It wasn’t even the climax of the book, because there wasn’t one. The character died about a third of the way through the penultimate chapter of the book, and the rest of it was just more stuff about road-mending. The book just finished dead at the one hundred thousandth word, because that was how long books were on Bartledan.

那甚至不是书里的高潮部分，因为那本书压根就没有高潮。男主角死于倒数第二章进行到大约三分之一的时候，剩下的部分只是更多跟修路有关的事情而已。书在写到十万个字的时候戛然而止，因为巴忒勒丹的书全都是这么长。

Arthur threw the book across the room, sold the room and left. He started to travel with wild abandon, trading in more and more spit, toenails, fingernails, blood, hair, anything that anybody wanted, for tickets. For semen, he discovered, he could travel first class. He settled nowhere, but only existed in the hermetic, twilight world of the cabins of hyperspatial starships, eating, drinking, sleeping, watching movies, only stopping at spaceports to donate more DNA and catch the next long-haul ship out. He waited and waited for another accident to happen.

阿瑟把书扔到对面墙上，卖掉房子离开了。他开始狂热地旅行，卖唾液，卖脚趾甲，卖手指甲，卖血，卖头发，只要有人想买，任何东西他都卖，卖得越来越勤，得来的钱全当了旅费。后来他又发现，如果卖精液自己还能坐上头等呢。他也不在哪个地方久待，只管生活在超空间飞船船舱那与世隔绝，半明半暗的世界里，在里头吃，在里头喝，在里头睡觉看电影，在空港干的就只是捐献DNA，好坐上下一艘远程飞船。他等了又等，等待一次意外。

The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen is that it won’t. That is not what ‘accident’ means. The accident that eventually occurred was not what he had planned at all. The ship he was on blipped in hyperspace, flickered horribly between ninety-seven different points in the Galaxy simultaneously, caught the unexpected gravitational pull of an uncharted planet in one of them, became ensnared in its outer atmosphere and began to fall, screaming and tearing, into it.

他想要的是一个恰到好处的意外。这里唯一的问题在于，恰到好处的意外发生不了，因为“意外”压根儿就不是这个意思。最后发生的那个意外同他的计划完全无关。他乘坐的飞船在超空间里蹦蹦跳跳，同时闪现在银河系里九十七个不同的地方，在其中一个地方有颗地图上尚未标明的星球，飞船意外地被它的重力拉扯，陷进它的外层大气里开始坠落，尖叫着撕破了那个星球的大气层。

The ship’s systems protested all the way down that everything was perfectly normal and under control, but when it went into a final hectic spin, ripped wildly through half a mile of trees and finally exploded into a seething ball of flame it became clear that this was not the case.

这一路下落期间，飞船的舰载系统坚持说一切正常，尽在掌控；可飞船最后一个狂野的旋转，扫清了整整半里的树林，自己也被炸成了一个沸腾的火球，所以情况显然并不像系统说的那么乐观。