Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
This is her story.
在遥远的银河系西旋臂那毫不时髦的末端上一块毫不为图所注的毫无生气的地方有一颗小小的毫不引人注目的黄色恒星。
大约在九千二百万英里外环绕着它的是一颗完全可以被无视的渺小的蓝绿色星球，上面的猿类生物是如此惊人地原始以至于他们仍然认为电子表是个相当精妙的玩意儿。
这个星球有——或者应该说是曾经有——一个问题，问题是这样的：大多数人在大多数时间里都处于一种郁闷的状态。对于这一问题有很多解决方案，但大多数方案都跟一种小小的绿色纸片的动向有密切关系，这点很诡异，因为大体上来讲并不是那些绿色纸片在郁闷。
因此这一问题继续遗留了下来；很多人都非常不爽，其中大多数人都相当悲哀，即便是有电子表的家伙。很多人越来越赞同这样的观点：他们当初首先从树上下来实在是个大错误。并且甚至有些人觉得进化到树上都是一步臭棋，没有任何东西应该离开可亲可敬的海洋母亲。
于是，在一个星期四（大约是一个人被钉在树上之后的两千年，那个人宣称如果改变一下，与人为善，世界原来可以更美），一个女孩独自坐在瑞克曼斯沃斯（注）的一个小咖啡馆，突然意识到这么长时间以来到底是那儿出了岔子，她终于明白了这个世界究竟怎样才能变成一个美好幸福的地方。这一次这个主意很妥当，一定能奏效，而且没有人会因此被钉到什么东西上。
然而，悲哀的是，在她能够打电话告诉任何人这一事情之前，一个愚蠢得可怕的灾难发生了，这一主意永远地消失了。
这就是她的故事。