“Yes, in two million years’ time. Why don’t you tell them that? Go and say to them, ‘Excuse me, I’d just like to point out that in two million years’ time I will be born just a few miles from here.’ See what they say. They’ll chase you up a tree and set fire to it.”
Arthur absorbed this unhappily.
“Face it,” said Ford, “those zeebs over there are your ancestors, not these poor creatures here.”
He went over to where the apemen creatures were rummaging listlessly with the stone letters. He shook his head.
“Put the Scrabble away, Arthur,” he said, “it won’t save the human race, because this lot aren’t going to be the human race. The human race is currently sitting round a rock on the other side of this hill making documentaries about themselves.”
Arthur winced.
“There must be something we can do,” he said. A terrible sense of desolation thrilled through his body that he should be here, on the Earth, the Earth which had lost its future in a horrifying arbitrary catastrophe and which now seemed set to lose its past as well.
“No,” said Ford, “there’s nothing we can do. This doesn’t change the history of the Earth, you see, this is the history of the Earth. Like it or leave it, the Golgafrinchans are the people you are descended from. in two million years they get destroyed by the Vogons. History is never altered you see, it just fits together like a jigsaw. Funny old thing, life, isn’t it?”
He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant privet bush where it hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and didn’t stop till it was set upon and eaten by a fox which choked on one of its bones and died on the bank of a stream which subsequently washed it away.
During the following weeks Ford Prefect swallowed his pride and struck up a relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on Golgafrincham, and he was terribly upset when she suddenly passed away as a result of drinking water from a pool that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox. The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the letter Q into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.
Like most of the really crucial things in life, this chain of events was completely invisible to Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent. They were looking sadly at one of the natives morosely pushing the other letters around.
“Poor bloody caveman,” said Arthur.
“They’re not…”
“What?”
“Oh never mind.”
The wretched creature let out a pathetic howling noise and banged on the rock.
“It’s all been a bit of waste of time for them, hasn’t it?” said Arthur.
“Uh uh urghhhhh,” muttered the native and banged on the rock again. “They’ve been outevolved by telephone sanitizers.”
“Urgh, gr gr, gruh!” insisted the native, continuing to bang on the rock.
“Why does he keep banging on the rock?” said Arthur.