The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read Online Free PDF Page B

islands separated by very pretty but annoyingly wide stretches of ocean.
    The boat sped on.
    Because of this topographical awkwardness Damogran has always remained a deserted planet. This is why the Imperial Galactic Government chose Damogran for the Heart of Gold project, because it was so deserted and the Heart of Gold project was so secret.
    The boat zipped and skipped across the sea, the sea that lay between the main islands of the only archipelago of any useful size on the whole planet. Zaphod Beeblebrox was on his way from the tiny spaceport on Easter Island (the name was an entirely meaningless coincidence—in Galacticspeke,
easter
means small, flat and light-brown) to the Heart of Gold island, which by another meaningless coincidence was called France.
    One of the side effects of work on the Heart of Gold was a whole string of pretty meaningless coincidences.
    But it was not in any way a coincidence that today, the day of culmination of the project, the great day of unveiling, the day that the Heart of Gold was finally to be introduced to a marveling Galaxy, was also a great day of culmination for Zaphod Beeblebrox. It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the presidency, a decision that had sent shock waves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy. Zaphod Beeblebrox?
President?
Not
the
Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not
the
President? Many had seen it as clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas.
    Zaphod grinned and gave the boat an extra kick of speed.
    Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer, (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.
    President?
    No one had gone bananas, not in that way at least.
    Only six people in the entire Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a fait accompli: he was ideal presidency fodder. 1
    What they completely failed to understand was why Zaphod was doing it.
    He banked sharply, shooting a wild wall of water at the sun.
    Today was the day; today was the day when they would realize what Zaphod had been up to. Today was what Zaphod Beeblebrox’s presidency was all about. Today was also his two-hundredth birthday, but that was just another meaningless coincidence.
    As he skipped his boat across the seas of Damogran he smiled quietly to himself about what a wonderful, exciting day it was going to be. He relaxed and spread his two arms lazily along the seat back. He steered with an extra arm he’d recently had fitted just beneath his right one to help improve his ski-boxing.
    “Hey,” he cooed to himself, “you’re a real cool boy, you.” But his nerves sang a song shriller than a dog whistle.
    The island of France was about twenty miles long, five miles across the middle, sandy and crescent-shaped. In fact, it seemed to exist not so much as an island in its own right as simply a means of defining the sweep and curve of a huge bay. This impression was heightened by the fact that the inner coastline of the crescent consisted almost entirely of steep cliffs. From the top of the cliff the land sloped slowly down five miles to the opposite shore.
    On top of the cliffs stood a reception committee.
    It consisted in large part of the engineers and researchers who had built the Heart of Gold—mostly humanoid, but here and there were a few reptiloid atomineers, two or three green sylphlike maximegalacticians, an octopodic physucturalist or two and a Hooloovoo (a Hooloovoo is a superintelligent shade of the color blue). All except the Hooloovoo were resplendent in their multicolored ceremonial lab coats; the Hooloovoo had been temporarily refracted into a free-standing prism for the occasion.
    There was a mood of immense excitement thrilling through all of them. Together and between them they had gone to