the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape- descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still -- Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. -- at himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stuck out his tongue. "Yellow," he thought. The word yellow wandered through his mind in search of something to connect with. -- Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path. -- distractedly into the night sky was any kind of flying saucer at all. The reason he said green was that green was the traditional space livery of the Betelgeuse trading scouts. -- Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract, redolent of all the heady odours of the dark Qualactin Zones, subtle sweet and mystic. -- the ionosphere many miles above the surface of the planet; several somethings in fact, several dozen huge yellow chunky slablike somethings, huge as office buildings, silent as birds. -- presence, which was just how they wanted it for the moment. The huge yellow somethings went unnoticed at Goonhilly, they passed over Cape Canaveral without a blip, Woomera and Jodrell Bank -- The only place they registered at all was on a small black device called a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic which winked away quietly to -- Besides the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic and the scripts he had an Electronic Thumb - a short squat black rod, smooth and matt with a couple of flat switches and dials at one end; he also had a -- vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- -- the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic began to wink more quickly. Miles above the surface of the planet the huge yellow somethings began to fan out. At Jodrell Bank, someone decided it was time for a nice -- The huge yellow machines began to sink downward and to move faster. -- hectically into the sky. What Mr Prosser had noticed was that huge yellow somethings were screaming through the clouds. Impossibly huge yellow somethings. -- Whatever it was raced across the sky in monstrous yellowness, tore the sky apart with mind-buggering noise and leapt off into -- land. The huge ships turned slowly in the sky with easy power. On the underside of each a hatchway opened, an empty black space. -- meaningless coincidence - in Galacticspeke, easter means small flat and light brown) to the Heart of Gold island, which by another meaningless coincidence was called France. -- had built the Heart of Gold - mostly humanoid, but here and there were a few reptiloid atomineers, two or three green slyph-like maximegalacticans, an octopoid physucturalist or two and a Hooloovoo (a Hooloovoo is a super-intelligent shade of the color blue). All except the Hooloovoo were resplendent in their multi- colored ceremonial lab coats; the Hooloovoo had been temporarily -- possibility and impossibility, but still the greatest excitement of all seemed to be to meet a man with an orange sash round his neck. (An orange sash was what the President of the Galaxy traditionally wore.) It might not even have made much difference -- appearance except for the extra head and third arm. His fair tousled hair stuck out in random directions, his blue eyes glinted with something completely unidentifiable, and his chins -- rolling and bobbing, glistening in the brilliant sun. Inside it floated a wide semi-circular sofa upholstered in glorious red leather: the more the globe bobbed and rolled, the more the sofa -- To tremendous applause Zaphod Beeblebrox stepped out of the bubble, his orange sash blazing in the light. -- incognito. She was slim, darkish, humanoid, with long waves of black hair, a full mouth, an odd little nob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes. With her red head scarf knotted in that particular way and her long flowing silky brown dress she looked vaguely Arabic. Not that anyone there had ever heard of an Arab -- switch on the remote control device in his pocket. Away in front of them a huge white dome that bulged against the sky cracked down in the middle, split, and slowly folded itself down into the -- Beneath it lay uncovered a huge starship, one hundred and fifty metres long, shaped like a sleek running shoe, perfectly white and mindboggingly beautiful. At the heart of it, unseen, lay a -- Vogons. His highly domed nose rose high above a small piggy forehead. His dark green rubbery skin was thick enough for him to play the game of Vogon Civil Service politics, and play it well, -- "Excuse me?" said Arthur. "Are you trying to tell me that we just stuck out our thumbs and some green bug-eyed monster stuck his head out and said, Hi fellas, hop right in. I can take you as far -- "Is green, yes." -- Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz heaved his unpleasant green body round the control bridge. He always felt vaguely irritable after -- The words Vogon Constructor Fleets flared in green across the screen. Ford pressed a large red button at the bottom of the screen and words began to undulate across it. At the same time, the book -- Ford was holding up a small glass jar which quite clearly had a small yellow fish wriggling around in it. Arthur blinked at him. He wished there was something simple and recognizable he could -- underwear, the piles of Squornshellous mattresses and the man from Betelgeuse holding up a small yellow fish and offering to put it in his ear he had been able to see just a small packet of -- goggle-eyed with wonder. He was experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick. Or of looking at a lot of coloured dots on a piece of paper which -- "The Babel fish," said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not -- "`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. -- recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode To A Small Lump of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal -- The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England in the destruction of the planet Earth. -- A slight hiss built into a deafening roar of rushing air as the outer hatchway opened on to an empty blackness studded with tiny impossibly bright points of light. Ford and Arthur popped into -- Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood - and such generators were often used to -- hadn't had the plastic wrapping taken off yet. The cabin was mostly white, oblong, and about the size of a smallish restaurant. In fact it wasn't perfectly oblong: the two long -- Marvin turned and lifted his