The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy / Руководство для путешествующих автостопом по Галактике. Дуглас АдамсЧитать онлайн книгу.
“Damn their fun!” he shouted and ran out of the pub angrily waving an almost empty beer glass. He made no friends at all in the pub that lunchtime.
“Stop, you vandals!” yelled Arthur. “Stop!”
Ford had to go after him. Turning quickly to the barman he asked for four packets of peanuts.
“There you are, sir,” said the barman, putting the packets on the bar, “twenty-eight pence if you’d be so kind.”
Ford was very kind – he gave the barman another five-pound note and told him to keep the change. The barman looked at it and then looked at Ford. He suddenly shivered: he had a momentary sensation which he didn’t understand because no one on Earth had ever had it before.
In moments of great stress, every life form gives out a tiny signal. This signal simply means how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn’t very far, so such signals are too tiny to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.
For a moment the barman was hit by a shocking sensation of distance. He didn’t know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with respect.
“Are you serious, sir?” he said in a small whisper that made the whole pub silent. “You think the world’s going to end?”
“Yes,” said Ford.
“This afternoon?”
“Yes,” he said happily, “in less than two minutes.”
The barman couldn’t believe it, but he couldn’t believe the sensation he had just had either.
“Isn’t there anything we can do about it then?” he said.
“No, nothing,” said Ford, stufnif g the peanuts into his pockets.
Someone in the bar suddenly laughed at how stupid everyone had become. The man sitting next to Ford was a bit drunk by now. His looked up at Ford.
“I thought,” he said, “that if the world was going to end, we had to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something.”
“If you like, yes,” said Ford.
“That’s what they told us in the army,” said the man and looked back down at his whisky. “Will that help?” asked the barman.
“No,” said Ford and gave him a friendly smile. “Excuse me, I’ve got to go.” With a wave, he left.
The pub was silent for a moment longer, failing to understand that in a minute and a half they would suddenly turn into hydrogen, ozone and carbon monoxide[49].
Then the barman cleared his throat. He heard himself say: “Last orders, please.”
The huge yellow machines began to go down and to move faster.
Ford knew they were there. This wasn’t the way he had wanted it.
Running up the road, Arthur had almost reached his house. He didn’t notice how cold it had suddenly become, he didn’t notice the wind, he didn’t notice the sudden rain. He didn’t notice anything but the bulldozers rolling over what had been his home.
“You barbarians!” he yelled. “I’ll sue the council!”
Ford was running after him very fast. Very, very fast.
“I’ll kill you!” yelled Arthur.
Arthur didn’t notice that the men were actually running away from the bulldozers; he didn’t notice that Mr. Prosser was staring into the sky. What Mr. Prosser had noticed was those huge yellow somethings that were moving through the clouds. Impossibly huge yellow somethings.
“And then I’ll do it again!” yelled Arthur, still running, “until I… until you…”
Arthur tripped and fell on his back. At last he noticed that something was going on. He looked up.
“What the hell’s that?” he shrieked.
Whatever it was moved across the sky and tore it apart with terrible noise.
It’s difficult to say exactly what the people on the surface of the planet were doing now because they didn’t really know what they were doing. None of it made any sense: running into houses, running out of houses, screaming at the noise. All around the world city streets filled with people, cars crashed into each other as the noise fell on them.
Only one man stood and watched the sky, with terrible sadness in his eyes and rubber plugs in his ears[50]. He knew exactly what was happening and had known since his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic had started blinking in the night and woken him up. It was what he had waited for all these years, but when he had got the signal, sitting alone in his small dark room, coldness had gripped his heart. Of all the races in the Galaxy who could have come and said a big hello to planet Earth, he thought, it just didn’t have to be the Vogons.
Still he knew what he had to do. As the Vogon craft moved through the air high above him, he opened his bag. He threw away a couple of things. He wouldn’t need them where he was going. Everything was ready, everything was prepared.
He knew where his towel was.
A sudden silence hit the Earth. It was worse than the noise. For a while nothing happened.
The great ships hung in the air, over every nation on Earth. They hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, against the law of nature. Many people went into shock as their minds tried to understand what they were looking at. The ships just hung in the sky.
And still nothing happened.
Then there was a whisper, a sudden whisper of sound. Every hi-fi system in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder in the world quietly turned itself on. Every tin can, every dust bin, every window, every car, every wine glass, every piece of rusty metal became activated.
Before the Earth was gone, it turned into the greatest public address system[51] ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no siren, just a simple message.
“People of Earth, your attention please,” a voice said, and it was wonderful. Wonderful, perfect sound.
“This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,” the voice continued. “As you know, the plans for development of the regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route[52] through your star system, and your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take less that two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.”
The public address ended.
Terror moved slowly through the crowds of the people of Earth. They started to panic, but there was nowhere to run to.
Seeing all this, the Vogons turned on their public address again. It said: “There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the plans and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri[53] for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to complain, and it’s too late to start making a fuss[54] about it now.”
The public address was silent again and its echo drifted across the land. The huge ships turned slowly in the sky. On the underside of each ship a hatchway[55] opened, an empty black space.
By this time somebody somewhere had used a radio transmitter and sent a message back to the Vogon ships, on behalf of[56] the planet. Nobody ever heard what it said, they only heard the answer.
The public address was turned on again. The voice was annoyed. It said:
“What
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