Read The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for Free Online

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
    “Very deep,” said Arthur, “you should send that in to the
Reader’s Digest
. They’ve got a page for people like you.”
    “Drink up.”
    “Why three pints all of a sudden?”
    “Muscle relaxant, you’ll need it.”
    “Muscle relaxant?”
    “Muscle relaxant.”
    Arthur stared into his beer.
    “Did I do anything wrong today,” he said, “or has the world always been like this and I’ve been too wrapped up in myself to notice?”
    “All right,” said Ford, “I’ll try to explain. How long have we known each other?”
    “How long?” Arthur thought. “Er, about five years, maybe six,” he said. “Most of it seemed to make some kind of sense at the time.”
    “All right,” said Ford. “How would you react if I said that I’m not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse?”
    Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way.
    “I don’t know,” he said, taking a pull of beer. “Why, do you think it’s the sort of thing you’re likely to say?”
    Ford gave up. It really wasn’t worth bothering at the moment, what with the world being about to end. He just said, “Drink up.”
    He added, perfectly factually, “The world’s about to end.”
    Arthur gave the rest of the pub another wan smile. The rest of the pub frowned at him. A man waved at him to stop smiling at them and mind his own business.
    “This must be Thursday,” said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. “I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”

Chapter 3
    O n this particular Thursday, something was moving quietly through the ionosphere many miles above the surface of the planet; several somethings in fact, several dozen huge yellow chunky slablike somethings, huge as office blocks, silent as birds. They soared with ease, basking in electromagnetic rays from the star Sol, biding their time, grouping, preparing.
    The planet beneath them was almost perfectly oblivious of their presence, which was just how they wanted it for the moment. The huge yellow something went unnoticed at Goonhilly, they passed over Cape Canaveral without a blip, Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them, which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they’d been looking for all these years.
    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 itself. It nestled in the darkness inside a leather satchel which Ford Prefect habitually wore slung around his neck. The contents of Ford Prefect’s satchel were quite interesting in fact and would have made any Earth physicist’s eyes pop out of his head, which is why he always concealed them by keeping a couple of dogeared scripts for plays he pretended he was auditioning for stuffed in the top. 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 device that looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million “pages” could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor—
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.
    Beneath that in Ford Prefect’s satchel were a few ballpoints, a notepad and a largish bath towel from Marks and