银河系漫游指南国语 经典科幻文学:《银河系漫游指南》第6章 Part 6

经典科幻文学:《银河系漫游指南》第6章 Part 6  

"The Babel fish
" said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly
"is small
yellow and leech-like
and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by bining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God."The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist
' says God
`for proof denies faith
and without faith I am nothing.'"`But
' says Man
`The Babel fish is a dead giveaway
isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist
and so therefore
by your own arguments
you don't. QED.'"`Oh dear
' says God
`I hadn't thought of that
' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
"`Oh
that was easy
' says Man
and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
"Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys
but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.
"Meanwhile
the poor Babel fish
by effectively removing all barriers to munication beeen different races and cultures
has caused more and bloddier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Arthur let out a low groan. He was horrified to discover that the kick through hyperspace hadn't killed him. He was now six light years from the place that the Earth would have been if it still existed.
The Earth.
Visions of it swam sickeningly through his nauseated mind. There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone
it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a plete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket before and felt a sudden stab — the supermarket was gone
everything in it was gone. Nelson's Column had gone! Nelson's Column had gone and there would be no outcry
because there was no one left to make an outcry. From now on Nelson's Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind — his mind
stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.
England no longer existed. He'd got that — somehow he'd got it. He tried again. America
he thought
has gone. He couldn't grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar
he thought
had sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped
he said to himself
and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonalds
he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.
He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.
He jerked himself violently to his feet.
"Ford!"