經典科幻文學:《 基本上無害 Mostly Harmless》 第11章5

It wasn’t even the climax of the book, because there wasn’t one. The character died about a third of the way through the penultimate chapter of the book, and the rest of it was just more stuff about road-mending. The book just finished dead at the one hundred thousandth word, because that was how long books were on BArtledan.

那甚至不是書裏的高潮部分，因爲那本書壓根就沒有高潮。男主角死於倒數第二章進行到大約三分之一的時候，剩下的部分只是更多跟修路有關的事情而已。書在寫到十萬個字的時候戛然而止，因爲巴忒勒丹的書全都是這麼長。

Arthur threw the book across the room, sold the room and left. He started to travel with wild abandon, trading in more and more spit, toenails, fingernails, blood, hair, anything that anybody wanted, for tickets. For semen, he discovered, he could travel first class. He settled nowhere, but only existed in the hermetic, twilight world of the cabins of hyperspatial starships, eating, drinking, sleeping, watching movies, only stopping at spaceports to donate more DNA and catch the next long-haul ship out. He waited and waited for another accident to happen.

阿瑟把書扔到對面牆上，賣掉房子離開了。他開始狂熱地旅行，賣唾液，賣腳趾甲，賣手指甲，賣血，賣頭髮，只要有人想買，任何東西他都賣，賣得越來越勤，得來的錢全當了旅費。後來他又發現，如果賣精液自己還能坐上頭等呢。他也不在哪個地方久待，只管生活在超空間飛船船艙那與世隔絕，半明半暗的世界裏，在裏頭吃，在裏頭喝，在裏頭睡覺看電影，在空港乾的就只是捐獻DNA，好坐上下一艘遠程飛船。他等了又等，等待一次意外。

The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen is that it won’t. That is not what ‘accident’ means. The accident that eventually occurred was not what he had planned at all. The ship he was on blipped in hyperspace, flickered horribly between ninety-seven different points in the Galaxy simultaneously, caught the unexpected gravitational pull of an uncharted planet in one of them, became ensnared in its outer atmosphere and began to fall, screaming and tearing, into it.

他想要的是一個恰到好處的意外。這裏唯一的問題在於，恰到好處的意外發生不了，因爲“意外”壓根兒就不是這個意思。最後發生的那個意外同他的計劃完全無關。他乘坐的飛船在超空間裏蹦蹦跳跳，同時閃現在銀河系裏九十七個不同的地方，在其中一個地方有顆地圖上尚未標明的星球，飛船意外地被它的重力拉扯，陷進它的外層大氣裏開始墜落，尖叫着撕破了那個星球的大氣層。

The ship’s systems protested all the way down that everything was perfectly normal and under control, but when it went into a final hectic spin, ripped wildly through half a mile of trees and finally exploded into a seething ball of flame it became clear that this was not the case.

這一路下落期間，飛船的艦載系統堅持說一切正常，盡在掌控；可飛船最後一個狂野的旋轉，掃清了整整半里的樹林，自己也被炸成了一個沸騰的火球，所以情況顯然並不像系統說的那麼樂觀。