the man next to ford grinned and nodded happily. ford ignored him. he said, “time is an illusion. lunchtime doubly so.”

“very deep,” said arthur, “you should send that in to the reader’s digest. they’ve got a page for people like you.”

orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

the planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

and so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.