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they were iron filings on a sheet of board and a magnet was moving beneath them. Panic sprouted again, desperate fleeing panic, but there was nowhere to flee to.
    Observing this, the Vogons turned on their PA again. It said:
    “There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.”
    The PA fell silent again and its echo drifted across the land. The huge ships turned slowly in the sky with easy power. On the underside of each a hatchway opened, an empty black square.
    By this time somebody somewhere must have manned a radio transmitter, located a wavelength and broadcast a message back to the Vogon ships, to plead on behalf of the planet. Nobody ever heard what they said, they only heard the reply. The PA slammed back into life again. The voice was annoyed. It said:
    “What do you mean, you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light-years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs that’s your own lookout
.
    “Energize the demolition beams.”
    Light poured out of the hatchways.
    “I don’t know,”
said the voice on the PA,
“apathetic bloody planet, I’ve no sympathy at all
.” It cut off.
    There was a terrible ghastly silence.
    There was a terrible ghastly noise.
    There was a terrible ghastly silence.
    The Vogon Constructor Fleet coasted away into the inky starry void.

Chapter 4
    F ar away on the opposite spiral arm of the Galaxy, five hundred thousand light-years from the star Sol, Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Imperial Galactic Government, sped across the seas of Damogran, his ion drive delta boat winking and flashing in the Damogran sun.
    Damogran the hot; Damogran the remote; Damogran the almost totally unheard of.
    Damogran, secret home of the Heart of Gold.
    The boat sped on across the water. It would be some time before it reached its destination because Damogran is such an inconveniently arranged planet. It consists of nothing but middling to large desert islands separated by very pretty but annoyingly wide stretches of ocean.
    The boat sped on.
    Because of this topographical awkwardness Damogran has always remained a deserted planet. This is why the Imperial Galactic Government chose Damogran for the Heart of Gold project, because it was so deserted and the Heart of Gold project was so secret.
    The boat zipped and skipped across the sea, the sea that lay between the main islands of the only archipelago of any useful size on the whole planet. Zaphod Beeblebrox was on his way from the tiny spaceport on Easter Island (the name was an entirely meaningless coincidence—in Galacticspeke,
easter
means small, flat and light-brown) to the Heart of Gold Island, which by another meaningless coincidence was called France.
    One of the side effects of work on the Heart of Gold was a whole string of pretty meaningless coincidences.
    But it was not in any way a coincidence that today, the day of culmination of the project, the great day of unveiling, the day that the Heart of Gold was finally to be introduced to a marveling Galaxy, was also a great day of culmination for Zaphod Beeblebrox. It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the presidency, a decision that had sent shock waves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy. Zaphod Beeblebrox?
President?
Not
the
Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not
the
President? Many had seen it as clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas.
    Zaphod grinned and gave the boat an extra kick of speed.
    Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terrible bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely