Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, by Douglas Adams (pub. 1986)
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I originally read this sometime in the mid to late 1990s, in an omnibus of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. I'm writing this review after reading it again in 2020, in a different omnibus of that series. It was written between the fourth and fifth books of the series (and therefore appears between them in the omnibus), but it's set sometime prior to the first book. There is also an expanded version of the story in a later publication, which I haven't read. The main thing I remember from the first time I read this story is having no idea what it was meant to imply. Nor had I any idea after reading it this time, but I was always sure it must imply something. And... after reading it this time, I read online (on more than one of the sites linked above) that that implication actually was. But I won't reveal it here.

Anyway, in the story, Zaphod Beeblebrox is running a salvage business, and he's been hired by a pair of bureaucrats to take them to the bottom of an ocean where a ship had crashed about six months earlier. A ship that was carrying something very dangerous. We don't learn until the end of the story, at least vaguely, what that something was. (Or at least the thing the bureaucrats were looking for, the most dangerous of various extremely dangerous things the ship was carrying.) If I've read more specifically about what it actually was, then the story seems to have no real importance to the Hitchhiker's continuity, aside from a likely explanation for why the Vogons were really hired to destroy the Earth (although we already have an ulterior explanation for that, so I dunno).

In any event, the story has plenty of Adams's usual brand of humor, which makes it reasonably fun to read, whether or not one ultimately understands what's actually going on in the story. But for me, the main reason to appreciate it is simply because it's a Hitchhiker's story, with a familiar character. I'm afraid, however, that I still couldn't enjoy it as much as I'd like to, because it doesn't really feel to me like there's much, you know, story, to the story. (In fact, learning the real point of the story makes it feel even less like a story, though depending on your political views, that knowledge might make you find the story more or less amusing than if you don't know what it's about. Or... it might have no effect on your enjoyment of the story.)