Extract From Mostly Harmless
The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons:
partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little
muddled, but also bacause some very muddling things have been happening
anyway.
One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the
difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels
faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news,
which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor
did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't
work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived
anywhere that there wasn't really much point in being there.
So, by and large, the peoples of the Galaxy tended to languish in their
own local muddles and the history of the Galaxy itself was, for a long time,
largely cosmological.
Which is not to say that people weren't still trying. They tried sending
off fleets of spaceships to do battle or business in distant parts, but
these usually took thousands of years to get anywhere. By the time they
eventually arive, other forms of travel had been discovered which made use
of hyperspace to circumvent the speed of light, so that whatever battles it
was that the slower-than-light fleets had been sent to fight had already
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', 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 arrose. 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 that is a pity, because if anybody
had known anything about them, it is quite possible that a most terrible
catastrophe would have been averted - or at least would have had to find a
different way to happen.
Email: spud_111@hotmail.com