Resumo de The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe

According to the Hitchhiker's Guide, researchers from a

pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings,

construct Deep Thought, the second greatest computer of
all

time and space, to calculate the answer to the Ultimate

Question. After seven and a half million years of
pondering

the question, Deep Thought provides the answer:
forty-two.

Forty-two! yelled Loonquawl. Is that all you've got to
show

for seven and a half million years' work?I checked it
very

thoroughly, said the computer,and that quite definitely
is

the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with

you, is that you've never actually known what the
Question

is.Deep Thought informs the researchers that it will
design

a second and greater computer, incorporating living
beings

as part of its computational matrix, to tell them what
the

question is. That computer was called Earth and was so

big that it was often mistaken for a planet. They
themselves

take the form of mice, to run the program. The question
was

lost five minutes before it was due to be produced, due
to

the Vogons' demolition of the Earth, supposedly to build
a

hyperspace bypass. (Later in the series, it is revealed
that

the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a

consortium of philosophers and psychiatrists who feared
for

the loss of their jobs when the meaning of life

became common knowledge.) Lacking a real question, the
mice

proposed to use How many roads must a man walk down?

(the first line of Bob Dylan's famous civil rights song

Blowin' In The Wind) as the question for talk shows,
after

considering and rejecting the question, What's

yellow and dangerous??actually a riddle whose answer,
not

given by Adams, is Shark-infested custard. However, this
may

also refer to the Vogon Constructor Fleet that
demolished

Earth,

in that their ships were described as yellow in the book

(and appeared that way in the TV series) and most
certainly

dangerous.

The Ultimate Answer

At the end of Mostly Harmless, and consequently at the
very

end of the series of novels, there is one last reference

to the number 42. As Arthur and Ford are dropped off at

club Beta (owned by Stavro Mueller), Ford shouts at the

cabby

to

stop just there, number forty-two ... Right

here!

The

entire

Earth (in all dimensions, not just those in

which it

was

demolished by the Vogons), is destroyed

immediately

after

this final reference. The radio adaptation
of

this

fifth

novel contains multiple endings, of which
the

above

is

merely the first. It should be noted that
Adams

himself

considered writing another Hitchhiker's
book, to

get

away

from an ending he himself described as
bleak,

but

died

in

2001 before writing an alternative. The

alternative

endings

that do exist were written by Dirk Maggs, in
an

attempt

to

give a more uplifting ending to the series.

In the second novel, as well as the fifth
radio

episode,

the

fifth TV episode, and the second of the LP
album

adaptations, Marvin mentions that he can
read

the

Question

in Arthur's brainwaves. This does nothing to

cheer

him

up.

At the end of the first radio series, the

television

series,

and the book The Restaurant at the End of
the

Universe

(the

second book of the five-book trilogy),
Arthur

Dent

(as

the

last human to have left the Earth before its

destruction,

and therefore the portion of the computer
matrix

most

likely

to hold the question) attempts to discover
the

Question

by

extracting it from his unconscious mind,
through

pulling

Scrabble letters at random out of a se

result

is

the

sentence WHAT DO YOU GET IF YOU MULTIPLY SIX
BY

NINE.

Six by nine. Forty-two.

That's it. That's all there is.

Since 6 × 9 = 54, this being the question
would

imply

that

the universe is bizarre and irrational; on
the

other

hand,

there is no proof that this was the actual

question.

After

all, Arthur Dent comprised only a minuscule

fragment

of

the

vast and complex computer matrix that was
the

Earth,

and

besides, it was stated that the computer's
run

had

not

finished when it was destroyed. In addition,

Arthur

and

Ford

realized that the original ape-like
inhabitants

of

Earth

were displaced by the Golgafrinchans, which

could

account

for the irrational nature of the question in

Arthur's

mind

(as he himself is a descendant of the

Golgafrinchans).

On

discovering the question in the original
radio

series,

Arthur Dent remarks: I always said there was

something

fundamentally wrong with the universe.

Another thought as to the false equation in
the

Hitchhiker's

Guide was that the program (Earth) would
have

run

correctly

if not for the crash landing of the

Golgafrinchams.

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