THE BABEL FISH

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like and is probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself, then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by the signals from the speech centres of the brain which supplied them.

The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any sort of language.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

Meanwhile the Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.