flat-topped triangular red eyes up towards him. -- incomprehensible computer bank, he reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words Please do not press this button again. He shook -- cage which contained her last and only links with Earth - two white mice that she had insisted Zaphod let her bring. She had expected not to see the planet again, but she was disturbed by -- For a moment it seemed that nothing was happening, then a brightness glowed at the edge of the huge screen. A red star the size of a small plate crept across it followed quickly by another one - a binary system. Then a vast crescent sliced into the corner of the picture - a red glare shading away into the deep black, the night side of the planet. -- of this industry was the planet Magrathea, where hyperspatial engineers sucked matter through white holes in space to form it into dream planets - gold planets, platinum planets, soft rubber -- became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a -- Out of the utter blackness stabbed a sudden point of blinding light. It crept up by slight degrees and spread sideways in a thin crescent blade, and within seconds two suns were visible, furnaces of light, searing the black edge of the horizon with white fire. Fierce shafts of colour streaked through the thin atmosphere beneath them. -- Gold streaked along its orbital path. The suns now stood high in the black sky, the pyrotechnics of dawn were over, and the surface of the planet appeared bleak and forbidding in the common -- Gold continued on its way perfectly normally with a rather fetchingly redesigned interior. It was somewhat larger, and done out in delicate pastel shades of green and blue. In the centre a spiral staircase, leading nowhere in particular, stood in a spray of ferns and yellow flowers and next to it a stone sundial pedestal housed the main computer terminal. Cunningly deployed -- "My white mice have escaped!" she said. -- "Nuts to your white mice," he said. -- Five figures wandered slowly over the blighted land. Bits of it were dullish grey, bits of it dullish brown, the rest of it rather less interesting to look at. It was like a dried-out -- fifty yards wide. Round the outside of the crater the sloping ground was spattered with black and red lumps. They stopped and looked at a piece. It was wet. It was rubbery. -- Last thing I did before I packed it in was take the superimposed picture and look at it through a green filter. You remember I was always superstitious about the color green when I was a kid? I always wanted to be a pilot on one of the trading scouts?" -- Ford stared at him, aghast. Trillian had turned white. -- humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to biro life forms. And it was to this -- worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book, and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the -- "Oh yes," said Arthur with a sigh, "great wide rolling blue oceans ..." -- He was standing with his back to Arthur watching the very last glimmers of light sink into blackness behind the horizon. He was tallish, elderly and dressed in a single long grey robe. When he -- Arthur tried to gauge the speed at which they were travelling, but the blackness outside was absolute and he was denied any reference points. The sense of motion was so soft and slight he -- insane silver blur that seemed to surround him. He twisted his head sharply round and saw a small black point dwindling rapidly in the distance behind them, and it took him several seconds to -- it was. Arthur guessed (quite wrongly) that it might be ultra violet. -- "Well, the Earth Mark Two in fact," said Slartibartfast cheerfully. "We're making a copy from our original blueprints." -- "Look, sorry - are we talking about the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing on tables screaming -- exchanging a quiet glance with Fook, Lunkwill leaned forward and touched a small black panel. -- Beneath him was a pretty treelined city square, and all around it as far as the eye could see were white concrete buildings of airy spacious design but somewhat the worse for wear - many were -- his fingernail. It was very heavy and very slightly soft - he could mark it with his fingernail. It was very yellow and very shiny, and when he breathed on it his breath evaporated off it in -- In the sky a huge green catalogue number appeared. It flickered and changed, and when they looked around again so had the land. -- The sea was purple. The beach they were on was composed of tiny yellow and green pebbles - presumably terribly precious stones. The mountains in the distance seemed soft and undulating with red peaks. Nearby stood a solid silver beach table with a frilly -- Somewhere on the wall a small white light flashed. -- A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to -- He was busy staring at two white mice sitting in what looked like whisky glasses on the table. He heard the silence and glanced -- pounds of Earthling brain." He scuttled round and about, his pink eyes flashing, his fine white coat bristling with static. -- "Difficult," said Frankie. He thought. "How about What's yellow and dangerous?" -- It was the Blagulon Kappa policecraft, a bulbous sharklike affair, slate green in colour and smothered with black stencilled letters of varying degrees of size and unfriendliness. 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 -- However, the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being the -- And, less than half a million miles from where their starship is drifting lazily through the inky blackness of space, a Vogon ship is moving slowly towards them. -- Like all Vogon ships it looked as if it had been not so much designed as congealed. The unpleasant yellow lumps and edifices which protuded from it at unsightly angles would have disfigured -- Around it blazed the billion pinpricks of the Galaxy. Towards it crept the ugly yellow lump of the Vogon ship. -- the computer to talk to her, Ford was thumping it and Zaphod was kicking it, and also why there was a nasty yellow lump on the vision screen. -- "Tell me," he continued, and said it so nervously that the others all turned to stare at him. He glanced at the approaching yellow blob on the vision screen. -- The only light on the bridge came from two dim red triangles in a far corner where Marvin the Paranoid Android sat slumped, -- always seemed to him to screech like fingernails across the blackboard of what he liked to think of as his soul. -- shaking had reached