Chapter 11 Chapter Eleven

The first thing Arthur Dent had to do, he admitted helplessly, was to find a life for himself.That meant he had to find a planet to live on.On that planet, the atmosphere had to be large enough for him to breathe and low in acidity; he had to be able to stand and sit at will without gravitational problems.In addition, plants had better not attack him. "I don't want to talk about anthropology all the time," he said to the weird thing behind the desk at the Resettlement Counseling Center in Pintton Alpha, "but I do want the people there to be a little like myself. You I know. Like a human being."

The weird thing behind the desk waved the weird parts it had grown, as if startled by Arthur's request.It chugs down from the chair, clatters slowly and with difficulty to the other side, swallows the old metal filing cabinet, and then, with a big belch, spits out the drawer that holds the relevant information.Glittering tentacles popped out of his ears, and he took some papers out of a drawer, stuffed the drawer into his mouth, and vomited out the filing cabinet.It clattered back to the table, stuck the seat sticky, and slapped the documents on the table. "Is there anything you like?" it asked.

Arthur turned the damp and dingy papers apprehensively.He obviously came to a remote mountainous area of ​​the Milky Way, and compared with the universe he was familiar with, it was obviously too far to the left.What should have been his home was just a stinky bumpkin planet, soaked in rain all year and overrun by bugs and marsh pigs.Even here it was like having a stroke, which was why he had to go to places like this and ask questions like this.There was one place where Arthur always mentioned, Stavro Murabetta, but no one had ever heard of such a planet. The planets to choose from all look a bit off-putting.People have nothing to give him, because he himself has nothing to give others.Arthur realized that although he had been born on a planet with cars and computers and Paris and Armagnac, he didn't know what those things were.He can't do it.He really couldn't build a toaster if he had to figure it out on his own, he could only make a sandwich, and that's about it, there really weren't many planets that needed his services.After realizing this, Arthur became more humble.

His heart sank, which surprised him because he had thought its tempo had slowed to such an extent that there was no room for it to go down.He closed his eyes for a while.He really wished he could go home.He wished his old world—the real earth he had grown up on—had not been erased.He wished none of this had happened.He wished that when he opened his eyes again he would find himself standing on the steps of his cottage in that little village in the South West of England, wishing to see the sun on the green hills and the mail-car Up and down the road, daffodils are blooming in his garden, and a distant pub is open for lunch.He wished he could buy a newspaper and go to the pub and read the paper over a bitter.He wished he could do another crossword puzzle.He really hoped that he could get confused when he reached the seventeenth horizontal character and couldn't do it anymore.

He opened his eyes. The strange thing was heaving impatiently at him, and it stretched out a pseudopod-like thing and slapped the table. Arthur shook his head, then looked down. Disgusting, he thought to himself.And then the next one. Very off-putting.Next one. Oh... this place looks nice. That planet is called Bartledan.There's oxygen, there's green hills, and there's even—or so the introductory says—even a notorious literary tradition.But it was a photo that aroused Arthur's interest most. A small group of Butlerdans gathered around an existing square, smiling kindly at the camera.

"Ah." He showed the photo to the strange thing behind the desk. Its eyes squirmed to the photo, and rolled back and forth for a long time, leaving shiny slime everywhere. "Yes," it said contemptuously, "they do look exactly like you." Arthur moved to Butlerdam, sold some of his toenail residue and saliva to a DNA bank, and used that money to buy a house in the village in the picture, where it was comfortable and the climate was mild.The locals were close in appearance to him, and didn't seem to mind having him alone, and didn't attack him with anything.He bought some clothes and a closet to put them in.

Life had his hands on it.Now he needs to find a target for it. At first he tried to sit and read.But Butlerdan's literature, for all its refinement and refinement in this part of the galaxy, seemed to have difficulty keeping Arthur interested.The problem is, it has nothing to do with people.It is not written for human needs.A Butlerdan, if you just look at the appearance, he is quite similar to the people on the earth, but when you say "good evening" to him, he will look around in a little surprise, sniff the air, and say, yes Well, he noticed at Arthur's mention, it did seem to be a pretty good evening.

