Дуглас Адамс – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy / Руководство для путешествующих автостопом по Галактике (страница 1)

Douglas Adams / Дуглас Адамс

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy / Руководство для путешествующих автостопом по Галактике

© Шитова А. В., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2018

© ООО «Издательство «Антология», 2018

Very far in the unfashionable end of the Galaxy lies a small yellow sun. Orbiting this sun at a distance of about ninety-two million miles is a tiny blue-green planet whose ape-descended [1] life forms are so primitive that they still think digital watches are a great idea.

This planet has – or had – a problem, which was this: most of the people on it (even the ones with digital watches) were unhappy most of the time. Many thought that they had all made a big mistake coming down from the trees. And some even said that no one should have ever left the oceans.

Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of them involved the small green pieces of paper. And so the problem remained.

And then, one Thursday, almost two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change[2], one girl sitting alone in a small cafe suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe happened, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story. But it is the story of that terribly stupid catastrophe.

It is also the story of a book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe, never seen or heard of by any Earthman). It is a remarkable book. In fact, it was probably the most remarkable book ever published by the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor [3].

It is also a very successful book – more popular than Oolon Colluphid’s philosophical bestsellers Where God Was Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who Is This God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations of the Galaxy, The Hitchhiker’s Guide has already beaten the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the main source of all knowledge and wisdom. Why? There are two reasons. First, it is a bit cheaper. Secondly, it has the words DONT’T PANIC written in large friendly letters on its cover.

But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of this remarkable book begins very simply.

It begins with a house.

Chapter 1

The house stood alone on the edge of the village and looked over the farmland. It was not a remarkable house – it was about thirty years old, small, made of brick, with four windows in the front that failed to please the eye[4].

The only person for whom this house was special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because he was the one who lived in it. He had lived in it for about three years, ever since he had left London because it made him nervous. He was about thirty as well, with dark hair, and never quite comfortable with himself. What used to worry him most was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was so worried about. He worked in local radio, and he always used to tell his friends that his job was a lot more interesting than they probably thought.

On Wednesday night it had rained very heavily, the road was wet and muddy, but the Thursday morning sun was bright and clear as it shone on Arthur Dent’s house for the last time.

Arthur hadn’t quite realized that the local council was planning to demolish his house and build a bypass[5] instead.

At eight o’clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn’t feel very good. He woke up, got up, walked round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and walked to the bathroom to wash.

He put toothpaste on the brush and looked at himself in the mirror. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer outside the bathroom window. Arthur Dent shaved, washed, dried, and walked to the kitchen to find something pleasant to put in his mouth.

Kettle, fridge, milk, coffee.

The word bulldozer went through Arthur’s mind for a moment, trying to find something to connect with. The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one. He stared at it. “Yellow,” he thought and walked back to his bedroom to get dressed.

Passing the bathroom, he stopped to drink a large glass of water, and another. He suspected that he had a hangover. Why? Had he been drinking the night before? Maybe. “Yellow,” he thought again and went to the bedroom.

There he stood for a while[6] and thought.

The pub, he thought. Oh dear, the pub.

He remembered being angry about something that seemed important. He’d been telling people about it. Telling people about it for too long, he suspected, remembering the looks on other people’s faces. Something about a new bypass he had just found out about. No one had heard about it. Ridiculous. It wouldn’t work, he had decided, because no one wanted a bypass.

God, what a terrible hangover it had brought him though. He looked at himself in the mirror. “Yellow,” he thought. The word yellow went through his mind, trying to find something to connect with.

Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer that was going up his garden path.

Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty and fat, and worked for the local council.

Mr. L. Prosser was a nervous, worried man. Today he was especially nervous and worried because something had gone seriously wrong with his job – which was to see that Arthur Dent’s house was cleared out of the way before the end of the day.

“Come on, Mr. Dent,” he said, “you can’t win, you know. You can’t lie in front of the bulldozer forever.”

Arthur lay in the mud and looked at him.

“I’m staying here,” he said, “and we’ll see who rusts first.”

“I’m afraid,” said Mr. Prosser, “this bypass has to be built, and it’s going to be built!”

“First time I’ve heard of it,” said Arthur. “Why does it have to be built?”

Mr. Prosser shook his finger at him. “What do you mean, why does it have to be built?” he said. “It’s a bypass. We’ve got to build bypasses.”

Bypasses help some people drive from point A to point B very fast, while other people drive from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C – right in between – often wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people of point B want to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people of point A want to get there. They often wish that people would just finally decide where the hell they wanted to be.

Mr. Prosser wanted to be at point D. Point D was just any point a very long way from points A, B and C. He would have a nice little cottage at point D and have a good time at point E, which would be the nearest pub to point D. His wife, of course, would be against it.

Now Mr. Prosser sweated under the grins of the bulldozer drivers. Obviously somebody had been terribly incompetent, and he hoped to God it wasn’t him.

Mr. Prosser said: “You had a chance to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time, you know.”

“Appropriate time?” asked Arthur. “Appropriate time? The first I knew about it was when a workman came to my home yesterday. I asked him if he’d come to clean the windows and he said no he’d come to demolish the house. He didn’t tell me straight away[7], of course. Oh no. First he cleaned a couple of windows and made me pay for it. Then he told me.”

“But Mr. Dent, the plans have been in the local planning ofcif e for the last nine months.”

“Oh yes, well, as soon as I heard I went there to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t really tried to call people’s attention to them[8], had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything.”

“But the plans were on display…”

“On display? I had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”[9]

“So had the stairs[10].”

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes, I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked cabinet in an old lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.”

A cloud passed in the sky. Its shadow fell over Arthur Dent as he lay in the cold mud.

Mr. Prosser frowned. “It’s not a very nice house anyway,” he said.

“I’m sorry, but I happen to like it.”[11]

“You’ll like the bypass.”

“Oh shut up,” said Arthur Dent. “Shut up and go away, and take your bloody[12] bypass with you!”

Mr. Prosser’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times while his mind showed him pleasant visions of Arthur Dent’s house burning. He pulled himself together.[13]

“Mr. Dent,” he said.

“Hello? Yes?” said Arthur.

“Some information for you. Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll over you?”

“How much?” said Arthur.

“None at all,” said Mr. Prosser, and walked nervously of.f

By a curious coincidence, “none at all” is exactly how much suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his closest friends was not an ape-descendant from Guildford[14] as he used to tell people, but was in fact from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse[15].