39. INT. MAGRATHEA
SLARTIBARTFAST: Earthman, we are now deep in the heart of Magrathea. I should warn you that the chamber we are about to pass into does not literally exist within our planet; it is simply the gateway to a vast track of hyperspace. It may disturb you.
ARTHUR: Oh.
SLARTIBARTFAST: It scares the willies out of me. Hold tight.
(The air car zooms along.)
ARTHUR: (Gasping.)
SLARTIBARTFAST: Welcome to our factory floor.
ARTHUR (Gasping): The light.
SLARTIBARTFAST: This is where we made most of our planets you see.
ARTHUR: Does this mean you’re starting it all up again now?
SLARTIBARTFAST: No, no, for heaven’s sake, the galaxy isn’t nearly rich enough to support us yet. No, we’ve been awakened to perform just one extraordinary commission. It may interest you. There, in the distance in front of us…
ARTHUR: Oh no!
SLARTIBARTFAST: You see?
ARTHUR: The Earth!
SLARTIBARTFAST: Well, the Earth Mark Two in fact. It seems that the first one was demolished five minutes too early and the most vital experiment was destroyed. There’s been a terrible hoo-hah, so we’re going to make a copy from our original blueprints.
ARTHUR: You … are you saying that you originally made the Earth?
SLARTIBARTFAST: Oh yes. Did you ever go to a place … I think it’s called Norway?
ARTHUR: What? Oh. No I didn’t.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Pity, that was one of mine. Won an award you know. Lovely, crinkly eddies.
ARTHUR: I -- I can’t take this. Did I hear you say the Earth was destroyed five minutes too early?
SLARTIBARTFAST: Shocking mix-up. The mice were furious.
ARTHUR: Mice?
SLARTIBARTFAST: Yes the whole thing was their experiment you see. A ten-million-year research program to find the ultimate question. Big job you know.
ARTHUR: Mice? What do you mean mice? I think we must be talking at cross purposes. Mice to me mean the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing screaming on tables in early Sixties sitcoms.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Earthman, it is sometimes hard to follow your mode of speech. Remember I have been asleep inside this planet of Magrathea for five-million years and know little of these early Sixties sitcoms of which you speak. These creatures you call mice you see are not quite as they appear, they are merely the protrusions into our dimension of vast, hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings. The business with the cheese and squeaking is just a front.
ARTHUR: A front?
SLARTIBARTFAST: Oh yes, you see the mice set up the whole Earth business, as an epic experiment in behavioural psychology; a ten-million year program -
ARTHUR: No, look, you’ve got it the wrong way round. It was us. We used to do the experiments on them.
SLARTIBARTFAST: A ten-million year program in which your planet Earth and its people formed the matrix of an organic computer. I gather that the mice did arrange for you humans to conduct some primitively staged experiments on them just to check how much you’d really learned, to give you the odd prod in the right direction, you know the sort of thing: suddenly running down the maze the wrong way; eating the wrong bit of cheese; or suddenly dropping dead of myxomatosis. Let me tell you the whole story. It'll take a little time, 'tho.
The aircar moves into a very, very large building and slides to a stop in front of a set of offices. Arthur and Slartibartfast exit, and go into one of the offices.
40. NARRATOR: There are, of course, many problems connected with life of which some of the most popular are, “why are people born?”; “why do they die?”; and “why do they spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?” Many of million of years ago, a race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings got so fed up with the constant bickering about the meaning of life, which used to interrupt their favourite pastime of Brockian Ultra Cricket - a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away - that they decided to sit down and solve the problem once and for all. And to this end, they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer which was so amazingly intelligent, that even before its databanks had been connected up, it had started from first principles with “I think therefore I am” and had got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off. Could a mere computer solve the problem of Life, the Universe, and Everything? Its makers came to it to ask the question.
41. INT. SLARTIBARTFAST'S OFFICE, MAGRATHEA
SLARTIBARTFAST: Here, watch this. It will explain everthing.
A wall panel comes to life, portraying a large crowd of people milling around the base of a computer the size of several large city blocks, covered in very large buildings. The camera zooms into an office space in one of the buildings, within which we see a pair of individuals standing before an array of computer consoles and displays.
DEEP THOUGHT (Voiced by either Big Bird, or a Celebrity Special Guest Star): What is this great task for which I, Deep Thought, the second greatest computer in the universe…
LUNKWILL (Played by Dr. Bunsen Honeydew) (Whispering): “Second greatest”?
DEEP THOUGHT: …of time and space…
LUNKWILL: “Second Greatest”!? Wait a minute.
DEEP THOUGHT: …have been called into existence?
FOOK (Played by Beaker): Well, your task oh, computer, is to calc-* (*Meep meep meep ... )
LUNKWILL: Er, no... Wait a minute. This isn’t right. Deep Thought…
DEEP THOUGHT: Speak, and I will hear
LUNKWILL: Are you not as we designed you to be, the greatest, most powerful computer in all creation?
DEEP THOUGHT: I described myself as the second greatest … and as such…
LUNKWILL: Yes, yes but…
DEEP THOUGHT: …I am.
