corpus4.txt

"Some people say that the lizards are the best  thing  that  ever
happened  to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course,
completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."

"But that's terrible," said Arthur.

"Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairan dollar for every
time  I  heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the
Universe and say `That's terrible' I  wouldn't  be  sitting  here
like  a  lemon looking for a gin. But I haven't and I am. Anyway,
what are you looking so placid and  moon-eyed  for?  Are  you  in
love?"

Arthur said yes, he was, and said it placidly.

"With someone who knows where the gin bottle is? Do I get to meet
her?"

He did because Fenchurch came in at that moment with  a  pile  of
newspapers  she'd  been  into  the village to buy. She stopped in
astonishment at the wreckage on the table and the  wreckage  from
Betelgeuse on the sofa.

"Where's the gin?" said Ford to Fenchurch. And to  Arthur,  "What
happened to Trillian by the way?"

"Er, this is  Fenchurch,"  said  Arthur,  awkwardly.  "There  was
nothing with Trillian, you must have seen her last."
"Oh, yeah," said Ford, "she went off with Zaphod somewhere.  They
had  some kids or something. At least," he added, "I think that's
what they were. Zaphod's calmed down a lot you know."

"Really?" said Arthur, clustering hurriedly  round  Fenchurch  to
relieve her of the shopping.

"Yeah," said Ford, "at least one of his heads is now  saner  than
an emu on acid."

"Arthur, who is this?" said Fenchurch.

"Ford Prefect,"  said  Arthur.  "I  may  have  mentioned  him  in
passing."




For a total of three days and nights the giant silver robot stood
in  stunned  amazement  straddling  the remains of Knightsbridge,
swaying slightly and trying to work out a number of things.

Government deputations came to see it, ranting journalists by the
truckload  asked  each other questions on the air about what they
thought of it, flights of fighter bombers tried  pathetically  to
attack  it  -  but  no  lizards  appeared. It scanned the horizon
slowly.

At night it was at its most spectacular, floodlit by the teams of
television  crews  who covered it continuously as it continuously
did nothing.

It thought and thought and eventually reached a conclusion.

It would have to send out its service robots.

It should have thought of that before, but it was having a number
of problems.

The tiny flying robots came screeching out of  the  hatchway  one
afternoon  in  a  terrifying  cloud  of  metal.  They  roamed the
surrounding  terrain,  frantically  attacking  some  things   and
defending others.

One of them at last found a pet shop with some  lizards,  but  it
instantly  defended  the  pet shop for democracy so savagely that
little in the area survived.

A turning point came when  a  crack  team  of  flying  screechers
discovered  the  Zoo  in Regent's Park, and most particularly the
reptile house.

Learning a little caution from their  previous  mistakes  in  the
petshop,  the  flying  drills  and  fretsaws  brought some of the
larger and fatter iguanas to the giant silver robot, who tried to
conduct high-level talks with them.

Eventually the robot announced to  the  world  that  despite  the
full,  frank  and  wide-ranging  exchange of views the high level
talks had broken down, the lizards had been retired, and that it,
the  robot  would  take  a  short holiday somewhere, and for some
reason selected Bournemouth.

Ford Prefect, watching it on TV, nodded, laughed, and had another
beer.

Immediate preparations were made for its departure.

The flying toolkits screeched and sawed  and  drilled  and  fried
things  with  light throughout that day and all through the night
time, and in the  morning,  stunningly,  a  giant  mobile  gantry
started  to  roll  westwards on several roads simultaneously with
the robot standing on it, supported within the gantry.

Westward it crawled, like a strange carnival buzzed around by its
servants  and  helicopters and news coaches, scything through the
land until at last it came to Bournemouth, where the robot slowly
freed itself from it transport system's embraces and went and lay
for ten days on the beach.

It was, of course, by far the most exciting thing that  had  ever
happened to Bournemouth.

Crowds gathered daily along the perimeter which  was  staked  out
and guarded as the robot's recreation area, and tried to see what
it was doing.

