it is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem.
for instance, on the planet earth, man had always assumed that he was the most intelligent species occupying the planet, instead of the third most intelligent which was, in fact, entirely accurate.
the second most intelligent creatures were, of course, dolphins who curiously enough had long known of the impending destruction of the planet earth. they had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger, but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually decided they would leave earth by their own means.
the last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double- backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the "star-spangled banner" but in fact the message was this.  "so long and thanks for all the fish."
the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy is a wholly remarkable book.
perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of ursa minor.
more popular than the celestial home care omnibus, better selling than 53 more things to do in zero gravity, and more controversial than oolon colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, where god went wrong, some more of god's greatest mistakes, and who is this god person, anyway?
in many of the more relaxed civilizations on the outer eastern rim of the galaxy, the hitchhiker's guide has already supplanted the great encyclopedia galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom. for though it has many omissions, and contains much which is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. first, it is slightly cheaper. and second, it has the words "don't panic" printed in large friendly letters on its cover.
vogons.
vogons are one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy - not evil, but bad- tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. they wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the ravenous bugblatter beast of traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as fire-lighters.
the best way to get a drink out of a vogon is to stick your finger down his throat.
on no account should you allow a vogon to read poetry to you.
earth.
harmless.
the babelfish is small, yellow, leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the universe.
it feeds on brainwave energy, absorbing unconscious frequencies and excreting a matrix of conscious frequencies to the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you instantly understand anything said to you in any language.
now, it is such a bizarrely improbable thing that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved in the universe purely by chance that many thinkers have chosen to see this as a final clinching proof of the non-existence of god.
the argument goes something like this.  "i refuse to prove that i exist," says god, "for proof denies faith, and without faith i am nothing."
"but," says man, "the babelfish is a dead give-away. it proves you exist, and so therefore you don't. qed." "oh dear," says god, "i hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys but that didn't stop oolon colluphid from making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book,
vogon poetry is widely accepted as the third worst in the universe.
the second worst is that of the azgoths of kria. during a recitation by their poet master grunthos the flatulent of his poem "ode to a small lump of green putty i found in my armpit one midsummer morning," four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the president of the mid- galactic arts nobbling council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.
the absolute worst poetry was written by paula nancy millstone jennings of sussix. it involved decaying swans. luckily, it was destroyed when the earth was.
"space" says the introduction to the hitchhikers guide, ". is big. really big. you just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. i mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the market, but that's just peanuts compared to space" and so on.
it also says that if you hold a lung full of air you can survive in the total vacuum of space for about thirty seconds -- but with space being really big and all, the chances of being picked up within that time are 2 to the power of 2076775949 to 1 against.
which, by a staggering coincidence, is also the telephone number of the islington flat where arthur once went to a fancy dress party and met a very nice girl whom he totally failed to connect with.
the infinite improbability drive is a new method of crossing vast interstellar distances without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. as soon as the drive reaches infinite improbability, it passes through every conceivable point in every conceivable universe almost simultaneously, then selects the appropriate re-entry point. the principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by hooking the logic circuits of a bambleweeny 57 sub- meson brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong brownian motion producer, say a nice hot cup of tea, were of course well understood.
such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy.
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 didn't get invited to those sort of parties.
in the beginning, the universe was created. this made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the jatravartid people of viltvodle 6 firmly believe that the entire universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the great green arkleseizure. the jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear
of the time they call "the coming of 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.
it is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a sperm whale had been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet. and since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with suddenly not being a whale any more. this is what it thought as it fell.
curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was "oh no, not again."
many have speculated that if we knew why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.