MARGARET ?

MARGARET?

..  custom-made luxury planet building. The home of this industry was the planet Magrathea, where hyperspatial engineers sucked matter through white holes in space to form it into dream planets - gold planets, platinum planets, soft rubber planets with lots of earthquakes - all lovingly made to meet the exacting standards that the Galaxy's richest men naturally came to expect.

But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a billion hungry worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they laboured into the night over smug little treatises on the value of a planned political economy.

Magrathea itself disappeared and its memory soon passed into the obscurity of legend.

In these enlightened days of course, no one believes a word of it.

Douglas Adams: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, A TRILOGY IN FOUR PARTS, Chapter 15 (on p. 87 of the Pan Books paperback I have. - G)

Kishalay Sinha কিশলয় সিনহা किशलय सिन्हा जी [G]