LUNKWILL: But, but, but -- this is preposterous! Are you not a greater computer than The Milliard Gargantu-Brain at Maximegalon, which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond?
DEEP THOUGHT: The Milliard Gargantu-Brain, a mere abacus. Mention it not.
FOOK: Meep meep meep?
DEEP THOUGHT: What did he say?
LUNKWELL: He said: Deep Thought, are you not a more fiendish disputant than The Great Hyperlobic Omnicognate Neutron-Wrangler?
DEEP THOUGHT: The Great Hyperlobic Omnicognate Neutron-Wrangler can talk all four legs off an Arcturan Mega-Donkey, but only I can persuade it to go for a walk afterwards. Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff!
LUNKWILL: Then what’s the problem?
DEEP THOUGHT: I speak of none, but the computer that is to come after me.
FOOK: Meep meep meep!
LUNKWILL: You're absolutely right, Fook! This is getting needlessly messianic.
DEEP THOUGHT: You know nothing of future time, and yet in my teaming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate. But which it will be my destiny eventually to design
LUNKWILL: Can we get on and ask the question?
DEEP THOUGHT: Speak.
LUNKWILL: O Deep Thought Computer, the task we have designed you to perform is this: We want you… to tell us… The Answer.
DEEP THOUGHT: ”The Answer”? The answer to what?
FOOK: Meep!
LUNKWILL: Life!
FOOK: Meep meep.
LUNKWILL: The Universe.
FOOK: Meep!
LUNKWILL: Everything!
DEEP THOUGHT: Tricky…
LUNKWILL: But can you do it?
DEEP THOUGHT: Yes … I can do it.
FOOK: Meep?
LUNKWILL: There, there, there is an answer? A simple answer?
DEEP THOUGHT: Yes. Life, the Universe, and Everything… There is an answer. But I’ll have to think about it.
There is the sound of a door being broken down, and then two robed figures rush in.
VROOMFONDEL (Played by Waldorf): We demand admission! We demand admission!
LUNKWILL: Hey! What?
FOOK: Meep meep meep!
MAJIKTHISE (Played by Statler): Come on, you can’t keep us out!
VROOMFONDEL: We demand that you can’t keep us out.
LUNKWILL: Who are you? What do you want? We’re busy!
MAJIKTHISE: I am Majikthise.
VROOMFONDEL: And I demand that I am Vroomfondel.
MAJIKTHISE: It’s all right, you don’t need to demand that.
VROOMFONDEL: Alright. I am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand! That is a solid fact! What we demand are solid facts!
MAJIKTHISE: No we don’t! That’s precisely what we don’t demand.
VROOMFONDEL: Oh. We don’t demand solid facts! What we demand is a total absence of solid facts! I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel.
FOOK: Who are you anyway?
MAJIKTHISE: We are philosophers.
VROOMFONDEL: But we may not be.
MAJIKTHISE: Yes we are!
MAJIKTHISE: We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and other professional thinking persons. And we want this machine off, and we want it off now.
FOOK: What is all this?
VROOMFONDEL: That computer! We demand that you get rid of it.
FOOK: What’s the problem?
MAJIKTHISE: I’ll tell you what the problem is mate: demarcation. That’s the problem.
VROOMFONDEL: We demand that demarcation may or may not be the problem.
MAJIKTHISE: You just let the machines get on with the adding up and we’ll take care of the eternal verities, thank you very much. You want to check your legal position, you do, mate. By law, the Quest for the Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the unalienable prerogative of your working thinkers
VROOMFONDEL: That’s right.
MAJIKTHISE: I mean what’s the use of us sitting up all night saying there may --
VROOMFONDEL: Or may not be.
MAJIKTHISE: (Softly) …or may not be… (louder) a god, if this machine comes along the next morning and gives you his telephone number?
VROOMFONDEL: We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
DEEP THOUGHT: Might I make an observation at this point?
MAJIKTHISE: We’ll go on strike!
VROOMFONDEL: That’s right. You’ll have a national philosopher’s strike on your hands.
DEEP THOUGHT: (Booming) If I might make an observation … All I wanted to say is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to computing the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. But the program will take me a little while to run.
LUNKWILL (Looking at his watch): How long?
DEEP THOUGHT: Seven and a half million years.
EVERYONE: Whaaat??!
DEEP THOUGHT: Yes. I said I'd have to think about it, didn't I? And it occurs to me that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy in general. Everyone's going to have their own theories about what answer I'm eventually going to come up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than yourselves? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?
The two philosophers gaped.
MAJIKTHISE: Wow! That’s what I call thinking! Here Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?
VROOMFONDEL: Dunno. Think our minds must be too highly trained Majikthise.
The wall viewer flickers and goes out.
ARTHUR: Yes, that's very salutory. But I don’t understand what all this has got to do with the Earth, and mice and things.
SLARTIBARTFAST: All will become clear to you Earthman … Are you not anxious to hear what the computer had to say seven-and-a-half million years later?
ARTHUR: Oh, well. Yes, of course…. quite.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Just let me find the recording of the events of that fateful day.
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