Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [29]
“Rather fond of it myself,” he added, “but in most people’s eyes you have been inadvertently guilty of the most grotesquely bad taste. Particularly the bit about the little red ball hitting the wicket, that’s very nasty.”
“Um,” said Arthur with a reflective frown to indicate that his cognitive synapses were coping with this as best they could, “um.”
“And these,” said Slartibartfast, slipping back into crypt guttural and indicating the group of Krikkit men who had now walked past them, “are the ones who started it all, and it will start tonight. Come, we will follow, and see why.”
They slipped out from underneath the tree, and followed the cheery party along the dark hill path. Their natural instinct was to tread quietly and stealthily in pursuit of their quarry, though, as they were simply walking through a recorded Informational Illusion, they could as easily have been carrying euphoniums and wearing war paint for all the notice their quarry would have taken of them.
Arthur saw that a couple of members of the party were now singing a different song. It came lilting back to them through the soft night air, and was a sweet romantic ballad that would have netted McCartney Kent and Sussex and enabled him to put in a fair offer for Hampshire.
“You must surely know,” said Slartibartfast to Ford, “what it is that is about to happen?”
“Me?” said Ford, “no.”
“Did you not learn Ancient Galactic history when you were a child?”
“I was in the cybercubicle behind Zaphod,” said Ford; “it was very distracting. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t learn some pretty stunning things.”
At this point Arthur noticed a curious feature to the song that the party was singing. The middle eight bridge, which would have had McCartney firmly consolidated in Winchester and gazing intently over the Test Valley to the rich pickings of the New Forest beyond, had some curious lyrics. The songwriter was referring to meeting with a girl not “under the moon” or “beneath the stars” but “above the grass,” which struck Arthur as being a little prosaic. Then he looked up again at the bewilderingly blank sky, and had the distinct feeling that there was an important point here, if only he could grasp what it was. It gave him a feeling of being alone in the Universe, and he said so.
“No,” said Slartibartfast, with a slight quickening of his step, “the people of Krikkit have never thought to themselves, ‘We are alone in the Universe.’ They are surrounded by a huge Dust Cloud, you see, their single sun with its single world, and they are right out on the utmost eastern edge of the Galaxy. Because of the Dust Cloud there has never been anything to see in the sky. At night it is totally blank. During the day there is the sun, but you can’t look directly at that so they don’t. They are hardly aware of the sky. It’s as if they had a blind spot that extended 180 degrees from horizon to horizon.
“You see, the reason why they have never thought, ‘We are alone in the Universe’ is that until tonight they didn’t know about the Universe. Until tonight.”
He moved on, leaving the words ringing in the air behind him.
“Imagine,” he said, “never even thinking, ‘We are alone,’ simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there’s any other way to be.”
He moved on again.
“I’m afraid this is going to be a little unnerving,” he added.
As he spoke, they became aware of a very thin roaring scream high up in the sightless sky above them. They glanced upward in alarm, but for a moment or two could see nothing.
Then Arthur noticed that the people in the party