Is this a riddle or just a bad tattoo?

It's from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy in four parts)

Near the end of the second book Arthur and Ford are living with cavemen (who are slowly being wiped out by the B-Ark occupants) when they decide to use a random method to see if the Earth (a giant computer built by trans-dimensional 'mice' to determine the question to the ultimate answer) is still working. Their choice is to draw letters out of a bag of scrabble tiles. It spells out :

S I X B Y N I N E F O R T Y T W O

You'd have to read the books to understand.

Actually, the answer, "42", is already known.

The Scrabble pieces spell out "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?".

Arthur then says something like "I'd always thought there was something fundamentally wrong about the universe!"; he seems to see"six times nine gets you forty-two" as confirming his suspicions.

Eliz.