terrifying proportions. He saw Trillian and Arthur's faces white and unblinking in the gloom. -- The ship was utterly silent. It lay in thick black space. Occasionally it rocked and swayed. Every instrument was dead, -- has this name. Here the sun shines brightest of all, glittering on the swimming pools, shimmering on the white, palm-lined boulevards, glistening on the healthy bronzed specks moving up -- Most particularly it shines on a building, a tall beautiful building consisting of two thirty-storey white towers connected by a bridge half-way up their length. -- attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you. -- that moment his Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive sunglasses had turned utterly black. A large shadow flitted past the window with a sharp buzz. -- The man was pulling him back through a door. He went with him. With a searing whine a small black spider-like object shot through the air and disappeared down the corridor. -- From the opposite direction came a larger black spider-like object. It zapped past them. -- From over the bridge came a massive rumbling hum. A gigantic black shape was moving over it from the opposite tower, the size and shape of a tank. -- Marvin looked at the gigantic black shape edging forward towards them over the bridge. He looked down at his own small metal body. -- He did, however, look pitifully small as the gigantic black tank rolled to a halt in front of him. The tank examined him with a -- Out in the open air again Zaphod could see the ring of dark green Frogstar Fighters round the uprooted tower of the building. A -- Out of the window, they could see nothing but the flickering light of the force beams, and vague green streaks which were presumably the distorted shapes of the Frogstar Fighters. At this -- "The yellow stripes are high in protein, the green ones have vitamin B and C complexes, the little pink flowers contain -- "What are the brown stains?" he asked. -- old decaying houses of the cities; it was more desolate as it whipped about the bottoms of the tall black towers that swayed uneasily here and there about the surface of this world. At the -- Zaphod was badly shaken by the crash. He lay for a while in the silent dusty rubble to which most of the room had been reduced. He felt that he was at the lowest ebb he had ever reached in his -- A large, scraggy black bird came flapping through the slowly settling clouds of dust and, stretching down its scrawny legs, -- Zaphod nodded. He took out his Peril Sensitive Sunglasses again. They were completely black, and by now quite badly scratched by the unexpected metal object in his pocket. He put them on. He -- When Zarniwoop entered a minute or so later with a black eye, he regarded the four wisps of smoke with interest. -- Four inert bodies sank through spinning blackness. Consciousness had died, cold oblivion pulled the bodies down and down into the pit of unbeing. The roar of silence echoed dismally around them and they sank at last into a dark and bitter sea of heaving red that slowly engulfed them, seemingly for ever. -- A green blur watched them disapprovingly. -- Ford Prefect's consciousness snapped back like elastic, making his brain smart. He looked up woozily at the green blur. "Reservation?" he said weakly. "Yes, sir," said the green blur. -- In so far as it is possible for a green blur to arch its eyebrows disdainfully, this is what the green blur now did. -- "If the lady and gentlemen would like to order drinks ..." said the green blur, hovering impatiently beside them. -- deployed here and there about the bar area. A young Vl'Hurg officer and his green steaming young lady passed through the large smoked glass doors at the far end of the bar into the -- "Perhaps," interrupted the green blur who had by this time resolved into the shape of a small wizened dark-suited green waiter, "perhaps you would care to discuss the matter over drinks -- "Dinner!" Zaphod exclaimed with passion, "Listen, little green person, my stomach could take you home and cuddle you all night -- to demonstrate how difficult it was to get this sort of body into a suit. The face had the texture of an orange and the colour of an apple, but there the resemblance to anything sweet ended. -- "Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "Braised in a white wine sauce?" -- "I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered. -- "A green salad," said Arthur emphatically. "A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur. -- "Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?" -- the photon storms gather in swirling crowds around us, preparing to tear apart the last of the red hot suns, I know you're all going to settle back and enjoy with me what I know we will find -- "Shhh!" said Ford. "It's conical. So what you do is, you see, you fill it with fine white sand, alright? Or sugar. Fine white sand, and/or sugar. Anything. Doesn't matter. Sugar's fine. And when -- Tipping back his chair to look for it, Ford collided with the small green waiter who was approaching the table carrying a portable telephone. -- The heat-sink had a mass of some two thousand billion tons and was contained within a black hole mounted in an electromagnetic field situated half-way along the length of the ship, and this heat-sink enabled the craft to be manoeuvred to within a few miles of a yellow sun, there to catch and ride the solar flares that burst out from its surface. -- "And this baby," said Ford, "the tangerine star buggy with the black sunbusters ..." -- "It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape ... light just seems to fall into it!" -- The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it. -- "It's black," said Ford, "Everything in it is just totally black ..." -- "The black ship going into the sun always gets 'em, and the new one's a beauty. Be real sorry to see it go. If we get on down there, I'll set the black ship autopilot and we'll cruise off in the limo. OK?" -- In the car park stood the black ship, closed and silent. -- moved up to the small cockpit. Here he operated the remote control system which activated the autopilot in the black ship lying next to the limo, thus causing great relief to Zaphod -- The black ship glided smoothly forward out of its bay, turned, and moved down the central causeway swiftly and quietly. At the -- the flight, "Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?" The walls of the swaying cabin were also black, the ceiling was black, the seats - which