned. The foreman had explained that the teleport was available at a ten percent discount and the accountant had explained that this was immaterial; the foreman had explained that it was the finest, most powerful and sophisticated teleport that money could buy and the accountant had explained that the money did not wish to buy it; the foreman had explained that people would still need to enter and leave the ship and the accountant had explained that the ship sported a perfectly serviceable door; the foreman had explained that the accountant could go and boil his head and the accountant had explained to the foreman that the thing approaching him rapidly from his left was a knuckle sandwich. After the explanations had been concluded, work was discontinued on the teleport which subsequently passed unnoticed on the invoice as “Sund. explns.” at five times the price.
| Location: 117 |
Date: December 9, 2016 |
Chapter 22
The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth—when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass—the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another—particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e., covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.
| Location: 120 |
Date: December 9, 2016 |
And what about matter transference beams? Any form of transport which involved tearing you apart atom by atom, flinging those atoms through the subether, and then jamming them back together again just when they were getting their first taste of freedom for years had to be bad news.
Notes:Problems with teleportation
| Location: 120 |
Date: December 9, 2016 |
Chapter 30
“Look at it this way,” Ford Prefect had said, “fruit and berries on strange planets either make you live or make you die. Therefore the point at which to start toying with them is when you’re going to die if you don’t. That way you stay ahead. The secret of healthy hitchhiking is to eat junk food.”
| Location: 153 |
Date: December 10, 2016 |