Today I opened the "who's online" window on h2g2, as I often have done over the past few days. The window showed over 100 people currently logged on to the site - as it has done every day since last Saturday. A large proportion of the Researchers listed there are described as "new this week" - again, a sight regularly seen since Saturday.

Once again, the site is teeming with new converts. And once again, I've found myself asking the empty air: "Why did it have to happen this way?"

There are several cruel ironies surrounding the death of Douglas Adams. The sudden surge in activity on h2g2, as people from all over this small planet have rushed to pay tribute to our fallen founder, is just one of them.

In a twist of fate bizarre enough to have featured in a Douglas Adams plot, he died because he tried too hard to stay healthy. And he died just as the "Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy" film, a dream which he'd been trying to turn into a reality for years, finally seemed set to go into production.

And so, as ever when a beloved person dies, we mourn for a variety of reasons. We mourn for the man we knew as DNA because he seemed to enjoy life so much, and because he should have been allowed to carry on enjoying it for many more years to come. He had so much to live for, and so much still to give; his friend David Gilmour has remarked upon how the last e-mail he received from Douglas was full of energy and ideas. We mourn because we feel pangs of empathy for his widow Jane, and for his daughter Polly; no-one deserves to lose their father so young, and Jane has to bear her own loss and to try to be strong for Polly.

And we mourn a little for ourselves, because we'll never now read another new Douglas Adams book, or hear from him in any other way. We regret business that must now forever remain unfinished, debts that cannot now be repaid.

I remember a bitter summer in the Eighties when I found myself unemployed and depressed, but the "Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy" books brought a kind of divine madness into my life that helped to save my sanity. Fast forward to 1999, and again I'm out of work, bored and depressed. One day, on a whim, I fed the words "Douglas Adams" into a search engine, wondering if there might be another book on the way from the genius who'd saved me with laughter years previously.

There wasn't - but there was something else. It was h2g2. Once I discovered it, I felt connected to the world again, and it has continued to brighten my days ever since. So many new friends, so much information, so much fun. I'd have liked to thank Mr. Adams personally for all of that.

By all accounts, for all the strange and exciting things he was involved with, he was a essentially shy man; so I imagine that he'd just have been embarrassed. Selfishly, I'd have liked to have thanked him anyway. Sometimes you just have to let a feeling out.

For proof of that, you need look no further than Douglas' page here at h2g2. As I write this, it's four days since the dreadful news broke, and still the tributes pour in every few minutes. Many more people have stories like mine to tell, about how his work helped them get through their own lives. Touchingly, many speak to him as if he were still here, as if they can't take in the awful fact that death consumes even the best and brightest of us. Some ask their God to look after him and those he left behind. Some imagine him looking down on h2g2, or on the great hitch-hike to the beyond - accompanied, of course, by his towel.

Everyone deals with their grief in their own way. But I'm not going to imagine an afterlife for Douglas Adams, for one very good reason: he was a fiercely committed, outspoken atheist. Personally, I'm an agnostic, so I don't entirely rule out the possibility that he's just had a big surprise. But I would rather focus on the idea of keeping the spirit of Douglas Adams alive in the world we have to inhabit.

First of all, I hope that the "Hitch-Hiker" film is finally made and is true to his vision. The TV series had some great moments but was badly flawed, notably by cheap special effects and the inexcusable transformation of the cool, collected Trillian of the books into a stereotypical bimbo. "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy" has never really been successfully translated into a visual medium. It would be a great tribute to Mr. Adams' talent if that happened now.

That's out of our hands - but h2g2 isn't. And as Mr. Adams himself said here on his own h2g2 page: "The more people who use the Guide, the more useful it will become, and the more useful it becomes, the more people will use it. . . For now, we have a lot of work to do."

The best way we can pay tribute to Douglas Adams is to continue to build what he began - to contribute to the website that grew out of his amazing imagination, and to continue making his vision into a reality.

