Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [22]
Here’s a good trick, let’s see how they cope with this. Oh, look! They’ve managed to find a way of climbing the tree. I didn’t think they’d be able to do that. All right, let’s see them get the thing open. Hmm, so they’ve found out how to temper steel now, have they? Okay, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Next time they go up that tree, I’ll have a dragon waiting for them at the bottom.
I can only think that the business with the apple must have upset him more than I realised.
I went and sat on the beach by a mangrove tree and gazed out at the quiet ripples of the sea. Some fish were jumping up the beach and into the tree, which struck me as an odd thing for a fish to do, but I tried not to be judgmental about it. I was feeling pretty raw about my own species, and not much inclined to raise a quizzical eyebrow at others. The fish could play about in trees as much as they liked if it gave them pleasure, so long as they didn’t try to justify themselves or tell one another it was a malign god who made them want to play in trees.
I was feeling pretty raw about my own species because we presume to draw a distinction between what we call good and what we call evil. We find our images of what we call evil in things outside ourselves, in creatures that know nothing of such matters, so that we can feel revolted by them, and, by contrast, good about ourselves. And if they won’t be revolting enough of their own accord, we stoke them up with a goat. They don’t want the goat, they don’t need it. If they wanted one, they’d find it themselves. The only truly revolting thing that happens to the goat is in fact done by us.
So why didn’t we say something? Like “Don’t kill the goat”?
Well, there are a number of possible reasons:
—If the goat hadn’t been killed for us, it would have been killed for someone else—for the party of American tourists, for instance.
—We didn’t really realise what was going to happen till it was too late to stop it.
—The goat didn’t lead a particularly nice life, anyway. Particularly not today.
—Another dragon would probably have got it later.
—If it hadn’t been the goat, the dragons would have got something else, like a deer or something.
—We were reporting the incident for this book and for the BBC. It was important that we went through the whole experience so that people would know about it in detail. That’s well worth a goat.
—We felt too polite to say, “Please don’t kill the goat on our account.”
—We were a bunch of lily-livered rationalising turds.
The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.
The fish were still hopping harmlessly up and down the tree. They were about three inches long, brown and black, with little bobble eyes set very close together on the top of their heads. They hopped along using their fins as crutches.
“Mudskippers,” said Mark, who happened along at that moment. He squatted down to look at them.
“What are they doing in the tree?” I asked.
“You could say they were experimenting,” said Mark. “If they find they can make a better living on the land than in the water, then in the course of time and evolution they may come to stay on the land. They absorb a certain amount of oxygen through their skin at the moment, but they have to rush back into the sea from time to time for a mouthful of water, which they process through their gills. But that can change. It’s happened before.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s probable that life on this planet started in the oceans, and that marine creatures migrated onto the land in search of new habitats. There’s one fish that existed about three hundred and fifty million years ago that was very like a mudskipper. It came up onto the land using its fins as crutches. It’s possible that it