"Douglas Adams - 2 - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Douglas Adams

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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 John Lloyd for his help with the original Milliways script
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

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.
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Chapter 1

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 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 ape-like beings
who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a