Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [63]
The light shut off.
“Nothing.”
“I’m doing exactly the same thing, but with ultraviolet light. You can’t see it.”
“So what’s the point of showing me something I can’t see?”
“So that you understand that just because you see something, it doesn’t mean to say it’s there. And if you don’t see something, it doesn’t mean to say it’s not there. It’s only what your senses bring to your attention.”
“I’m bored with this,” said Random, and then gasped.
Hanging in the rain was a giant and very vivid three-dimensional image of her father looking startled about something.
About two miles away behind Random, her father, struggling his way through the woods, suddenly stopped. He was startled to see an image of himself looking startled about something hanging brightly in the rain-filled air about two miles away. About two miles away some distance to the right of the direction in which he was heading.
He was almost completely lost, was convinced he was going to die of cold and wet and exhaustion and was beginning to wish he could just get on with it. He had just been brought an entire golfing magazine by a squirrel, as well, and his brain was beginning to howl and gibber.
Seeing a huge bright image of himself light up in the sky told him that, on balance, he was probably right to howl and gibber but probably wrong as far as the direction he was heading was concerned.
Taking a deep breath, he turned and headed off toward the inexplicable light show.
“Okay, so what’s that supposed to prove?” demanded Random. It was the fact that the image was her father that had startled her rather than the appearance of the image itself. She had seen her first hologram when she was two months old and had been put in it to play. She had seen her most recent one about half an hour ago playing the March of the AnjaQantine Star Guard.
“Only that it’s no more there or not there than the sheet was,” said the bird. “It’s just the interaction of water from the sky moving in one direction, with light at frequencies your senses can detect moving in another. It makes an apparently solid image in your mind. But it’s all just images in the Mish Mash. Here’s another one for you.”
“My mother!” said Random.
“No,” said the bird.
“I know my mother when I see her!”
The image was of a woman emerging from a spacecraft inside a large, gray hangarlike building. She was being escorted by a group of tall, thin purplish-green creatures. It was definitely Random’s mother. Well, almost definitely. Trillian wouldn’t have been walking quite so uncertainly in low gravity, or looking around her at a boring old life-support environment with quite such a disbelieving look on her face, or carrying such a quaint old camera.
“So who is it?” demanded Random.
“She is part of the extent of your mother on the probability axis,” said the bird Guide.
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean.”
“Space, time and probability all have axes along which it is possible to move.”
“Still dunno. Though I think … No. Explain.”
“I thought you wanted to go home.”
“Explain!”
“Would you like to see your home?”
“See it? It was destroyed!”
“It is discontinuous along the probability axis. Look!”
Something very strange and wonderful now swam into view in the rain. It was a huge bluish-greenish globe, misty and cloud-covered, turning with majestic slowness against a black, starry background.
“Now you see it,” said the bird. “Now you don’t.”
* * *
A little less than two miles away now, Arthur Dent stood still in his tracks. He could not believe what he could see, hanging there, shrouded in rain, but brilliant and vividly real against the night sky-the Earth. He gasped at the sight of it. Then, at the moment he gasped, it disappeared again. Then it appeared again. Then, and this was the bit that made him give up and stick straws in his hair, it turned into a sausage.
Random was also bewildered at the sight of this huge blue and green and watery and misty sausage hanging above her. And now it was a string of sausages, or rather it was a string of sausages in which many of