A mile or so away through the wood, Arthur Dent was too busily engrossed with what
he was doing to hear Ford's perfect approach.
What he was doing was rather curious, and this is what it was: on a wide flat piece of
the rock he had scratched out the shape of a large square, subdivided into one hundred and
sixty-nine smaller squares, thirteen to aside.
Furthermore, he had collected together a pile of smallish flattish stones and scratched
the shape of a letter onto each. Sitting morosely around the rock were a couple of the
surviving local native men whom Arthur Dent was trying to introduce the curious
concept embodied in these stones.
So far they had not done well. They had attempted to eat some of them, bury others and
throw the rest of them away. Arthur had finally encouraged one of them to lay a couple of
stones on the board he had scratched out, which was not even as far as he’d managed to
get the day before. Along with the rapid deterioration in the morale of these creatures,
there seemed to be a corresponding deterioration in their actual intelligence.
In an attempt to egg them along, Arthur set out a number of letters on the board
himself, and then tried to encourage the natives to add some more themselves.
It was not going well.
Ford watched quietly from beside a nearby tree.
“No,” said Arthur to one of the natives who had just shuffled some of the letters round
in a fit of abysmal dejection, “Q scores ten you see, and it’s on a triple word score, so…
look, I’ve explained the rules to you… no no, look please, put down that jawbone…
alright, we’ll start again. And try to concentrate this time.”
Ford leaned his elbow against the tree and his hand against his head.
“What are you doing, Arthur?” he asked quietly.
Arthur looked up with a start. He suddenly had a feeling that all this might look slightly
foolish. All he knew was that it had worked like a dream on him when he was a child.
But things were different then, or rather would be.
“I’m trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble,” he said.
“They’re not cavemen,” said Ford.
“They look like cavemen.”
Ford let it pass.
“I see,” he said.
“It’s uphill work,” said Arthur wearily, “the only word they know is grunt and they
can’t spell it.”
He sighed and sat back.
“What’s that supposed to achieve?” asked Ford.
“We’ve got to encourage them to evolve! To develop!” Arthur burst out angrily. He
hoped that the weary sigh and then the anger might do something to counteract the
overriding feeling of foolishness from which he was currently suffering. It didn’t. He
jumped to his feet.
“Can you imagine what a world would be like descended from those… cretins we
arrived with?” he said.
“Imagine?” said Ford, raising his eyebrows. “We don’t have to imagine. We’ve seen it.”
“But…” Arthur waved his arms about hopelessly.
“We’ve seen it,” said Ford, “there’s no escape.”
Arthur kicked at a stone.
“Did you tell them what we’ve discovered?” he asked.
“Hmmm?” said Ford, not really concentrating.
“Norway,” said Arthur, “Slartibartfast’s signature in the glacier. Did you tell them?”
“What’s the point?” said Ford, “What would it mean to them?”
“Mean?” said Arthur, “Mean? You know perfectly well what it means. It means that
this planet is the Earth! It’s my home! It’s where I was born!”
“Was?” said Ford.
“Alright, will be.”
“Yes, in two million years’ time. Why don’t you tell them that? Go and say to them,
‘Excuse me, I’d just like to point out that in two million years’ time I will be born just a
few miles from here.’ See what they say. They’ll chase you up a tree and set fire to it.”
Arthur absorbed this unhappily.
“Face it,” said Ford, “those zeebs over there are your ancestors, not these poor creatures
here.”
He went over to where the apemen creatures were rummaging listlessly with the stone
letters.
He shook his head.
“Put the Scrabble away, Arthur,” he said, “it won’t save the human race, because this
lot aren’t going to be the human race. The human race is currently sitting around rock on
the other side of this hill making documentaries about themselves.”
Arthur winced.
“There must be something we can do,” he said. A terrible sense of desolation thrilled
through his body that he should be here, on the Earth, the Earth which had lost its future
in a horrifying arbitrary catastrophe and which now seemed set to lose its past as well.
“No,” said Ford, “there’s nothing we can do. This doesn’t change the history of the
Earth, you see, this is the history of the Earth. Like it or leave it, the Golgafrinchans are
the people you are descended from. In two million years they get destroyed by the
Vogons. History is never altered you see, it just fits together like a jigsaw. Funny old
thing, life, isn’t it?”
He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant private bush where it hit a young
rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and didn’t stop till it was set upon and eaten by a
fox that choked on one of its bones and died on the bank of a stream which
subsequently washed it away.
During the following weeks, Ford Prefect swallowed his pride and struck up a
relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on Golgafrincham, and he was
terribly upset when she suddenly passed away as a result of drinking water from a pool
that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox. The only moral it is possible to draw
from this story is that one should never throw the letter Q into a pivot bush, but
unfortunately, there are times when it is unavoidable.
Like most of the really crucial things in life, this chain of events was completely
invisible to Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent. They were looking sadly at one of the natives
morosely pushing the other letters around.
“Poor bloody caveman,” said Arthur.
“They’re not…”
“What?”
“Oh never mind.”
The wretched creature let out a pathetic howling noise and banged on the rock.
“It’s all been a bit of a waste of time for them, hasn’t it?” said Arthur.
“Uh uh urghhhhh,” muttered the native and banged on the rock again.