It was doing nothing. It was lying on the beach. It was  lying  a
little awkwardly on its face.

It was a journalist from a  local  paper  who,  late  one  night,
managed  to  do what no one else in the world had so far managed,
which was to strike up a brief intelligible conversation with one
of the service robots guarding the perimeter.

It was an extraordinary breakthrough.

"I think there's a story in it," confided the journalist  over  a
cigarette  shared  through  the steel link fence, "but it needs a
good local angle. I've got a little list of questions  here,"  he
went  on,  rummaging  awkwardly  in an inner pocket, "perhaps you
could get him, it, whatever you call him,  to  run  through  them
quickly."

The little flying ratchet screwdriver said it would see  what  it
cold do and screeched off.

A reply was never forthcoming.

Curiously, however, the questions on the piece of paper  more  or
less  exactly  matched  the questions that were going through the
massive battle-scarred industrial quality circuits of the robot's
mind. They were these:

"How do you feel about being a robot?"

"How does it feel to be from outer space?" and
"How do you like Bournemouth?"

Early the following day things started to be packed up and within
a  few  days  it  became apparent that the robot was preparing to
leave for good.

"The point is," said Fenchurch  to  Ford,  "can  you  get  us  on
board?"

Ford looked wildly at his watch.

"I have some  serious  unfinished  business  to  attend  to,"  he
exclaimed.




Crowds thronged as close as they could to the giant silver craft,
which  wasn't  very.  The  immediate perimeter was fenced off and
patrolled by the tiny flying service robots.  Staked  out  around
that  was the army, who had been completely unable to breach that
inner perimeter, but were damned if anybody was going  to  breach
them.  They in turn were surrounded by a cordon of police, though
whether they were there to protect the public from  the  army  or
the  army  from  the  public,  or  to  guarantee the giant ship's
diplomatic immunity and prevent it getting  parking  tickets  was
entirely unclear and the subject of much debate.

The inner perimeter fence was  now  being  dismantled.  The  army
stirred uncomfortably, uncertain of how to react to the fact that
the reason for their being there seemed as if it was simply going
to get up and go.

The giant robot had lurched back aboard the  ship  at  lunchtime,
and  now it was five o'clock in the afternoon and no further sign
had been seen of it. Much had been heard  -  more  grindings  and
rumblings  from  deep  within  the  craft, the music of a million
hideous malfunctions; but the sense of  tense  expectation  among
the  crowd  was born of the fact that they tensely expected to be
disappointed. This wonderful extraordinary thing  had  come  into
their lives, an now it was simply going to go without them.

Two people were particularly aware of this sensation. Arthur  and
Fenchurch  scanned  the  crowd  anxiously,  unable  to  find Ford
Prefect in it anywhere, or any sign that  he  had  the  slightest
intention of being there.

"How reliable is he?" asked Fenchurch in a sinking voice.

"How reliable?" said Arthur. He gave a hollow laugh. "How shallow
is the ocean?" he said. "How cold is the sun?"

The last parts of the robot's gantry transport were being carried
on  board,  and the few remaining sections of the perimeter fence
were now stacked at the bottom of  the  ramp  waiting  to  follow
them. The soldiers on guard round the ramp bristled meaningfully,
orders were barked back and forth, hurried conferences were held,
but nothing, of course, could be done about any of it.
Hopelessly, and with no clear  plan  now,  Arthur  and  Fenchurch
pushed  forward  through the crowd, but since the whole crowd was
also trying to push forward through  the  crowd,  this  got  them
nowhere.

And within a few minutes more nothing remained outside the  ship,
every  last link of the fence was aboard. A couple of flying fret
saws and a spirit level seemed to do one last  check  around  the
site, and then screamed in through the giant hatchway themselves.

A few seconds passed.

The  sounds  of  mechanical  disarray  from  within  changed   in
intensity, and slowly, heavily, the huge steel ramp began to lift
itself back out  of  the  Harrods  Food  Halls.  The  sound  that
accompanied  it  was  the  sound  of  thousands of tense, excited
people being completely ignored.

