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

jazz on the ship's stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it
hadn't been for Sunday afternoons, he really could have done.
To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks,
cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving
the hell out of everybody.
In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that
terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2.55, when you know that
you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you
stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or
use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you
stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and
you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other
people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general,
and everyone in it in particular.
This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing which
would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on
forever. It was this.
He would insult the Universe.
That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by
one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in
alphabetical order.
When people protested to him, as they sometimes had done, that the plan
was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of
people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a
steely look and say, "A man can dream can't he?"
And so he started out. He equipped a spaceship that was built to last with
the computer capable of handling all the data processing involved in keeping
track of the entire population of the known Universe and working out the
horrifically complicated routes involved.
His ship fled through the inner orbits of the Sol star system, preparing
to slingshot round the sun and fling itself out into interstellar space.
"Computer," he said.
"Here," yipped the computer.
"Where next?"
"Computing that."
Wowbagger gazed for a moment at the fantastic jewellery of the night, the
billions of tiny diamond worlds that dusted the infinite darkness with light.
Every one, every single one, was on his itinerary. Most of them he would be
going to millions of times over.
He imagined for a moment his itinerary connecting up all the dots in the
sky like a child's numbered dots puzzle. He hoped that from some vantage point
in the Universe it might be seen to spell a very, very rude word.
The computer beeped tunelessly to indicate that it had finished its
calculations.
"Folfanga," it said. It beeped.
"Fourth world of the Folfanga system," it continued. It beeped again.
"Estimated journey time, three weeks," it continued further. It beeped
again.
"There to meet with a small slug," it beeped, "of the genus ARth-Urp-Hil