Zaphod Beeblebrox is hired to help locate a supposedly uncrashable ship at the bottom of an ocean.

(From The More Than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide, 1989 edition)

Yeah, I Read A Short Story Today is playing it safe too. Although I haven’t yet seen any commercials, and the only trailer I saw was decidedly low on footage, I know the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie will be out soon and I’m starting to get this feeling it might be good. I was and am a fan of the books not just for the dorky wordplay and satirical sci-fi, but also for the heartless chaos. It wasn’t the books which were heartless, mind you, it was life, the universe and everything else. Or maybe I just haven’t ever gotten over what happened to Marvin.
Anyway, despite my inarguable geekdom, I never got around to reading this story tucked in at the end of my enormous four-book volume. I was saving it. For today, I suppose.
So. Given that it’s so short, and that it stars the nearly unlikeable Zaphod, this wasn’t the most remarkable entry in the “increasingly innacurately named triology.” But it was funny, and scary, and made me miss the author all the more.
How’s this for sci-fi?:

 Aorist rods were devices used in a now happily abandoned form of
energy production. When the hunt for new sources of energy had at one
point got particularly frantic, one bright young chap suddenly spotted
that one place which had never used up all its available energy was -
the past. And with the sudden rush of blood to the head that such
insights tend to induce, he invented a way of mining it that very same
night, and within a year huge tracts of the past were being drained of
all their energy and simply wasting away. Those who claimed that the
past should be left unspoilt were accused of indulging in an extremely
expensive form of sentimentality. 

The infinite web, where all Douglas Adams fans have surely ended up, of course has the story available for your reading pleasure. Here.