经典科幻文学:《银河系漫游指南》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.

就是这玩意儿，它巨大的黄色身影划过，伴随着令人头晕的噪音把天幕撕开，然后驶远，身后留下渐渐合拢的天空，还有“砰”的一声巨响，简直快把人的耳朵震到颅腔里去了。
紧接着又是一个飞行物，干了同样的事情，只是发出的声响更大些。
很难准确地说出这颗行星表面的人们眼下都正在干些什么，因为连他们自己也不知道自己在干些什么。不过可以肯定，没什么真正有意义的事——进进出出房屋，在一片嘈杂中发出无声的嚎叫，伴随着巨响的降临，整个世界的城市街道上挤满了人群，汽车一辆撞向一辆。然后，这声音像潮汐一样翻滚着，越过山峰和峡谷、沙漠和海洋，似乎要扫平所遇上的一切。
只有一个人站着，望着天空，眼里满是悲伤。他知道正在发生什么事情，从他放在枕头旁边的亚以太感应器在深夜突然开始闪烁并且惊醒了他的那一刻起他就知道了。这是他这些年来一直在等待的，但当他破译出这些信号，独自一人坐在他那阴暗的小屋里时，一股寒意袭上他的心头。在整个银河系所有有能力到这里来向地球这颗行星打声招呼的物种中，他想，并不一定就非得是沃贡人吧。
不过，他仍然知道自己该做些什么。他已经一切都准备好了，一切就绪了。
他现在知道自己的毛巾在哪儿了。