And now—at last—it’s time to address Douglas’s extraordinary ability to procrastinate. It has become legendary that at least three of Douglas’s publishers—Sue Freestone, Sonny Mehta, and Shaye Areheart—have found it necessary to lock themselves up in the same room with him for days at a time in order to get him to complete a scandalously overdue book. (I’ve often wondered if they would have resorted to such rash measures if he weren’t such delightful company!) Douglas’s excuses for his books being late in the first place (covering up what was actually a daunting blend of perfectionism and a terror of failing in his quest to put, as he liked to phrase it, “a hundred thousand words in a cunning order”) are even more extraordinary; the rhino climb referenced above must certainly have startled the editor whose deadline Douglas missed because of it, as, I’m sure, did the unexpected news of his hastily-arranged trip to Australia to attempt a “comparative test drive” between a “sub bug”—a sort of underwater jet ski designed to propel scuba divers—and a manta ray, an excursion which caused him to miss yet another crucial due date (see “Riding the Rays,” also reprinted in this book).

Unfortunately—incomprehensibly!—a heart attack that no one could have predicted has prevented Douglas from postponing the completion of his long-awaited, and many-times delayed next book, The Salmon of Doubt, which interviews just before his death indicate he was still many, many months—if not years!—away from finishing. Would it have remained a Dirk Gently book, or would he instead have transformed it—as he hinted he might—into the sixth and final volume in the Hitchhiker trilogy? Why—I find myself wondering—didn’t he find an excuse to procrastinate during his fateful trip to the gym last spring?

Television viewers who tune into Between the Lions, the daily children’s literacy education program that Michael Frith—another of Douglas’s American friends—and I helped create for PBS, will note that one of the lead lion characters, Lionel, habitually wears a rugby shirt featuring the number 42. This small testament may not be the answer to “life, the universe, and everything” (as the famed “Deep Thought” computer from the Hitchhiker trilogy determined “42” to be), but if it serves to remind people what a brilliant, unique, irreplaceable force Douglas Adams was in the lives of virtually everyone who knew or read him—well, at least it’s a step in the right direction.

Douglas, I loved you dearly and I’ll miss you terribly. And I’m grateful you left that hard disk behind so we can all share this one last conversation with you . . .

Christopher Cerf
New York
FEBRUARY 2002

Prologue

Prologue

Nicholas Wroe, in The Guardian
SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 2000