were rudimentary since the only important trip this ship was designed for was supposed to be unmanned - were black, the control panel was black, the instruments were black, the little screws that held them in place were black, the thin tufted nylon floor covering was black, and when they had lifted up a corner of it they had discovered that the foam underlay also was black. -- Down on the dry, red world of Kakrafoon, in the middle of the vast Rudlit Desert, the stage technicians were testing the sound -- technicians testing the speaker channels, and this it was that was being relayed to the interior of the black ship. -- "The black stunt ship is now in position," it said, "it's looking good. Gonna be a great sundive. Stage computer on line?" -- "Take control of the black ship." -- that Ford Prefect had completed his search of the other compartments of the black ship. He burst back into the cabin. The sun of Kakrafoon loomed terrifyingly large on the vision screen, its blazing white inferno of fusing hydrogen nuclei growing moment by moment as the ship plunged onwards, unheeding -- follow was that of Ford Prefect lunging across the cabin to the small black box that Arthur had indicated and stabbing repeatedly at the single small black button set into it. -- The black ship with its single morose occupant had plunged on schedule into the nuclear furnace of the sun. Massive solar -- 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 -- Arthur span round and wobbled uncertainly. Ford Prefect was approaching looking red eyed and pasty. -- which stretched out of sight in both directions. The outer steel wall - which was painted in that sickly shade of pale green which they use in schools, hospitals and mental asylums to keep the -- met the inner perpendicular wall which, oddly enough was covered in dark brown hessian wall weave. The floor was of dark green ribbed rubber. -- crews; stories too of incautious travellers who found and entered such ships; stories of ... - then Ford remembered the brown hessian wall weave in the first corridor and pulled himself -- sarcophagi. They stood about waist high and were constructed of what appeared to be white marble, which is almost certainly what it was - something that only appeared to be white marble. The tops were semi-translucent, and through them could dimly be -- Rolling slowly round the floor between the sarcophagi was a heavy, oily white gas which Arthur at first thought might be there to give the place a little atmosphere until he discovered -- If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it -- The man with the gun moved from the door and circled round them. As he came into the light they could see his black and gold uniform on which the buttons were so highly polished that they -- trying any funny stuff. They seemed to have passed at least a mile of continuous brown hessian wall weave. Finally they reached a large steel door which slid open when Number Two shouted at it. -- The bath stood on a six foot pedestal of rough hewn blue water crystal and was of a baroque monstrosity not often seen outside -- planet of Golgafrincham: It is a planet with an ancient and mysterious history, rich in legend, red, and occasionally green with the blood of those who sought in times gone by to conquer -- That night the ship crash-landed on to an utterly insignificant little green-blue planet which circled a small unregarded yellow sun in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the -- imagine I'm told. When the men come, or when in my mind the men come in their six black ships, do they come in your mind too? What do you see pussy?" -- "I think I saw another ship in the sky today," he said at last. "A big white one. I've never seen a big white one, just the six black ones. And the six green ones. And the others who say they come from so far away. Never a big white one. Perhaps six small black ones can look like one big white one at certain times. Perhaps I would like a glass of whisky. Yes, that seems more -- was the most beautiful he had ever seen. All that day they had passed through rolling green hills and valleys, richly covered with grasses, wild scented flowers and tall thickly leaved trees, -- pile of fruit lying in their path - berries that looked remarkably like raspberries and blackberries, and pulpy, green skinned fruit that looked remarkably like pears. -- Ford had gone to examine a glacier, and Arthur found him there crouching by the solid wall of blue ice. He was tense with excitement - his eyes darted up to meet Arthur's. -- Arthur looked. He saw the solid wall of blue ice. -- What else was pleasant, he asked himself? Well, so many things: the red and gold of the trees, now that autumn was approaching; the peaceful chatter of scissors a few feet from his bath where a -- "Perhaps they're having their caves redecorated," called out a wag from the crowd. -- "Listen, forget it," said Ford, "forget all of it. Nothing matters. Look, it's a beautiful day, enjoy it. The sun, the green of the hills, the river down in the valley, the burning trees." -- in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole. Killed ten billion people." -- Many hours later Arthur and Mella sat and watched the moon rise over the dull red glow of the trees. -- "And that other world your friend talked about, the one that got pushed into a black hole." -- instinctively they bowed anyway, which was fortunate because the small red heavy ball which the crowd actually had been applauding whistled mere millimetres over Arthur's head. In the crowd a man -- "Something red," hissed Ford back at him. -- "Er, somewhere green." -- "Something blue," he said. -- They remained crouched there for a few moments, frowning deeply. The blue thing shaped like a policeman tapped them both on the shoulders. -- "I'm home," said Arthur. "Tea," he said, "cricket," he added with pleasure, "mown grass, wooden benches, white linen jackets, beer cans ..." -- Outside the refreshment tent, the sun was shining on a happy crowd. It shone on white hats and red faces. It shone on ice lollies and melted them. It shone on the tears of small children -- "I had a Golgafrinchan jogging towel," continued Arthur, "it was blue with yellow stars on it. This isn't it." -- probably not important in the cosmic scale of things, it's just odd, that's all. A pink towel suddenly, instead of a blue one with yellow stars." -- What happened next they could not ignore. With a noise like a hundred thousand people saying "wop", a steely white spaceship