"Hold it!"

A megaphone barked from a taxi which screeched to a halt  on  the
edge of the milling crowd.

"There has been,"  barked  the  megaphone,  "a  major  scientific
break-in!  Through.  Breakthrough," it corrected itself. The door
flew open and a small man  from  somewhere  in  the  vicinity  of
Betelgeuse leapt out wearing a white coat.

"Hold it!" he shouted again, and this  time  brandished  a  short
squad black rod with lights on it. The lights winked briefly, the
ramp paused in its ascent, and then in obedience to  the  signals
from the Thumb (which half the electronic engineers in the galaxy
are constantly trying to find fresh ways of  jamming,  while  the
other  half  are  constantly trying to find fresh ways of jamming
the jamming signals), slowly ground its way downwards again.

Ford Prefect grabbed his megaphone  from  out  of  the  taxi  and
started bawling at the crowd through it.

"Make way," he shouted,  "make  way,  please,  this  is  a  major
scientific  breakthrough. You and you, get the equipment from the
taxi."

Completely at random he pointed  at  Arthur  and  Fenchurch,  who
wrestled  their  way back out of the crowd and clustered urgently
round the taxi.

"All right, I want you to  clear  a  passage,  please,  for  some
important  pieces  of  scientific  equipment," boomed Ford. "Just
everybody keep calm. It's all under control, there's  nothing  to
see. It is merely a major scientific breakthrough. Keep calm now.
Important scientific equipment. Clear the way."

Hungry for new excitement, delighted at this sudden reprieve from
disappointment,  the crowd enthusiastically fell back and started
to open up.

Arthur was a little surprised to see  what  was  printed  on  the
boxes of important scientific equipment in the back of the taxi.
"Hang your coat over them," he muttered to Fenchurch as he heaved
them   out   to  her.  Hurriedly  he  manoeuvred  out  the  large
supermarket trolley that was also jammed against the  back  seat.
It  clattered  to  the ground, and together they loaded the boxes
into it.

"Clear a path, please," shouted Ford again.  "Everything's  under
proper scientific control."

"He said you'd pay," said the taxi-driver to Arthur, who dug  out
some  notes  and  paid him. There was the distant sound of police
sirens.

"Move along there," shouted Ford, "and no one will get hurt."

The crowd surged and closed behind  them  again,  as  frantically
they  pushed  and hauled the rattling supermarket trolley through
the rubble towards the ramp.

"It's all right," Ford continued to bellow. "There's  nothing  to
see, it's all over. None of this is actually happening."

"Clear the way, please," boomed a police megaphone from the  back
of the crowd. "There's been a break-in, clear the way."

"Breakthrough,"  yelled  Ford  in  competition.   "A   scientific
breakthrough!"

"This is the police! Clear the way!"

"Scientific equipment! Clear the way!"

"Police! Let us through!"

"Walkmen!" yelled Ford, and pulled half a  dozen  miniature  tape
players  from  his  pockets  and  tossed them into the crowd. The
resulting seconds of utter confusion  allowed  them  to  get  the
supermarket trolley to the edge of the ramp, and to haul it up on
to the lip of it.

"Hold tight,"  muttered  Ford,  and  released  a  button  on  his
Electronic  Thumb. Beneath them, the huge ramp juddered and began
slowly to heave its way upwards.

"Ok, kids," he said as the milling  crowd  dropped  away  beneath
them  and  they started to lurch their way along the tilting ramp
into the bowels of the ship, "looks like we're on our way."




Arthur Dent was irritated to be continually wakened by the  sound
of gunfire.

Being careful not to wake Fenchurch, who was  still  managing  to
sleep  fitfully,  he slid his way out of the maintenance hatchway
which they had fashioned into a  kind  of  bunk  for  themselves,
slung  himself  down  the access ladder and prowled the corridors
moodily.

They were  claustrophobic  and  ill-lit.  The  lighting  circuits
buzzed annoyingly.

This wasn't it, though.

