Volume 2 - The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe

Douglas Adams was born in 1952 and created all the various and contradictory manifestations of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
: radio, novels, TV, computer game, stage adaptation, comic book and bath towel.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
was published thirty years ago on 12 October 1979 and its phenomenal success sent the book straight to number one in the UK bestseller list. In 1984 Douglas Adams became the youngest author to be awarded a Golden Pan. His series has sold over 15 million books in the UK, the US and Australia and was also a bestseller in German, Swedish and many other languages.

The feature film starring Martin Freeman and Zooey Deschanel with Stephen Fry as the
Guide
was released in 2005 using much of Douglas’s original script and ideas.

Douglas lived with his wife and daughter in California, where he died in 2001.

BOOKS BY DOUGLAS ADAMS

The Hitchhiker series

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Life, the Universe and Everything

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Mostly Harmless

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts: The Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Film Tie-in

The Making of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’

The Dirk Gently series

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul

The Salmon of Doubt

With John Lloyd

The Meaning of Liff

The Deeper Meaning of Liff

With Mark Carwardine

Last Chance to See . . .

By Terry Jones, based on a story/computer game by Douglas Adams

Starship Titanic

First published 1980 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2009 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-0-330-51312-8 in Adobe Reader format
ISBN 978-0-330-51311-1 in Adobe Digital Editions format
ISBN 978-0-330-51313-5 in Mobipocket format

Copyright © Serious Productions Ltd 2009
Foreword copyright © Terry Jones 2009

The right of Douglas Adams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

The Macmillan Group has no responsibility for the information provided by any external websites whose address you obtain from this book. The inclusion of external website addresses in this book does not constitute an endorsement by or association with us of such sites or the content, products, advertising or other materials presented on such sites.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Visit
www.panmacmillan.com
to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

To Jane and James
with many thanks
To Geoffrey Perkins for achieving the Improbable
To Paddy Kingsland, Lisa Braun and Alick Hale Munro for helping him
To Simon Brett for starting the whole thing off
To the Paul Simon album
One Trick Pony
which I played incessantly while writing this book
Five years is far too long
And with very special thanks to Jacqui Graham for infinite patience, kindness and food in adversity

by Terry Jones

I woke up one Sunday morning with a hangover and remembered that I’d bought two tickets for a five-hour silent film (it was the first performance of Abel Gance’s
Napoléon
).

My wife also had a hangover and said she couldn’t face it, so I rang Mike Palin and he said he had a hangover and couldn’t face it. So then I rang Douglas Adams and he said he had a hangover and couldn’t face it.

So I prepared to sit for five hours on my own, watching a film I wasn’t sure I wanted to see.

However, just as I was opening the front door to leave the house, the phone rang and it was Douglas, who said, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, and it seems such a terrible idea that I think I ought to do it.’

Douglas wasn’t afraid of ideas even if they seemed like bad ones. Indeed he was totally obsessed with the idea of ideas.

Nobody, I suspect, reads the Hitchhiker books for their plot. Not many, I would suppose, read them for their characters (apart from Marvin). So why is it that we love these books so much? After all, if a novel doesn’t have great characters or a compelling plot, why bother reading it?

In
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
, there is an interlude in which the Ruler of the Universe talks to his cat about how we know we know anything or how we know what we perceive is what we are actually perceiving or is what is happening, and he concludes by saying, ‘Perhaps I would like a glass of whisky. Yes, that seems more likely.’

And he pours himself a glass of whisky.

It’s one of those magical moments when Douglas’s fascination with ideas comes to the fore. And it’s those magical moments that I love in Douglas’s writing. He’s the only novelist I know who can make ideas a pageturner.

And
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
is full of ideas. And humour. That’s the other thing Douglas was so good at: making ideas not only interesting but funny.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
opines that every civilization goes through three stages:
Survival, Enquiry and Sophistication
– the how?, why? and where? stages.

The
Guide
says: ‘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?
’

Then there is the wonderful concept of the A, B and C spaceships, in which all the people in Management, Accountancy, Advertising and Hairdressing are sent off in advance while the creative and productive people stay behind and somehow never make it into space . . . deliberately. When you look nowadays at the BBC or the National Health Service, you get the feeling that we all must have been on the B Ark.

In fact,
The Restaurant
is full of slightly prophetic elements. The one that makes me shudder, at the edge of today’s economic disaster, is the section where the settlers from the B Ark have made the leaf into legal tender – so money really does grow on trees. But they now realize that there is too much currency available and so, to remedy the situation in fiscal terms, they decide to burn down all the forests.

So welcome to Douglas Adams’s Rollercoaster of Ideas.

Oh, and we had a great day at Abel Gance’s
Napoléon
. It wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

TERRY JONES
Python and co-author
of
Starship Titanic

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 theory which states that this has already happened.

The story so far:

In the beginning the Universe was created.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.

The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.

However, the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being the puzzling place it is, other explanations are constantly being sought.

For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Question to the Ultimate Answer 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.