suddenly seemed to create itself out of nothing in the air -- They were robots, white robots. What was most extraordinary about them was that they appeared to have come dressed for the occasion. Not only were they white, but they carried what appeared to be cricket bats, and not only that, but they also carried what appeared to be cricket balls, and not only that but they wore white ribbing pads round the lower parts of their legs. These last were extraordinary because they -- And then, as suddenly as it had all started, it was over. The eleven white robots ascended through the seething cloud in a tight formation, and with a few last flashes of flame entered the bowels of their hovering white ship, which, with the noise of a hundred thousand people saying "foop", promptly vanished into the -- The interior of the flight deck was dark green, dark red, dark brown, cramped and moodily lit. Inexplicably, the resemblance to a small Italian bistro had failed to end at the hatchway. Small -- He walked towards a green wrought-iron spiral staircase set incomprehensibly in the middle of the flight deck and started to -- dozen chairs, of the bentwood style. On it was a tablecloth - a grubby, red and white check tablecloth, scarred with the occasional cigarette burn, each, presumably, at a precise -- was nothing in it. No information, no illusions, just themselves, white walls and a few small instruments which looked as if they were meant to plug into something which Slartibartfast couldn't -- moving a fairish body of water as it did so. It blew a few bubbles up through the water engagingly. Its blue and white stripes glistened briefly in a sudden feeble ray of sun that had -- conversation during which a hundred thousand people seemed unexpectedly to say "wop" and a team of white robots descended from the sky like dandelion seeds drifting on the wind in tight -- And then the blackness behind the Universe exploded, and each particular piece of blackness was the furious smoke of hell. And the nothingness behind the blackness behind the Universe erupted, and behind the nothingness behind the blackness behind the shattered Universe was at last the dark figure of an immense -- sky was a sullen pink, darkening via a rather curious colour to blue and upwards to black. Smoke billowed down out of it at an incredible lick. -- only images which ever stood out clearly from the avalance of tumbling history: a wicket gate, a small hard red ball, hard white robots, and also something less distinct, something dark and cloudy. -- All around them softly undulating green countryside rolled off gently into the distance. Birds sang about what they thought of -- The town appeared to consist mostly of fairly low buildings made of white stone. The skyline was of gentle pleasing curves. -- The sky, from one horizon to another, from east to west, from north to south, was utterly and completely black. -- down. It was drifting in a remote area of the Galaxy, deep in the inky blackness of space. So which particular hundred thousand people would turn up at this point and say a totally unexpected -- Terrific, thought Trillian to herself, and within a few hours the great white running-shoe ship was slowly powering down out of the sky beneath a hot brilliant sun towards a brightly coloured sandy -- "I want you to imagine," said Zaphod to the group of white robots who swung round to stare at him at that point, "that I have an -- It was impossible to explain why, but their smooth and sleek white bodies seemed to be the utter embodiment of clean, clinical evil. From their hideously dead eyes to their powerful lifeless -- seemed a little tall, thin, angular and almost as pale as to be white, but otherwise they appeared remarkably pleasant; a little whimsical perhaps, one wouldn't necessarily want to spend a long -- you have been inadvertently guilty of the most grotesque bad taste. Particularly the bit about the little red ball hitting the wicket, that's very nasty." -- the stars" but "above the grass", which struck Arthur a little prosaic. Then he looked up again at the bewildering black sky, and had the distinct feeling that there was an important point -- pins and needles of light against the deep interstellar blackness; but when launched, it did not even manage to complete its very first radio message - an SOS - before undergoing a -- grasp of all the hypertechnology involved in building their thousands of spaceships, and their millions of lethal white robots. -- "M'lud?" said the severe little man in black, rising. -- "Nothing is lost for ever," said Slartibartfast, his face flickering redly in the light of the candle which the robot waiter was trying to take away, "except for the Cathedral of -- Slartibartfast had been telling him. He half-expected suddenly to see lethal white robots step silently from the shadows and kill him. He caught his breath. They didn't. He let it go again. He -- that moment there lit up suddenly in the dark distance an eerie green neon sign. -- Only in green neon. -- Once again, the sign flicked off, and left him blinking in the darkness with just the dim red image of his name jumping on his retina. -- Just blackness. -- With a sudden ping, there was a rabbit there in the black labyrinth with him, a huge, monstrously, hideously soft and -- reflection in its soft and lovable unblinking and extremely huge brown eyes. -- And there was, standing in the corridor with Arthur, a giant green scaly newt. Arthur turned, yelped, leapt backwards, and found himself standing in the middle of the rabbit. He yelped -- a huge palpitating wet cave with a vast, slimy, rough, whale-like creature rolling around it and sliding over monstrous white tombstones. High above the cave rose a vast promontory in which -- section of wall trundling aside, revealing, for the moment, just dark blackness behind it. Arthur looked into it in much the same way that a mouse looks into a dark dog-kennel. -- It was black. Where it wasn't black you were inclined to wish that it was, because the colours with which some of the unspeakable details -- eye-defying colours from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead, taking in Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow, Burnt hombre and Gan Green on the way. -- Agrajag was black, bloated, wrinkled and leathery. -- been hoping to avoid, Arthur noticed that much of Agrajag's face was covered with ragged strips of black sticky plasters. -- "On the way down," he snarled, "I couldn't help noticing a flashy-looking