He paused and leaned backwards as a flying power drill flew  past
him  down  the  dim  corridor  with a nasty screech, occasionally
clanging against the walls like a confused bee as it did so.

That wasn't it either.

He clambered through a bulkhead  door  and  found  himself  in  a
larger  corridor.  Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end so he
walked towards the other.

He came to an observation monitor let  into  the  wall  behind  a
plate of toughened but still badly scratched perspex.

"Would you turn it down please?" he said to Ford Prefect who  was
crouching in front of it in the middle of a pile of bits of video
equipment he'd taken from a shop window in Tottenham Court  Road,
having  first  hurled  a small brick through it, and also a nasty
heap of empty beer cans.

"Shhhh!" hissed Ford, and peered with manic concentration at  the
screen. He was watching The Magnificent Seven.

"Just a bit," said Arthur.

"No!" shouted Ford. "We're just getting to the good bit!  Listen,
I finally got it all sorted out, voltage levels, line conversion,
everything, and this is the good bit!"

With a sigh and a  headache,  Arthur  sat  down  beside  him  and
watched  the good bit. He listened to Ford's whoops and yells and
"yeehay!"s as placidly as he could.

"Ford," he said eventually, when it was all over,  and  Ford  was
hunting  through a stack of cassettes for the tape of Casablanca,
"how come, if ..."

"This is the big one," said Ford. "This is the one  I  came  back
for.  Do  you realize I never saw it all through? Always I missed
the end. I saw half of it again the night before the Vogons came.
When  they  blew  the place up I thought I'd never get to see it.
Hey, what happened with all that anyway?"

"Just life," said Arthur, and plucked a beer from a six-pack.

"Oh, that again," said Ford. "I thought  it  might  be  something
like  that. I prefer this stuff," he said as Rick's Bar flickered
on to the screen. "How come if what?"

"What?"

"You started to say, `how come if ...'"
"How come if you're so rude about the  Earth,  that  you  ...  oh
never mind, let's just watch the movie."

"Exactly," said Ford.




There remains little still to tell.

Beyond what used to be known  as  the  Limitless  Lightfields  of
Flanux   until  the  Grey  Binding  Fiefdoms  of  Saxaquine  were
discovered lying behind them, lie the Grey  Binding  Fiefdoms  of
Saxaquine. Within the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine lies the
star named Zarss, around which orbits the planet  Preliumtarn  in
which  is  the  land  of Sevorbeupstry, and it was to the land of
Sevorbeupstry that Arthur and Fenchurch came at  last,  a  little
tired by the journey.

And in the land of Sevorbeupstry, they  came  to  the  Great  Red
Plain  of  Rars,  which  was  bounded  on  the  South side by the
Quentulus Quazgar  Mountains,  on  the  further  side  of  which,
according  to the dying words of Prak, they would find in thirty-
foot-high letters of fire God's Final Message to His Creation.

According to Prak, if Arthur's memory saved him right, the  place
was  guarded  by the Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob, and so, after a
manner, it proved to be. He was a little man in a strange hat and
he sold them a ticket.

"Keep to the left, please," he said,  "keep  to  the  left,"  and
hurried on past them on a little scooter.

They realized they were not the first to pass that way,  for  the
path  that  led  around the left of the Great Plain was well-worn
and dotted with booths. At one they bought a box of fudge,  which
had  been  baked  in an oven in a cave in the mountain, which was
heated by the fire of the letters that formed God's Final Message
to  His  Creation.  At  another  they  bought some postcards. The
letters had been blurred with an airbrush, "so as  not  to  spoil
the Big Surprise!" it said on the reverse.

"Do you know what the message is?" they asked the wizened  little
lady in the booth.

"Oh yes," she piped cheerily, "oh yes!"

She waved them on.

Every twenty miles or so  there  was  a  little  stone  hut  with
showers and sanitary facilities, but the going was tough, and the
high sun baked down on the Great Red Plain,  and  the  Great  Red
Plain rippled in the heat.

