經典科幻文學:《生命 宇宙及一切》第24章

Chapter 24
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
For instance, there was once an insanely aggressive race of people called the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax. That was just the name of their race. The name of their army was something quite horrific. Luckily they lived even further back in Galactic history than anything we have so far encountered twenty billion years ago when the Galaxy was young and fresh, and every idea worth fighting for was a new one.
And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were good at, and being good at it, they did a lot. They fought their enemies (i.e. everybody else), they fought each other. Their planet was a complete wreck. The surface was littered with abandoned cities which were surrounded by abandoned war machines, which were in turn surrounded by deep bunkers in which the Silastic Armorfiends lived and squabbled with each other.
The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend was just to be born. They didn’t like it, they got resentful. And when an Armorfiend got resentful, someone got hurt. An exhausting way of life, one might think, but they did seem to have an awful lot of energy.
The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend was to put him into a room of his own, because sooner or later he would simply beat himself up.
Eventually they realized that this was something they were going to have to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a weapon as part of his normal Silastic work (policemen, security guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty-five minutes every day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus aggressions.
For a while this worked well, until someone thought that it would be much more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot the potatoes instead.
This led to a renewed enthusiasm for shooting all sorts of things, and they all got very excited at the prospect of their first major war for weeks.
Another achievement of the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax is that they were the first race who ever managed to shock a computer.
It was a gigantic spaceborne computer called Hactar, which to this day is remembered as one of the most powerful ever built. It was the first to be built like a natural brain, in that every cellular particle of it carried the pattern of the whole within it, which enabled it to think more flexibly and imaginatively, and also, it seemed, to be shocked.
The Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were engaged in one of their regular wars with the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, and were not enjoying it as much as usual because it involved an awful lot of trekking through the Radiation Swamps of Cwulzenda, and across the Fire Mountains of Frazfraga, neither of which terrains they felt at home in.
What do you mean, asked Hactar, by Ultimate?
To which the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax said:
Read a bloody dictionary, and plunged back into the fray.
So Hactar designed an Ultimate Weapon.
It was a very, very small bomb which was simply a junction box in hyperspace that would, when activated, connect the heart of every major sun with the heart of every other major sun simultaneously and thus turn the entire Universe in to one gigantic hyperspatial supernova.
When the Silastic Armorfiends tried to use it to blow up a Strangulous Stilettan munitions dump in one of the Gamma Caves, they were extremely irritated that it didn’t work, and said so.
Hactar had been shocked by the whole idea.
He tried to explain that he had been thinking about this Ultimate Weapon business, and had worked out that there was no conceivable consequence of not setting the bomb off that was worse than the known consequence of setting it off, and he had therefore taken the liberty of introducing a small flaw into the design of the bomb, and he hoped that everyone involved would, on sober reflection, feel that…
The Silastic Armorfiends disagreed and pulverized the computer.
Later they thought better of it, and destroyed the faulty bomb as well. Then, pausing only to smash the hell out of the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, and the Strangulous Stilettans of Jajazikstak, they went on to find an entirely new way of blowing themselves up, which was a profound relief to everyone else in the Galaxy, particularly the Garfighters, the Stilettans and the potatoes.
Trillian had watched all this, as well as the story of Krikkit. She emerged from the Room of informational Illusions thoughtfully, just in time to discover that they had arrived too late.

24
如果你認爲，憑着馬鈴薯就能解決一些重要問題的話，那你可就錯了。
舉個例子。曾經有一個極其好戰的民族，名叫撕痕萬條星的撕拉鎧甲魔。那只是他們民族的名稱，他們軍隊的名稱還要恐怖。幸運的是，他們的生存年代比我們早很多——兩千億年，比誰都早。那時，銀河系年輕力盛，每一個新思想都值得爲之奮鬥。
“鬥”正是撕痕萬條星的撕拉鎧甲魔最擅長的事。他們鬥得可不少。他們與敵人戰鬥（敵人=其他任何人），他們和自己人戰鬥。他們的星球簡直就是廢墟。星球上，佈滿了死城，死城周圍堆滿了廢棄軍火，軍火四周則都是深深的地堡，撕拉鎧甲魔人住在裏面，互相爭吵不休。
要跟撕拉鎧甲魔人開戰最簡便的方式，就是來到這個世界上。他們不喜歡，他們很生氣。撕拉鎧甲魔人一生氣，後果就很嚴重。也許你會想：這活得多累啊？可他們似乎有着無窮的生命力。
解決一個撕拉鎧甲魔人最簡便的方式，就是讓他獨處於一室。很快他就會殺掉自己的。
後來，他們也發現，有些東西需要加以分辨。於是，他們通過了一項新法規：凡是需要經常攜帶武器的職業人員（如警察、保安、小學教師等），每天至少要花四十五分鐘的時間捶打一袋馬鈴薯，以便消耗其過剩的攻擊性。
這一規定實行後不久，情況就變了——人們覺得，用槍打馬鈴薯更有效率，更省時間。由此，導致了新一輪的無差別槍擊熱潮。他們爲這次大型戰爭激動不已。
撕痕萬條星的撕拉鎧甲魔，還有一項突出成就，便是——第一次讓電腦驚呆了。
那是一臺巨型太空媒介電腦，名叫黑克特，即使在今天也是最強的電腦之一。它是第一臺模擬真實大腦的電腦，每一個組成部分，都攜帶着整體的範式。因此，它能夠更加靈活地思考，想象力更加豐富。當然，還能被驚呆。
當時，撕痕萬條星的撕拉鎧甲魔族，正同撕塔星的苦熬鬼戰士族打仗。然而這次情況不妙。這次戰爭，需要趟過苦澤達的輻射溼地，穿越費拉費加的火焰山脈，它們都不是什麼好地方。
後來，啞啞鋸星的扼喉匕首狂族也參戰了。於是，他們還得把戰場開闢到卡費思的伽瑪山洞裏，開闢到瓦冷古騰的冰雪風暴之中。這時，他們終於受夠了，便要求黑克特設計出一種終極武器來。
“終極……”黑克特問道，“是什麼意思呢？”
撕痕萬條的撕拉鎧甲魔答曰：
“他媽的翻字典去。”便又投入了戰鬥。
黑克特就設計了一種終極武器。
那是一顆很小很小的炸彈。其實，只是個超空間的插線板。一旦啓動，它就會自動將所有大型恆星的中心地帶連通，將整個宇宙變成一顆巨大無比的超新星。
然而，正當撕拉鎧甲魔想用它炸掉伽瑪山洞裏、扼喉匕首狂族的廢棄軍火時，卻發現它不能啓動，於是勃然大怒。他們又找到黑克特，跟它說了。
黑克特真是驚呆了。
他解釋說，自己確實斟酌過終極武器的事。他覺得，引爆它的後果將會空前絕後的嚴重，因此，他自作主張，設計的時候留了一點點瑕疵。他希望有關人士都能理智地、清楚地認識到……
撕拉鎧甲魔人拒絕接受解釋，並把他碎屍萬段。
三思過後，他們把那顆不能用的炸彈也毀掉了。隨後，他們先後解決了撕塔星的苦熬鬼戰士和啞啞鋸星的扼喉匕首狂。最後，再用一種頗爲新穎的方式解決了自己。全銀河系都爲之倍感欣慰，特別是鬼戰士族、匕首狂族和馬鈴薯們。
崔莉安看完了這些故事，也看了版求的故事。她心事重重地走出信息幻影室，然後發現，他們幾個到得太遲了。