One of the causes Douglas Adams always supported was Amnesty International, the excellent organisation that campaigns globally to free those who have been imprisoned for peacefully expressing an opinion. AI also opposes the death penalty, regardless of the circumstances. I support that stance; but it has to be admitted that it is tested to the limit by the case of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber.

Crimes do not come much worse than the one for which McVeigh was condemned. The bomb he planted in a federal building in 1995 killed 168 people, including 19 children, and maimed many more. He appears to have been motivated by an extreme loathing of the US government. According to opinion polls, 80 per cent of the American public believe that he should die. That 80 per cent includes McVeigh himself, who has waived all appeals against his sentence of death by lethal injection.

In fact, McVeigh would be dead by now if it were not for an amazing omission - if that was what it was - on the part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who somehow "forgot" to hand over thousands of documents relating to McVeigh's case to his lawyers before his trial . The apparent blunder has caused US Attorney General John Ashcroft to postpone McVeigh's execution for a month, so that the hitherto missing documents can be studied by the self-confessed bomber's lawyers. It's the second major embarrassment for the FBI this year. In February, they admitted that one of their agents, Robert Hanssen, had spied for Russia for 15 years.

The sheer horror of McVeigh's crime has understandably caused some who usually oppose the death penalty to argue that an exception should be made in his case. I cannot agree. When the execution takes place (and I suspect, somehow, that political pressure will make it inevitable) it will give McVeigh the martyrdom and the oblivion he craves.

American law forbids assisting a suicide, but the federal government will be doing exactly that if it gives McVeigh the painless exit from this life that he apparently craves.

One must also at least question the sanity of an individual capable of committing an atrocity like the Oklahoma bombing. Perhaps the greatest possible punishment for McVeigh, if it were possible, would be to make him comprehend the full horror of the consequences of his actions, and force him to live with that knowledge for the rest of his natural life.

Here's a truly horrifying statistic: since 1973, 94 people have been sentenced to death in the USA and then subsequently released from prison, when their convictions were overturned. We'll never know how many more died because of unjust convictions that were never discovered. In such circumstances, Amnesty International's attitude to the death penalty seems like the only reasonable one to take - even when there are people like Timothy McVeigh around.

I have always had mixed feelings about electoral reform. For all the self-evident shortcomings of Britain's first-past-the post system of voting, it does at least produce stable governments, in which the centre-left or centre-right parties do not find themselves being forced to try to form coalitions with unsavoury extremist factions in order to achieve a parliamentary majority. Anyone who has seen events in the Italian election will appreciate why this can appear to be a highly desirable state of affairs.

However, I now find myself feeling unsure what to do. I live in a constituency where only two parties have a realistic hope of winning. I'd ideally prefer to vote for one of the other candidates, but I know that if I do so my vote will count for nothing except an empty protest. Of the two candidates with a realistic chance, one represents a party for which I have little enthusiasm. The other represents a party I despise. Do I follow my ideals, or vote to block the serious contender whose views I find repulsive?

There is a voting method that would solve my problem. It has already been used in some elections in Britain, and it's called Single Transferable Vote. It works like this. Instead of merely choosing one candidate, the voter puts the candidates in order of preference.

The first-choice votes are counted, and if no candidate is supported by more than half of the voters then the least well-supported candidate drops out. The second choices of that candidate's supporters are then examined, and their votes re-allocated accordingly. If there's still no candidate with over 50 per cent of the votes, then the second least popular candidate drops out, and their votes are redistributed, until eventually someone has more than half of the total poll.

Under that system, I could give my minority candidate my first choice vote and the serious contender I don't mind too much, my second choice, and thus achieve both my objectives.

The current system may be simpler, but it guarantees that political parties with millions of sympathisers are denied any voice in government.

Meanwhile, after the election, the overwhelming likelihood is that absolute power will be delivered to a party that was opposed by more than half the voters. There has to be a better way.

Ormondroyd

17.05.01. Front Page

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