The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy | Page 2

that the council wanted to
knock down his house and build an bypass instead.
At eight o'clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very good. He
woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window,
saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped o to the bathroom to wash. Toothpaste on the brush { so. Scrub.
Shaving mirror { pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment
it re
ected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window. Properly ad-
justed, it re
ected Arthur Dent's bristles. He shaved them o, washed, dried,
and stomped o to the kitchen to nd something pleasant to put in his mouth.
Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coee. Yawn.
The word bulldozerwandered through his mind for a moment in search
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of something to connect with.
The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one.
He stared at it. "Yellow," he thought and stomped o back to his bedroom
to get dressed. Passing the bathroom he stopped to drink a large glass of water, and
another. He began to suspect that he was hung over. Why was he hung
over? Had he been drinking the night before? He supposed that he must
have been. He caught a glint in the shaving mirror. "Yellow," he thought
and stomped on to the bedroom. He stood and thought. The pub, he thought. Oh dear, the pub. He
vaguely remembered being angry, angry about something that seemed im-
portant. He'd been telling people about it, telling people about it at great
length, he rather suspected: his clearest visual recollection was of glazed
looks on other people's faces. Something about a new bypass he had just
found out about. It had been in the pipeline for months only no one seemed
to have known about it. Ridiculous. He took a swig of water. It would sort
itself out, he'd decided, no one wanted a bypass, the council didn't have a
leg to stand on. It would sort itself out. God what a terrible hangover it had earned him though. He looked
at himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stuck out his tongue. "Yellow," he
thought. The word yellowwandered through his mind in search of something
to connect with. Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front of a big
yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path.
Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a
carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specically he was forty,
fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though
he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan,
though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes
that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges
left in Mr. L. Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness
about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats. He was by no means a great warrior: in fact he was a nervous worried
man. Today he was particularly nervous and worried because something had
gone seriously wrong with his job { which was to see that Arthur Dent's
house got cleared out of the way before the day was out. "Come o it, Mr. Dent,", he said, "you can't win you know. You can't lie
in front of the bulldozer indenitely." He tried to make his eyes blaze ercely
but they just wouldn't do it. Arthur lay in the mud and squelched at him.
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"I'm game," he said, "we'll see who rusts rst."
"I'm afraid you're going to have to accept it," said Mr. Prosser gripping
his fur hat and rolling it round the top of his head, "this bypass has got to
be built and it's going to be built!" "First I've heard of it," said Arthur, "why's it going to be built?"
Mr. Prosser shook his nger at him for a bit, then stopped and put it
away again.
"What do you mean, why's it got to be built?" he said. "It's a bypass.
You've got to build bypasses." Bypasses are devices which allow some people to drive from point A to
point B very fast whilst other people dash from point B to point A very fast.
People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given
to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people of point B are
so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people
of point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just
once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.
Mr. Prosser wanted to be at point D. Point D wasn't anywhere in partic-
ular, it was just any convenient point a very long way from points A, B and
C. He would have a nice little cottage at point D, with axes over the door,
and spend a pleasant amount of time at point E, which would be the nearest
pub to point D. His wife of course wanted