"Adams, Douglas - Hitchhiker's 02 - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe 1.1b" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

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 gigantic computer program.
And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and
obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the
Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.

Sadly however, just before the critical moment of readout, the
Earth was unexpectedly demolished by the Vogons to make way - so
they claimed - for a new hyperspace bypass, and so all hope of
discovering a meaning for life was lost for ever.

Or so it would seem.

Two of the strange, ape-like creatures survived.

Arthur Dent escaped at the very last moment because an old friend
of his, Ford Prefect, suddenly turned out to be from a small
planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he
had hitherto claimed; and, more to the point, he knew how to
hitch rides on flying saucers.

Tricia McMillian - or Trillian - had skipped the planet six
months earlier with Zaphod Beeblebrox, the then President of the
Galaxy.

Two survivors.