银河系漫游指南国语 经典科幻文学:《银河系漫游指南》第31章1

经典科幻文学:《银河系漫游指南》第31章1  

Chapter 31
It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives
but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.
For instance
at the very moment that Arthur said "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle
" a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.
The o opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.
A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the mander of the Vl'hurgs
resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts
gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam
and
with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of mand
challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour
and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.
Unfortunately
in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable
and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.
Eventually of course
after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years
it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake
and so the o opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy — now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.
For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first pla they came across — which happened to be the Earth — where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
Those who study the plex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time
but that we are powerless to prevent it.