"Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" is a short Science Fiction story by Douglas Adams. Written between the fourth and fifth books of the increasingly inaccurately-named The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy but set long before the beginning of the first, it features the character Zaphod Beeblebrox as a young man in charge of the Beeblebrox Salvage and Really Wild Stuff Corporation, conducting an expedition to the bottom of a remote alien ocean for the benefit of a group of shady suits from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration. Though they don't say much to Zaphod, preferring to keep the nature of their expedition a secret, it soon becomes clear that the suits are searching for a lost spacecraft, one that crashed into the ocean while holding top-secret and potentially deadly cargo. The story ends with another possible motive behind the demolition of the planet Earth by the Vogons.
Actually a huge Author Tract and an unsubtle Take That! aimed at Ronald Reagan, the story saves itself by being hilarious and full of vintage Adamsian wit.
"Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" provides examples of the following tropes:
- Artificial Human: What the spacecraft is carrying that makes it so worrisome; turns out that "designer people" tend to be insane, and they don't project the usual warning signals that someone that dangerous would...
- Author Tract: The entire story is just build-up to a punchline of "Ronald Reagan is psychotic".
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Ronald Reagan was an insane charismatic artificial life form from outer space.
- Buffy Speak: Lampshaded, discussed, or maybe just played with. "This is barking time, this is major lunch, this is stool approaching critical mass, this is... this is... total vocabulary failure!"
- Insistent Terminology: The two suits accompanying Zaphod describe everything as "very safe".
- Nuclear Weapons Taboo: Played with, as the most horrible weapons ever invented, including nuclear and all kinds of engineered gases and viruses, are perfectly safe because no real person would ever be allowed near them. (No real person, mind you...)
- Person as Verb: Invoked: Zaphod tells the ship to "do as I do"; it thinks for a second, and then sinks as low as it can go.
- Unwitting Pawn: Zaphod, to a degree; although he's being used, he has nothing to lose in the matter, and cares little for the outcome of the expedition.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: There are very detailed descriptions of Zaphod and company vomiting inside their Hi-Presh-A Smart Suits, until the author gives up and promises no more of that kind of nastiness.
- You Wanna Get Sued?: The original “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe” was published in the UK and assumed an audience somewhat aware of contemporary American politics, making the reveal of Reagan's identity straight forward to work out. As Reagan fades into history, that puzzle has gotten harder to deduce (pushing the puzzle into Viewers Are Geniuses territory), and so the reference was made explicit by a tiny addition in a 1996 anthology publication. Nonetheless, the original remains the preferred text in US omnibus editions of the series. You could say those versions... played it safe. Ba-dum-tish!
