Young Zaphod Plays It Safe

Young Zaphod Plays It Safe is a short Douglas Adams story, catalogued here for 11 year olds, about a salvage pilot hired to look at a crashed spaceship that absolutely cannot have crashed.

What happens

Please read the warning near the end of this before you hand it over. It matters more than usual.

Zaphod Beeblebrox has two heads, a salvage ship and no interest at all in what he has been hired to do. Two officials from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration are paying him to dive to a wreck on the seabed.

What is on board? By-products, they say. By-products of what? Processes. What processes? Processes that are perfectly safe.

That joke runs the whole way through. Every hold they walk past is perfectly safe. Some of them contain enough of something to poison a planet.

Adams is very funny about officials who use the word safe as a way of not answering. He is funnier still about the reason the crash happened, which involves a pilot, a detour and a strong opinion about lobster.

The opening is lovely. A ship shaped like a burgled filing cabinet flies over an island, and the islanders are struck mainly by how little it looks like a lobster.

Now the warning, because it is a real one.

This is an adult story from the Hitchhiker's universe, not a children's book, and one scene is properly grim. Zaphod sits on a body that has been lying there six months and it bursts. He is then described covered in what used to be the ship's navigation officer, and he is sick twice. A survivor floats in a tank, out of his mind, babbling. There is one use of the word bastards.

A confident reader who already finds this sort of humour funny will be fine and will enjoy it a lot. I would still read those two pages first and decide. The vocabulary is also adult and dense, and a fair bit of the comedy is about bureaucracy, which lands better on a reader who has met some.

It is short. About four thousand words, so an afternoon at most.

What to read next

If they take to Zaphod, he turns up again in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is in the library, and that one starts with a council deciding to run a road straight through a man's house.