Misery, dejection. More misery and more dejection. He needed a project and he gave himself one.
He would find where his cave had been.
On prehistoric Earth he had lived in a cave, not a nice cave, a lousy cave, but… There was no but. It had been a totally lousy cave and he had hated it. But he had lived in it for five years which made it home of some kind, and a person likes to keep track of his homes. Arthur Dent was such a person and so he went to Exeter to buy a computer.
That was what he really wanted, of course, a computer. But he felt he ought to have some serious purpose in mind before he simply went and lashed out a lot of readies on what people might otherwise mistake as being just a thing to play with. So that was his serious purpose. To pinpoint the exact location of a cave on prehistoric Earth. He explained this to the man in the shop.
Why? said the man in the shop.
This was a tricky one.
OK, skip that, said the man in the shop. How?
Well, I was hoping you could help me with that.
The man sighed and his shoulders dropped.
Have you much experience of computers?
Arthur wondered whether to mention Eddie the shipboard computer on the Heart of Gold, who could have done the job in a second, or Deep Thought, or but decided he wouldn’t.
No, he said.
Looks like a fun afternoon, said the man in the shop, but he said it only to himself.
Arthur bought the Apple anyway. Over a few days he also acquired some astronomical software, plotted the movements of stars, drew rough little diagrams of how he seemed to remember the stars to have been in the sky when he looked up out of his cave at night, and worked away busily at it for weeks, cheerfully putting off the conclusion he knew he would inevitably have to come to, which was that the whole project was completely ludicrous.
Rough drawings from memory were futile. He didn’t even know how long it had been, beyond Ford Prefect’s rough guess at the time that it was “a couple of million years” and he simply didn’t have the maths.
Still, in the end he worked out a method which would at least produce a result. He decided not to mind the fact that with the extraordinary jumble of rules of thumb, wild approximations and arcane guesswork he was using he would be lucky to hit the right galaxy, he just went ahead and got a result.
He would call it the right result. Who would know?
As it happened, through the myriad and unfathomable chances of fate, he got it exactly right, though he of course would never know that. He just went up to London and knocked on the appropriate door.
Oh. I thought you were going to phone me first.
Arthur gaped in astonishment.
You can only come in for a few minutes, said Fenchurch. I’m just going out.
悲哀，沮丧。更多的悲哀和更多的沮丧。他需要一个计划然后他就给了自己一个。
他要找到自己的洞窟在哪儿。
在史前地球时代他曾住在一个洞窟里，不是什么很好的洞，是个脏兮兮的洞，但是......没有但是。那完完全全就是个脏兮兮臭烘烘的洞而且他讨厌它。但是他在那里住了五年或多或少是把那里当家了，而一个人总是喜欢追寻家的踪迹的。阿瑟.邓特就是那样的人，因此他去埃克赛特买台电脑。
这就是他真正想要的，当然了，一台电脑。但当他在简单地甩出一沓现金去买一台旁人可能误会为只是个玩具的东西之前，他觉得应该在头脑中明确几个严肃的目的。这就是他的严肃目的了。我要去查明史前地球的一个洞窟的精确位置。他对商店的人这样解释。
“为了什么？”商店的人问。
这是个麻烦的问题。
“算啦，跳过这步，”商店的人说，“怎么做？”
“这个，我正希望你能帮我呢。”
那个人叹了口气把肩放了下来。
“你对电脑的经验多么？”
阿瑟琢磨了一下是否要提到黄金之心上的舰载电脑艾迪，可以在一秒钟内搞定事情的家伙，或者是深思，或者是——但是最后决定不提了。
“没有。”他说。
“看来这个下午会很有趣，”商店的人说着，但他只是在对自己这么说。
最后不管怎么说阿瑟还是买了那台苹果机。过了几天他也装上了一些天文学软件，能标出恒星的运动，粗略绘出他在洞窟仰望夜空时所大致记住的星星在天空中的位置图表，随后在那上面忙了几个星期，愉快地推迟了他知道最终不可避免会得出的结论——整个计划就是个不折不扣的胡闹。
根据记忆做出的草图是没意义的。他甚至不记得那是多少年前的事儿了，按照福特.普里弗克特的大致猜测是“好几百万年”而他就是搞不清数学。
尽管如此，最后他还是想出了一个辙至少能够整出个结果。他决定不去管这样一个事实：通过那些经验主义做法，疯狂的近似值还有神秘的臆测混合起来的超凡混乱，他最终会幸运地找到正确的银河系。但他决定直接跑过去然后得到个结果。
他会把这个叫做直接结果。谁知道呢？
恰好，通过那无数深不可测的宿命的偶然性，他得到了极端正确的结果，但是他当然是永远不会知道这些的。他直接就跑到了伦敦然后敲了那扇合适的门。
“哦，我以为你会先给我打电话的。”
阿瑟惊讶地张大了嘴。
“你只能进来待几分钟，”芬琪诗说，“我正要出门去。”