white spaceship. And looking out of a port on this flashy-looking spaceship was a smug-looking Arthur Dent. -- He rushed in a painful waddling hobble to what appeared to be a small black sacrificial altar. He was shouting so wildly now that he was really carving his face up badly. Arthur leaped down from -- He thrashed again in a brief apoplectic fit, quivered, and collapsed, smacking a large red button on the altar as he did so. -- all bound together in a single volume, they underwent gravitational collapse and became a Black Hole. -- with a hook mouth, a lantern nose, and small beady little cheekbones. He was wearing black trousers, a black silk shirt open to what was presumably his navel, though Arthur had learnt -- dangly gold things hanging round his neck. He carried something in a black bag, and clearly wanted people to notice that he didn't want them to notice it. -- "A Rory. It's just a small silver thing set on a large black base. What did you say?" -- The party was locked in a horrible embrace with a strange white spaceship which seemed to be half sticking through it. Together -- for Thor and except for Arthur, who stared, shaking, into the Thunder God's black eyes. -- The white Krikkit warship was parked amongst the stark grey crags of the asteroid, alternately flaring under arclights or disappearing in shadow. The blackness of the shaped shadows cast by the hard rocks danced together in wild choreography as the -- The eleven white robots were bearing, in procession, the Wikkit Key out into the middle of a circle of swinging lights. -- genuine spacecraft. It was as if it was a full-scale model of one - a solid blueprint. In other words it was a very useful thing to have around if you suddenly decided to build a spaceship yourself -- middle of the chamber, where Trillian stood, as if on trial, was a slim white pillar about four feet tall. On top of it stood a small white globe, about three, maybe four inches in diameter. -- The robot swung its battleclub. It hit the small white globe. The small white globe was the supernova bomb. -- speck of dust, held within itself, faintly and weakly, the pattern of the whole. In reducing the computer to dust the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax had merely crippled the -- The computer looked normal size for a black space-borne computer satellite - about a thousand miles across. -- "Excuse me," he said. "The Ashes. I've got them. They were stolen by those white robots a moment ago. I've got them in this bag. They were part of the Key to the Slo-Time envelope, you see, and, -- He tossed the small hard red ball from hand to hand, feeling its weight. -- He looked up into the sky. The birds were wheeling about it, a few white clouds scudded across it. The air was disturbed with the sounds of police and ambulance sirens, and people screaming -- team. It was one of the robot Krikkit team. It was a cold, hard, lethal white killer-robot that presumably had not returned to its ship with the others. -- and looked at his own hand, the hand which was holding the small hard red ball. -- at the ball gripped in his helpless hand. It was emitting a deep red glow and flashing intermittently. And still his feet were pounding inexorably forward. -- He pushed himself up on to his thin wasted shoulders, his eyes stared wildly. His white hair seemed to be waving at someone it knew in the next room. -- "Some white robots," whispered the man hoarsely, "broke into the courtroom and stole the judge's sceptre, the Argabuthon Sceptre -- the darkest and most severe trees in the fearsome Forest of Arglebard. The massive black Podium of Justice which dominated the centre of the chamber was a monster of gravity. If a sunbeam -- Then, as their eyes became accustomed to the darkness, they spotted a dull red glow in a corner, and behind the glow a live shadow. They swung a torch round on to it. -- the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape- descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still -- Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. -- The figure paused again on seeing them, and then redoubled his steps, making directly towards the point on the horizon at which -- or a "Hey look, there's someone in the rain, what a jerk" was entirely unclear. A green strip across the top of the windscreen indicated that whatever the message was, it came from Steve and -- Behind her, in the darkness of the alley, a green flickering glow was bathing Ford Prefect's face, and his eyes were slowly -- "Surviving: get a job as cab driver immediately. A cab driver's job is to drive people anywhere they want to go in big yellow machines called taxis. Don't worry if you don't know how the -- the geography or indeed the basic physics of the area, and have large green antennae growing out of your head. Believe me, this is the best way of staying inconspicuous. -- roaring, gripped by tidal waves of energy pouring out of the loathsome yellow Vogon ships. And then at last, five seconds after the moment he had determined as being the last possible -- He weaved terrifyingly up through the canyoned walls of the city, and once clear of them, hurtled through the black and red pall of smoke which hung permanently above it. -- Eight years ago, at lunchtime, this planet had been demolished, utterly destroyed, by the huge yellow Vogon ships which had hung in the lunchtime sky as if the law of gravity was no more than a -- "What do you mean, what hallucinations? I'm talking about all that stuff with the big yellow ships, everyone going crazy and saying we're going to die, and then pop, they vanished as the -- "The Vogon ..." squeaked Arthur. "The yellow ships ... vanished?" -- bloody heck had he been for the last eight years, and how he had got there if not in one of the big yellow Vogon ships which the appalling Russell had just been telling him were merely drug- -- A small black wire-haired terrier ran out from behind a low wall and then, catching sight of Arthur, began to snarl. -- startled to see the sun rising in the morning, and astonished by all the green stuff in the fields. -- the whole bypass scheme in the area; there was also an old letter from Greenpeace, the ecological pressure group to which he occasionally made contributions, asking for help with their -- He flipped through the Yellow Pages and made a short list of numbers to try. -- "Oh yes," he said again. "The Californians have rediscovered alchemy. Oh yes." -- He sat and looked at the fish bowl. He tapped it again, and despite