經典科幻文學:《銀河系漫遊指南》第3章 Part 4

Whatever it was raced across the sky in monstrous yellowness, tore the sky apart with mind-buggering noise and leapt off into the distance leaving the gaping air to shut behind it with a bang that drove your ears six feet into your skull.
Another one followed and did the same thing only louder.
It's difficult to say exactly what the people on the surface of the planet were doing now, because they didn't really know what they were doing themselves. None of it made a lot of sense — running into houses, running out of houses, howling noiselessly at the noise. All around the world city streets exploded with people, cars slewed into each other as the noise fell on them and then rolled off like a tidal wave over hills and valleys, deserts and oceans, seeming to flatten everything it hit.
Only one man stood and watched the sky, stood with terrible sadness in his eyes and rubber bungs in his ears. He knew exactly what was happening and had known ever since his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic had started winking in the dead of night beside his pillar and woken him with a start. It was what he had waited for all these years, but when he had deciphered the signal pattern sitting alone in his small dark room a coldness had gripped him and squeezed his heart. Of all the races in all of the Galaxy who could have come and said a big hello to planet Earth, he thought, didn't it just have to be the Vogons.
Still he knew what he had to ything was ready, everything was prepared.
He knew where his towel was.

就是這玩意兒，它巨大的黃色身影劃過，伴隨着令人頭暈的噪音把天幕撕開，然後駛遠，身後留下漸漸合攏的天空，還有“砰”的一聲巨響，簡直快把人的耳朵震到顱腔裏去了。
緊接着又是一個飛行物，幹了同樣的事情，只是發出的聲響更大些。
很難準確地說出這顆行星表面的人們眼下都正在幹些什麼，因爲連他們自己也不知道自己在幹些什麼。不過可以肯定，沒什麼真正有意義的事——進進出出房屋，在一片嘈雜中發出無聲的嚎叫，伴隨着巨響的降臨，整個世界的城市街道上擠滿了人羣，汽車一輛撞向一輛。然後，這聲音像潮汐一樣翻滾着，越過山峯和峽谷、沙漠和海洋，似乎要掃平所遇上的一切。
只有一個人站着，望着天空，眼裏滿是悲傷。他知道正在發生什麼事情，從他放在枕頭旁邊的亞以太感應器在深夜突然開始閃爍並且驚醒了他的那一刻起他就知道了。這是他這些年來一直在等待的，但當他破譯出這些信號，獨自一人坐在他那陰暗的小屋裏時，一股寒意襲上他的心頭。在整個銀河系所有有能力到這裏來向地球這顆行星打聲招呼的物種中，他想，並不一定就非得是沃貢人吧。
不過，他仍然知道自己該做些什麼。他已經一切都準備好了，一切就緒了。
他現在知道自己的毛巾在哪兒了。