"Douglas Adams - 3 - Life, the Universe, and Everything" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

Arthur's first sensations of hope and trepidation had instantly been
overwhelmed by astonishment, and all sorts of thoughts were battling for the
use of his vocal chords at this moment.
"Whh ...?" he said.
"Bu ... hu ... uh ..." he added.
"Ru ... ra ... wah ... who?" he managed finally to say and lapsed into a
frantic kind of silence. He was feeling the effects of having not said
anything to anybody for as long as he could remember.
The alien creature frowned briefly and consulted what appeared to be some
species of clipboard which he was holding in his thin and spindly alien hand.
"Arthur Dent?" it said.
Arthur nodded helplessly.
"Arthur Philip Dent?" pursued the alien in a kind of efficient yap.
"Er ... er ... yes ... er ... er," confirmed Arthur.
"You're a jerk," repeated the alien, "a complete asshole."
"Er ..."
The creature nodded to itself, made a peculiar alien tick on its clipboard
and turned briskly back towards the ship.
"Er ..." said Arthur desperately, "er ..."
"Don't give me that!" snapped the alien. It marched up the ramp, through
the hatchway and disappeared into the ship. The ship sealed itself. It started
to make a low throbbing hum.
"Er, hey!" shouted Arthur, and started to run helplessly towards it.
"Wait a minute!" he called. "What is this? What? Wait a minute!"
The ship rose, as if shedding its weight like a cloak to the ground, and
hovered briefly. It swept strangely up into the evening sky. It passed up
through the clouds, illuminating them briefly, and then was gone, leaving
Arthur alone in an immensity of land dancing a helplessly tiny little dance.
"What?" he screamed. "What? What? Hey, what? Come back here and say that!"
He jumped and danced until his legs trembled, and shouted till his lungs
rasped. There was no answer from anyone. There was no one to hear him or speak
to him.
The alien ship was already thundering towards the upper reaches of the
atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void which separates the very
few things there are in the Universe from each other.
Its occupant, the alien with the expensive complexion, leaned back in its
single seat. His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He was a man
with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to
admit, but it was at least a purpose and it did at least keep him on the move.
Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was --indeed, is - one of the
Universe's very small number of immortal beings.
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 had his immortality thrust upon him by an unfortunate
accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of
rubber bands. The precise details of the accident 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.
Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some light