being full of water and a small yellow Babel fish which was gulping its way around rather dejectedly, it still chimed its -- He waited for the green light to show and then opened the door again on the now empty cargo hold. -- The bright orange curve that filled over half the visible area was the giant gas planet Sesefras Magna, where the Xaxisian battleships docked, and just rising over its horizon was a small cool blue moon, Epun. -- He climbed into his battered but adored old black Golf GTi, squealed the tyres, and headed out past the islands of petrol -- and some soggy beermats with jokes printed on them. Arthur got Fenny a tomato juice, and himself a pint of yellow water with gas in it. And a couple of sausages. He didn't know why. He bought -- without the same sense of moral depth. Plus the air is, for some reason, yellow." -- He wandered hazily on and found himself outside the offices of Greenpeace. he remembered the contents of his file marked "Things to do - urgent!", which he hadn't opened again in the meantime. -- "Hold this," she said, shoved a stout rope in his hand and disappeared inside through the large white wooden doors from which dangled a fat padlock off a black iron bar. -- normal-looking front door of smartly glazed panelled wood with a black dolphin door knocker. The one odd thing about this door was its doorstep, which was nine feet high, since the door was set -- One of them showed some horrible green scaly reptilian figure ranting and raving about the Single Transferable Vote system. It -- "Well, in the circumstances I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do. I was compelled," said Arthur, "to ignore it." -- worry just dropping away, like taking off heavy weights, like black and white becoming colour, like a dry stick suddenly being watered. The sudden shift of perspective that says `Put away your -- "It was very odd," she said, much as one of the pursuing Egyptians might have said that the behaviour of the Red Sea when Moses waved his rod at it was a little on the strange side. -- flickery and jumpy, and if I try too hard, I get as far as the teacup and I just black out." -- out of her bag was battered and travelworn as it had been hurled into prehistoric rivers, baked under the sun that shines so redly on the deserts of Kakrafoon, half-buried in the marbled sands -- All was redoubled fear and consternation for a moment, but the ship was gone. -- "Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and -- Ten or fifteen feet below him was the hard tarmac and a few yards off to the right the yellow street lights of Upper Street. -- one by one and left them in a neatly crumpled heap on the floor. He put on his pyjamas, the blue ones with the stripe. He washed his face and hands, cleaned his teeth, went to the lavatory, -- The light is darkly brilliant. There are different mountains up there, but they are mountains, with their own white arctic snows. -- till all were gone, winding their surprised way down into the enveloping whiteness. -- "Just a rumour my old elephant tusk, my little green baize card table, just a rumour. Probably means nothing at all, but I may -- "It's the absolute stocking top truth. All documented in his little black book, it all checks out at every single funloving level. The Met Office is going ice cold thick banana whips, and funny little men in white coats are flying in from all over the world with their little rulers and boxes and drip feeds. This man -- will not only believe, but will actually have absolute proof, often dictated to him by angels with golden beards and green wings and Doctor Scholl footwear, that the month's most -- Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious. -- He was talking of the angels with the golden beards and green wings and Dr Scholl sandals. -- "That one?" said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at a blue plaque with some instructions written on it. -- They went out on to the beach, which was where he started talking about angels with golden beards and green wings and Dr Scholl sandals. -- Pleiades? I can see that you haven't, so I'll tell you," he said, "over the very large mug of black coffee that you are about to make me." -- "Making you some black coffee." -- flew open and a small man from somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse leapt out wearing a white coat. "Hold it!" he shouted again, and this time brandished a short squad black rod with lights on it. The lights winked briefly, the ramp paused in its ascent, and then in obedience to the signals -- And in the land of Sevorbeupstry, they came to the Great Red Plain of Rars, which was bounded on the South side by the -- showers and sanitary facilities, but the going was tough, and the high sun baked down on the Great Red Plain, and the Great Red Plain rippled in the heat. -- and a photograph of themselves with their arms tight around each other on the Great Red Plain of Rars. -- They stared ahead at the distant black speck winking in the heat haze; they looked behind themselves. They elected to go on. -- They carried him with them along the path that ran along the left of the Great Red Plain of Rars toward the encircling mountains of Quentulus Quazgar. -- Luckily, there was a stall nearby where you could rent scooters from guys with green wings. -- The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breath- taking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background -- for Tricia, her second stab at a role in life. Behind her Chanel lip gloss, her coupe sauvage and her crystal blue contact lenses lay a brain that had acquired for itself, in an earlier, abandoned phase -- Two minutes later, Tricia swivelled into the bar seat next to Gail Andrews, who was sitting in front of a glass of white wine. -- Time to go home. Time to phone the airline and see if she could still get the red-eye back to Heathrow. tonight. She reached for the big phone directory. -- She then spent another hour dithering about what to wear. At last she settled on a smart little black dress she'd got in New York. She phoned a friend to see who was likely to be at the -- They were all thin and, under domestic lighting conditions, a sort of dim purplish green. -- gripping, the distance made his heart wilt and his brain bend. His fingers were white with pain and tension. His teeth were grinding and twisting against each other beyond his control. His -- He was sitting in a blue leatherette foam filled swivel-seated office chair in front of a computer