“They’ve been out evolved by telephone sanitizers.”
“Urgh, gr gr, gruh!” insisted the native, continuing to bang on the rock.
“Why does he keep banging on the rock?” said Arthur.
“I think he probably wants you to Scrabble with him again,” said Ford, “he’s pointing
at the letters.”
“Probably spelled crzjgrdwldiwdc again, poor bastard. I keep on telling him there’s only
one g in crzjgrdwldiwdc.”
The native banged on the rock again.
They looked over his shoulder.
Their eyes popped.
There amongst the jumble of letters were eight that had been laid out in a clear straight
line.
They spelt two words.
The words were these:
“Forty-Two.”
“Grrrurgh guh guh,” explained the native. He swept the letters angrily away and went
and mooched under a nearby tree with his colleague.
Ford and Arthur stared at him. Then they stared at each other.
“Did that say what I thought it said?” they both said to each other.
“Yes,” they both said.
“Forty-two,” said Arthur.
“Forty-two,” said Ford.
Arthur ran over to the two natives.
“What are you trying to tell us?” he shouted. “What’s it supposed to mean?”
One of them rolled over on the ground, kicked his legs up in the air, rolled over again
and went to sleep.
The other bounded up the tree and threw horse chestnuts at Ford Prefect. Whatever it
was they had to say, they had already said it.
“You know what this means,” said Ford.
“Not entirely.”
“Forty-two is the number Deep Thought gave as being the Ultimate Answer.”
“Yes.”
And the Earth is the computer Deep Thought designed and built to calculate the
Question to the Ultimate Answer.”
“So we are led to believe.”
“And organic life was part of the computer matrix.”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so. That means that these natives, these apemen are an integral part of the
computer program, and that we and the Golgafrinchans are not.”
“But the cavemen are dying out and the Golgafrinchans are obviously set to replace
them.”
“Exactly. So do you see what this means?”
“What?”
“Cock up,” said Ford Prefect.
Arthur looked around him.
“This planet is having a pretty bloody time of it,” he said.
Ford puzzled for a moment.
“Still, something must have come out of it,” he said at last, “because Marvin said he
could see the Question printed in your brain wave patterns.”
“But…”
“Probably the wrong one, or a distortion of the right one. It might give us a clue though
if we could find it. I don’t see how we can though.”
They moped about for a bit. Arthur sat on the ground and started pulling up bits of
grass, but found that it wasn’t an occupation he could get deeply engrossed in. It wasn’t
grass he could believe in, the trees seemed pointless, the rolling hills seemed to be rolling
to nowhere and the future seemed just a tunnel to be crawled through.
Ford fiddled with his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was silent. He sighed and put it away.
Arthur picked up one of the letter stones from his homemade Scrabble set. It was a T.
He sighed and put it down again. The letter he put down next to it was an I. That spelled IT.
He tossed another couple of letters next to them They were an S and an H as it happened.
By a curious coincidence, the resulting word perfectly expressed the way Arthur was
feeling about things just then. He stared at it for a moment. He hadn’t done it
deliberately, it was just a random chance. His brain got slowly into first gear.
“Ford,” he said suddenly, “look, if that Question is printed in my brain wave patterns
but I’m not consciously aware of it it must be somewhere in my unconscious.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“There might be a way of bringing that unconscious pattern forward.”
“Oh yes?”
“Yes, by introducing some random element that can be shaped by that pattern.”
“Like how?”
“Like by pulling Scrabble letters out of a bag blindfolded.”
Ford leapt to his feet.
“Brilliant!” he said. He tugged his towel out of his satchel and with a few deft knots
transformed it into a bag.
“Totally mad,” he said, “utter nonsense. But we’ll do it because it’s brilliant nonsense.
Come on, come on.”
The sun passed respectfully behind a cloud. A few small sad raindrops fell.
They piled together all the remaining letters and dropped them into the bag. They shook
them up.
“Right,” said Ford, “close your eyes. Pull them out. Come on, come on, come on.”
Arthur closed his eyes and plunged his hand into the towel of stones. He jiggled
them about, pulled out four, and handed them to Ford. Ford laid them along the ground in
the order he got them.
“W,” said Ford, “H, A, T… What!”
He blinked.
“I think it’s working!” he said.
Arthur pushed three more at him.
“D, O, Y… Doy. Oh perhaps it isn’t working,” said Ford.
“Here’s the next three.”
“O, U, G… Doug… It’s not making sense I’m afraid.”
Arthur pulled another two from the bag. Ford put them in place.
“E, T, do you get… Do you get!” shouted Ford, “it is working! This is amazing, it really
is working!”
“More here.” Arthur was throwing them out feverishly as fast as he could go.
“I, F,” said Ford, “Y, O, U,… M, U, L, T, I, P, L, Y,… What do you get if you
multiply,… S, I, X,… six, B, Y, by, six by… what do you get if you multiply six by… N,
I, N, E,… six by nine…” He paused. “Come on, where’s the next one?”
“Er, that’s the lot,” said Arthur, “that’s all there were.”
He sat back, nonplussed.
He rooted around again in the knotted-up towel but there were no more letters.
“You mean that’s it?” said Ford.
“That’s it.”
“Six by nine. Forty-two.”
“That’s it. That’s all there is.”
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