"No, I wanted to wish you a good evening," Arthur would say - or, more accurately, he used to say, though he soon learned to avoid such conversations. "I mean I hope you're doing well tonight," he'd add. More serious confusion. "Hope?" the Butlerdan would ask at last, with polite perplexity. "Er, yes." And Arthur would say, "I'm just expressing a wish." "desire?" "yes." "What is the wish?" Good question, Arthur thought, and retreated to his room to ponder. He understood the cosmology of the Bartledan people: the universe is the universe, if you want it or not, don’t pull it down.On the one hand he had to admit and respect this idea, but on the other hand he couldn't help feeling that it was so unnatural to never desire anything, never have any hope or wish.

nature.This is a difficult word to deal with. He realized early on that many of the things he used to think were natural, like buying someone presents for Christmas, stopping at a red light, or going in free fall at 32 feet per second, were just Habits in his own world might not work in the rest of the universe; but no desire—it can't be something natural, can it?It's like not breathing. Breathing is another thing that the Bartledaines don't have to do, although the atmosphere is full of oxygen.They just stand like that, run around occasionally, play tennis and things like that (without hoping to win, of course—they just play like that, and whoever wins at the end wins), but they never Not really breathing.I don't know why, but breathing is unnecessary anyway.Arthur soon discovered that playing tennis with them was just too weird.Although they look like Earthlings and even move and sound like Earthlings, they neither breathe nor have any desires.

Breathing and hope, in turn, seemed to be what Arthur's life was all about.Sometimes his hope was so strong that his breathing was disturbed and he had to lie down for a while.Lie down by yourself.in his little room.So far away from the planet where he was born and raised.Every time he tried to deal with the mathematics involved, his head inevitably became a mess. He preferred not to think about it.He'd rather sit and read - as long as he could find anything worth reading.But in the stories of the Butlerdans, there was never anything anyone wanted—not even a glass of water.Of course, if they were thirsty, they drank water, but if there was no water to drink at the time, they didn't think about it.Arthur has just read a book in which the main character spends a week doing yard work, playing tennis many times, repairing a road, getting his wife to have a baby, and then, on the last day, A little bit ahead of the chapter, unexpectedly dehydrated to death.Arthur was furious, and he just searched forward in a carpet-like manner, and it turned out that in the second chapter, the author had casually mentioned that there was something wrong with the pool.That's all.That guy just hangs up.It just happened.

That's not even the climax in the book, because the book doesn't even have a climax.The hero dies about a third of the way through the penultimate chapter, and the rest is just more road-building stuff.The book stopped abruptly when it reached 100,000 words, because Bartledin's books are all that long. Arthur threw the book against the opposite wall, sold the house and left.He began to travel wildly, selling saliva, toenails, fingernails, blood, hair, as long as anyone wanted to buy, he would sell anything, and he sold more and more frequently, and all the money he got was used for travel expenses.Later, he discovered that if he sold his semen, he could still sit in the first class.He doesn't stay in any place for a long time, he just lives in the isolated, semi-dark world of the hyperspace spaceship cabin, eats, drinks, sleeps and watches movies in it, and all he does in the airport is donate DNA , so as to get on the next remote spaceship.He waited and waited, waiting for an accident. What he wanted was a well-timed surprise.The only problem here is that just the right accident can't happen, because "accident" doesn't mean that at all.The last accident had nothing to do with his plan.His ship was bouncing through hyperspace, simultaneously flashing to ninety-seven different places in the galaxy, and in one of those places the ship was accidentally pulled by its gravity and stuck in it. began to fall in the outer atmosphere of the planet, screaming and tearing through the planet's atmosphere. During the way down, the on-board system of the spacecraft insisted that everything was normal and under control; but the last wild rotation of the spacecraft cleared half a mile of woods, and it was blown into a boiling fireball, so the situation Obviously not as optimistic as the system said. The fire engulfed the forest, burned into the night, and extinguished itself neatly.This is the case because today all wildfires of a certain size that are not scheduled must do so -- it is required by law.A few moments later, bits and pieces exploded unhurriedly by themselves, setting off several small fires around.But they also went out. Arthur Dent, because the endless interstellar travel is too boring, used to pass the time by learning the safety procedures of the spacecraft, so he was lucky to be the only one who knew how to protect himself when landing in unscheduled conditions, and thus became the only survivor on board.He was lying on the ground in a daze, with some broken bones and bleeding, and his body was wrapped in a ball of pink plastic, which looked like a big quilt, quite fluffy, with three thousand different languages ​​written all over it. "have a good time". The dark, roaring silence heaved in his cluttered head made him sick.He knew with resigned confidence that he would live, because he had not been to Stavro Murabetta. After the seemingly endless pain and darkness, he gradually realized that some quiet shadows were moving around him.