The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

picture of a white candlestick. Or of looking at a lot of colored dots on a piece of paper which suddenly resolve themselves into the figure six and mean that your optician is going to charge you a lot of money for a new pair of glasses.
    He was still listening to the howling gargles, he knew that, only now it had somehow taken on the semblance of perfectly straightforward English.
    This is what he heard . . .

Chapter 6
    Howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gar
gle howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl slurrp uuuurgh should have a good time. Message repeats. This is your captain speaking, so stop whatever you’re doing and pay attention. First of all I see from our instruments that we have a couple of hitchhikers aboard. Hello, wherever you are. I just want to make it totally clear that you are not at all welcome. I worked hard to get where I am today, and I didn’t become captain of a Vogon constructor ship simply so I could turn it into a taxi service for a load of degenerate freeloaders. I have sent out a search party, and as soon as they find you I will put you off the ship. If you’re very lucky I might read you some of my poetry first.
    “Secondly, we are about to jump into hyperspace for the journey to Barnard’s Star. On arrival we will stay in dock for a seventy-two-hour refit, and no one’s to leave the ship during that time. I repeat, all planet leave is canceled. I’ve just had an unhappy love affair, so I don’t see why anybody else should have a good time. Message ends.”
    The noise stopped.
    Arthur discovered to his embarrassment that he was lying curled up in a small ball on the floor with his arms wrapped round his head. He smiled weakly.
    “Charming man,” he said. “I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one . . .”
    “You wouldn’t need to,” said Ford. “They’ve got as much sex appeal as a road accident. No, don’t move,” he added as Arthur began to uncurl himself, “you’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
    “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
    “You ask a glass of water.”
    Arthur thought about this.
    “Ford,” he said.
    “Yeah?”
    “What’s this fish doing in my ear?”
    “It’s translating for you. It’s a Babel fish. Look it up in the book if you like.”
    He tossed over
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and then curled himself up into a fetal ball to prepare himself for the jump.
    At that moment the bottom fell out of Arthur’s mind.
    His eyes turned inside out. His feet began to leak out of the top of his head.
    The room folded flat around him, spun around, shifted out of existence and left him sliding into his own navel.
    They were passing through hyperspace.
    “The Babel fish,”
said
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
quietly,
“is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing
in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own
carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes
into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining
the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the
speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshotof all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can
instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The
speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has
been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
    “Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything
so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that
some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the
non
existence
of God.
    “The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I
exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am