terminal. -- `Oh, she's all over the continuum these days. We can't get the tri-d TV stations out here of course, thank the Great Green Arkleseizure, but you hear her on the radio, gallivanting here -- `Go ahead and take a breath outside,' said the old woman. Arthur was going red in the face trying to help her move the thing. -- Even The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy seemed to work only fitfully here, which was why he was reduced to making these sorts of enquiries in these sorts of places. One place he always -- little cottage in the west country of England, that the sun would be shining over the green hills, the post van would be going up the lane, the daffodils would be blooming in his garden, and in -- It was a world called Bartledan. It had oxygen. It had green hills. It even, it seemed, had a renowned literary culture. But -- thought of as natural, like buying people presents at Christmas, stopping at red lights or falling at a rate of 32 feet/second/second, were just the habits of his own world and didn't necessarily work -- Black, roaring silences swam sickeningly through his shattered mind. He knew with a kind of resigned certainty that he would -- a regular towel from a regular domestic soft furnishings shop. It even had a kind of blue and pink floral pattern despite his repeated attempts to bleach and stone wash it. It had a couple -- It was circular and black and about the size of a small side plate. Its top and its bottom were smoothly convex so that it -- fuss. One moment it was a perfectly ordinary late afternoon in the early autumn - the leaves were just beginning to turn red and gold, the river was beginning to swell again with the rains from the -- their jigsaw. A little salad, a little sauce, another slice of bread, another sandwich, another verse of Yellow Submarine. -- there in the morning, you've simply no idea how old they'll be in the evening. You complain till you're blue in the face but it doesn't get you anywhere. I left her at one of the places for a -- about the length of her forearm on each side, and about the length of her hand deep, wrapped up in brown plasper with an ingenious new form of self-knotting string. It didn't rattle as she shook it, -- later by a giant pair of teeth framed by immense and perfectly glossed red lips. A huge blue brush appeared out of nowhere and started foamily to scrub at the teeth, which continued to -- There was quite a large quantity of missing matter in the box, little soft round white pellets of missing matter, which Random discarded for future generations of physicists to track -- Out of the pellets of missing matter she lifted the featureless black disk. She put it down on a rock beside her and sifted amongst all the missing matter to see if there was anything else, a manual or some attachments or something, but there was nothing else at all. Just the black disk. -- Where just a few moments earlier there had been a smoothly curved black disk there was now a bird. A bird, hovering there. -- same size or, at least, not less than twice the size. It was also both a lot bluer and a lot pinker than pikka birds, while at the same time being perfectly black. -- Then, just as suddenly everything went black. Random drop- ped into a tense crouch, feeling for the specially sharpened rock in her pocket again. Then the blackness receded and rolled itself up into a ball and then the blackness was the bird again. It hung in the air in front of her, beating its wings slowly and staring at -- encountered. It was as if the whole geometry of space was redefined in seamless bird shapes. -- on the right dimensional matrix. Good. No, the answer is an orange and two lemons.' -- `If I have three lemons and three oranges and I lose two oranges and a lemon what do I have left?' -- Am I still infinite?' it asked, ballooning this way and that in space. `Am I infinite now? How yellow am I?' -- in the rain. It was a huge, bluish-greenish globe, misty and cloud-covered, turning with. majestic slowness against a black, starry background. -- Random was also startled by the sight of this huge, blue and green and watery and misty sausage hanging above her. And now it was a string of sausages, or rather it was a string of -- The sky above the buildings was a cold and hostile black. The stars, which should have been blindingly brilliant points -- First of all, it had all come on top of the overnight flight from New York. The red eye. Always a killer, that. -- The leader lounged against a brown corduroy bean bag and squirted breath-freshener into his mouth. -- and she was with an alien creature, who was lounging against a brown corduroy bean bag and squirting breath-freshener into his mouth. -- expert on extraterrestrial craft, but this was a sleek and beautiful silver and white thing about the size of a large ocean-going yacht, which is what it most resembled. Next to this, the structures of the -- the fantastic shapes of the giant cacti that sprouted here and there from the arid, orange landscape. -- Learn to delegate. Hire whoever you want. Get on to it. I think you'll find my credit is good. And blue cheese dressing on the salad. Thank you.' -- At the very edge of the solar system, hunkered down on a green leatherette sofa, staring fretfully at a range of TV and computer screens sat a very worried Grebulon leader. He was -- Its chances of spotting this other source of data - a massive yellow constructor ship - accidentally were practically nil. It was as far from the sun as Rupert was, but almost diametrically -- The massive yellow constructor ship wanted to be able to monitor events on Planet Ten without being spotted itself. It -- Deep in the bowels of his unsightly yellow ship, the Vogon Captain grunted as he reached for a slightly faded and dog-eared -- into the air near him. Darkness engulfed the bridge. Dim lights danced briefly in the black eyes of the bird as, deep in its instructional address space, bracket after bracket was final- -- A brilliant vision lit up in the darkness, a watery blue and green vision, a tube flowing through the air, shaped like a chopped up string of sausages. -- He bounded down the dark glossy stairs, feeling very froody in his new shoes. They were suede and they were blue, and he was very pleased that in spite of everything else going on he had -- external vision screens that lined one wall. In the air above him the discontinuities in the blue and green watery sausage shape resolved themselves. Options collapsed, possibilities folded into