"Adams, Douglas -hitchhikers guide to the galaxy part 5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

been taken care of centuries earlier by the time they actually got
there .
This didn't, of course, deter their crews from wanting to fight
the battles anyway. They were trained, they were ready, they'd
had a couple of thousand years' sleep, they'd come a long way
to do a tough job and by Zarquon they were going to do it.
This was when the first major muddles of Galactic history set
in, with battles continually re-erupting centuries after the issues
they had been fought over had supposedly been settled. However,
these muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had
to try and unravel once time-travel was discovered and battles
started pre-erupting hundreds of years before the issues even
arose. When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole
planets started turning unexpectedly into banana fruitcake, the
great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally
gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the
rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which
had been after them for years.
Which is all very well, of course, but it almost certainly
means that no one will ever know for sure where, for instance,
the Grebulons came from, or exactly what it was they wanted.
And this is a pity, because if anybody had known anything about
them, it is just possible that a most terrible catastrophe would
have been averted - or at least would have had to find a different
way to happen.

Click, hum.
The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently
through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breath-
taking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background
of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one
dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.
On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia,
deeply dark and Silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher
level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent
cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it
got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was
supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said
that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably
more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know
what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was
getting.