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The thing they wouldn't be expecting him to do was to be there in the first place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, so he was winning already. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

"Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen."

"But you like the way it's changed?" demanded Ford.

"I like everything," moaned the robot. "Especially when you shout at me like that. Do it again, please."

"Just tell me what's happened!"

"Oh, thank you, thank you!"

"This is very, very serious indeed. The Guide has been taken over. It's been bought out."

Arthur leapt up. "Oh, very serious," he shouted. "Please fill me in straight away on some corporate publishing politics! I can't tell you how much it's been on my mind of late!"

"You don't understand! There's a whole new Guide!"

"Oh!" shouted Arthur again. "Oh! Oh! Oh! I'm incoherent with excitement! I can hardly wait for it to come out to find out which are the most exciting spaceports to get bored hanging about in in some globular cluster I've never heard of. Please, can we rush to a store that's got it right this very instant?"

Ford narrowed his eyes. "This is what you call sarcasm, isn't it?"

"Do you know," bellowed Arthur, "I think it is? I really think it might just be a crazy little thing called sarcasm seeping in at the edges of my manner of speech! Ford, I have had a fucking bad night! Will you please try and take that into account while you consider what fascinating bits of badger-sputumly inconsequential trivia to assail me with next?"

So everything was going well, was it? Everything was working out as if the most extraordinary luck was on his side? Well, he'd see about that.

In a spirit of scientific inquiry he hurled himself out of the window again.

[The Ident-I-Eeze] encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and it therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

It: No, the answer is an orange and two lemons.

"I leaped out of a high-rise office window."

This cheered Arthur up. "Oh!" he said. "Why don't you do it again?"

"I did."

"Hmmm," said Arthur, disappointed. "Obviously no good came of it."

"Reverse engineering enables us to shortcut all the business of waiting for one of those horribly few spaceships that passes through your galactic sector every year or so to make up its mind about whether or not it feels like giving you a lift. You want a lift, a ship arrives and gives you one. The pilot may think he has any one of a million reasons why he has decided to stop and pick you up. The real reason is that I have determined that he will."

"This is you being extremely vain, isn't it, little bird?"

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

"The insurance business is completely screwy now. You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?"

"Really?" said Arthur. "No, I didn't. For what offense?"

Trillian frowned.

"What do you mean, offense?"

"I see."