Episode Two, In Which Arthur Listens to Vogon Poetry, Gets Ejected into Space and Meets a Man he Rather Hoped had perished when the Earth was Destroyed, but Who he now Discovers is not from his Home Planet at all; He is not even Called Phil.
Having failed to convince the Vogon captain not to, Ford and Arthur are thrown off the ship but luckily are rescued by another passing ship, which just happens to have Ford's old buddy and part-time Galactic President, Zaphod Beeblebrox, on board. Oddly, the other member of the crew is someone Arthur knows, or knew, a girl called Trillian, although he knew her as Tricia McMillan at the time. The ship's company is completed by Marvin, the Paranoid Android, who moans about everything and is permanently depressed.
Seems Zaphod has stolen the
Heart of Gold, a starship with the prototype Infinite Improbability Drive installed. This revolutionary new way of travelling means that as the ship builds up to infinite improbability, everything becomes possible. The natural laws of physics no longer apply, and anything can happen. The practical upshot of this is that the ship passes through every point in the universe simultaneously allowing one to travel anywhere, instantly. Ford is impressed, not so much with Zaphod as with the ship: he knows Zaphod from way back, but Arthur is less so. He remembers Zaphod as “Phil”, who once spoiled his chances of hitting it off with the very Tricia McMillan who is now with him, calling herself Trillian. At a party on Earth, Zaphod whisked her away from Arthur and, obviously, off the planet.
QUOTES
The Book: “Far out, in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of 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 think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has – or had --- a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of them seemed to involve the movements of small green pieces of paper. Which was odd, as on the whole, it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean and most of them were miserable. Even the ones with digital watches. Many were of the increasing opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and no-one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one day nearly 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, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmondsworth suddenly realised 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. This time, it was right, it would work, and nobody would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and so the idea was lost forever.”
Arthur, having been asked by the Vogon captain to tell him how good his awful poetry is, comes up with this (helped along in part by Ford, who probably can't believe what they're doing): “I liked it. Some of the metaphysical imagery was really particularly effective. Interesting rhythmic devices which seem to counterpoint the, um, surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the, um, humanity --- Vogonity, sorry! --- of the poet's compassionate soul which strives through the medium of the verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other. And one is left with a profound and vivid insight into ... into .. into whatever the poem was about!”
Ford: “Do you enjoy your job?”
Vogon guard: “Well, the hours are good.”
Ford: “They'd have to be.”
Vogon guard: “Mind you, now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy!”
Arthur: “You know, it's at times like this, when I'm stuck in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother used to tell me when I was young.”
Ford: “Why? What did she tell you?”
Arthur: “I don't know! I didn't listen!”
Arthur: “My left arm's disappearing! How am I going to operate my digital watch now?”
The Book explains the theory behind the Infinite Improbabilty Drive: “The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing interstellar distances in a few seconds, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. The principle of generating small amounts of finite probabilty by hooking the logic circuits of a Bableweeny 57 Sub Meson Brain to an Atomic Vector Plotter suspended in a producer of Brownian motion --- say a nice hot cup of tea --- had long been understood, and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties, by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments move simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the principles of indeterminancy.
Many respectable physicists said they weren't going to stand for that sort of thing, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they never got invited to those sort of parties. Another thing they couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they kept coming up against while trying to generate the infinite improbabilty field needed to flip a spaceship through the distances between the stars. And in the end, they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
And then one evening, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way: if such a machine was a virtual impossibility then it must logically be a finite improbabilty. If so, then all I have to do to make one is work out exactly how improbable it is, feed those calculations into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea and turn it on. The moment he did this, he was rather startled to discover that he had created the long sought-after Infinite Improbabilty Drive out of thin air.
It startled him even more when, just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness, he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists, who had finally realised that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartarse.”
The Book: “
The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as “a mechanical appartus designed to do the work of a man”. The Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your plastic pal who's fun to be with!”
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “A mindless bunch of jerks who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes”, with a footnote from the editors for anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent. Curiously enough, an edition of
The Encyclopaedia Galactica which fell through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defines the Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “A mindless bunch of jerks who were first against the wall when the revolution came.”
Arthur: “I wonder what will happen if I press this button?”
Ford: “Don't.”
Arthur: “Oh.”
Ford: “What happened?”
Arthur: “A sign lit up saying please do not press this button again!”
Marvin: “Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? Cos I don't.”
Marvin: “Did I say something wrong? Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I said it oh God I'm so depressed!”
Newscaster: “We'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms out there, and to everyone else, the secret is to bang the rocks together guys!”
Trillian: “Can we leave your ego out of this? This is important!”
Zaphod: “Hey, if there's anything more important than my ego on this ship I want it caught and shot now!”
Ford Prefect's Logic
Trying to save their lives, Ford attempts to show the Vogon guard throwing them off the ship that his job is mindless and humdrum, and that he should rebel, stand up to the captain. Faced with such a choice though, the guard decides he'd rather be bored, unappreciated, unfulfilled and alive and goes ahead and throws them off the ship anyway. Worth a try though: Ford appeals to his soul by humming Beethoven's 5th Symphony, but the guard is not impressed. Trouble is, there's no real soul there to appeal to in the first place. Ford probably knew this and was just trying to buy time, but the effort was doomed to failure. Vogon ship guards are not known for their wit, initiative, nor their appreciation of the finer things in life. They quite like the shouting, though.
“So that's it, we're going to die!”
Arthur says this so many times during the series --- and they never do --- that it seems a good idea to give it its own section.
The first time he says this is when they are sitting in the airlock of the Vogon ship, waiting to be ejected into space. Fatalistic? Perhaps, but what would you think? As it happens, as we've seen above, neither of them die, due to an extremely improbable set of circumstances, helped along by the Infinite Improbability Drive in the
Heart of Gold.
Designing the future
Well, we all expect it will happen, and probably sooner than expected --- we do have phones that can talk to us now and arrange our schedules, digital helpers and so on --- but back in the 1970s Adams was already foreseeing the possibility of computers and robots being given personalities. The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation began testing a system called GPP, or Genuine People Personalities. It resulted in doors that are happy when you use them, and computers who are eager to serve and cheer you up, but the prototype sort of failed with Marvin, giving him a very morose, downbeat, depressed personality. And like everyone of that nature, he is ready to share his doom and gloom with everyone. Life? Don't talk to him about life!
Those clever little touches
Trillian justifies her decision to leave Earth with Zaphod: “Well, with a degree in maths and another in astrophysics, it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday!” Zing!