A neutrino is not a big thing to be hit by.
In fact it’s hard to think of anything much smaller by which one could reasonably hope to be hit. And it’s not as if being hit by neutrinos was in itself a particularly unusual event for something the size of the Earth. Far from it. It would be an unusual nanosecond in which the Earth was not hit by several billion passing neutrinos.
It all depends on what you mean by `hit’, of course, seeing as matter consists almost entirely of nothing at all. The chances of a neutrino actually hitting something as it travels through all this howling emptiness are roughly comparable to that of dropping a ball bearing at random from a cruising 747 and hitting, say, an egg sandwich.
Anyway, this neutrino hit something. Nothing terribly impor- tant in the scale of things, you might say. But the problem with saying something like that is that you would be talking cross- eyed badger spit. Once something actually happens somewhere in something as wildly complicated as the Universe, Kevin knows where it will all end up – where `Kevin’ is any random entity that doesn’t know nothin’ about nothin’.
This neutrino struck an atom.
The atom was part of a molecule. The molecule was part of a nucleic acid. The nucleic acid was part of a gene. The gene was part of a genetic recipe for growing… and so on. The upshot was that a plant ended up growing an extra leaf. In Essex. Or what would, after a lot of palaver and local difficulties of a geological nature, become Essex.
The plant was a clover. It threw its weight, or rather its seed, around extremely effectively and rapidly became the world’s dominant type of clover. The precise causal connection between this tiny biological happenstance, and a few other minor vari- ations that exist in that slice of the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash – such as Tricia McMillan failing to leave with Zaphod Beeblebrox, abnormally low sales of pecan-flavoured ice-cream and the fact that the Earth On which all this occurred did not get demolished by the Vogons to make way for a new hyperspace bypass – is currently sitting at number 4,763,984,132 on the research project priority list at what was once the History Department of the University of MaxiMegalon, and no one cur- rently at the prayer meeting by the poolside appears to feel any sense of urgency about the problem.
4
Tricia began to feel that the world was conspiring against her. She knew that this was a perfectly normal way to feel after an overnight flight going east, when you suddenly have a whole other mysteriously threatening day to deal with for which you are not the least bit prepared. But still.
There were marks on her lawn.
She didn’t really care about marks on her lawn very much. Marks on her lawn could go and take a running jump as far as she was concerned. It was Saturday morning. She had just got home from New York feeling tired, crabby and paranoid, and all she wanted to do was go to bed with the radio on quietly and gradually fall asleep to the sound of Ned Sherrin being terribly clever about something.
But Eric Bartlett was not going to let her get away with not making a thorough inspection of the marks. Eric was the old gardener who came in from the village on Saturday mornings to poke around at her garden with a stick. He didn’t believe in people coming in from New York first thing in the morning. Didn’t hold with it. Went against nature. He believed in virtually everything else, though.
`Probably them space aliens,’ he said, bending over and prod- ding at the edges of the small indentations with his stick. `Hear a lot about space aliens these days. I expect it’s them.’
`Do you?’ said Tricia, looking furtively at her watch. Ten minutes, she reckoned. Ten minutes she’d be able to stay standing up. Then she would simply keel over, whether she was in her bedroom or still out here in the garden. That was if she just had to stand. If she also had to nod intelligently and say `Do you?’ from time to time, it might cut it down to five.