He tossed over The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and then curled himself up into a foetal ball to prepare himself for the jump.
At that moment the bottom fell out of Arthurs mind.
His eyes turned inside out. His feet began to leak out of the top of his head.
The room folded flat about him, spun around, shifted out of existence and left him sliding into his own navel.
They were passing through hyperspace.
The Babel fish, said The Hitchhikers 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 combining 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, isnt it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you dont. QED.
Oh dear, says God, I hadnt 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 dingos kidneys, but that didnt 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 communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bluddier 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 hadnt 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 complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket before and felt a sudden stabthe supermarket was gone, everything in it was gone. Nelsons Column had gone! Nelsons Column had gone and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry. From now on Nelsons Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mindhis mind, stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.
England no longer existed. Hed got thatsomehow hed got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldnt grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. Hed 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 McDonalds 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!
Ford looked up from where he was sitting in a corner humming to himself. He always found the actual travelling-through-space part of space travel rather trying.
Yeah? he said.
If youre a researcher on this book thing and you were on Earth, you must have been gathering material on it.
Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes.
Let me see what it says in this edition then, Ive got to see it.
Yeah OK. He passed it over again.
Arthur grabbed hold of it and tried to stop his hands shaking. He pressed the entry for the relevant page. The screen flashed and swirled and resolved into a page of print. Arthur stared at it.
It doesnt have an entry! he burst out.
Ford looked over his shoulder.
Yes it does, he said, down there, see at the bottom of the screen, just under Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6.
Arthur followed Fords finger, and saw where it was pointing. For a moment it still didnt register, then his mind nearly blew up.