"Is it possible," asked Arthur at one of the larger  booths,  "to
rent  one  of  those  little  scooters?  Like  the  one  Lajestic
Ventrawhatsit had."

"The scooters," said the little lady who was serving  at  an  ice
cream bar, "are not for the devout."

"Oh  well,  that's  easy  then,"  said  Fenchurch,   "we're   not
particularly devout. We're just interested."

"Then you must turn back now," said the little lady severely, and
when  they  demurred, sold them a couple of Final Message sunhats
and a photograph of themselves with their arms tight around  each
other on the Great Red Plain of Rars.

They drank a couple of sodas in the shade of the booth  and  then
trudged out into the sun again.

"We're running out of border cream," said Fenchurch after  a  few
more miles. "We can go to the next booth, or we can return to the
previous one which is nearer, but means we have  to  retrace  our
steps again."

They stared ahead at the distant black speck winking in the  heat
haze; they looked behind themselves. They elected to go on.

They then discovered that they were not only not the  first  ones
to make this journey, but that they were not the only ones making
it now.

Some way ahead of them an awkward low shape  was  heaving  itself
wretchedly  along  the  ground, stumbling painfully slowly, half-
limping, half-crawling.

It was moving so slowly that before  too  long  they  caught  the
creature  up  and could see that it was made of worn, scarred and
twisted metal.

It groaned at them as they approached it, collapsing in  the  hot
dry dust.

"So much time," it groaned, "oh so much time. And pain  as  well,
so much of that, and so much time to suffer it in too. One or the
other on its own I could probably manage. It's the  two  together
that really get me down. Oh hello, you again."

"Marvin?" said Arthur sharply, crouching down beside it. "Is that
you?"

"You were always one," groaned the aged husk of the  robot,  "for
the super-intelligent question, weren't you?"

"What is it?" whispered  Fenchurch  in  alarm,  crouching  behind
Arthur, and grasping on to his arm. "He's sort of an old friend,"
said Arthur. "I ..."

"Friend!" croaked the robot pathetically. The word died away in a
kind of crackle and flakes of rust fell out of its mouth. "You'll
have to excuse me while I try and remember what the  word  means.
My  memory  banks  are  not what they were you know, and any word
which falls into disuse for  a  few  zillion  years  has  to  get
shifted down into auxiliary memory back-up. Ah, here it comes."

The robot's battered head snapped up a bit as if in thought.
"Hmm," he said, "what a curious concept."

He thought a little longer.

"No," he said at last, "don't think I ever  came  across  one  of
those. Sorry, can't help you there."

He scraped a knee along pathetically in the dust, an  then  tried
to twist himself up on his misshapen elbows.

"Is there any last service you would like me to perform  for  you
perhaps?"  he asked in a kind of hollow rattle. "A piece of paper
that perhaps you would like me to pick up for you? Or  maybe  you
would like me," he continued, "to open a door?"

His head scratched round in its rusty neck bearings and seemed to
scan the distant horizon.

"Don't seem to be any doors around at present," he said, "but I'm
sure  that if we waited long enough, someone would build one. And
then," he said slowly twisting his  head  around  to  see  Arthur
again,  "I  could  open it for you. I'm quite used to waiting you
know."

"Arthur," hissed Fenchurch in his ear sharply, "you never told me
of this. What have you done to this poor creature?"

"Nothing," insisted Arthur sadly, "he's always like this ..."

"Ha!" snapped Marvin. "Ha!" he repeated. "What  do  you  know  of
always?  You say `always' to me, who, because of the silly little
errands your organic lifeforms keep on sending  me  through  time
on,  am  now  thirty-seven  times older than the Universe itself?
Pick your words with a little more care," he coughed, "and tact."

He rasped his way through a coughing fit and resumed.

"Leave me," he said, "go on ahead, leave me to struggle painfully
on  my  way.  My  time at last has nearly come. My race is nearly
run. I fully expect," he said,  feebly  waving  them  on  with  a
broken  finger, "to come in last. It would be fitting. Here I am,
brain the size ..."

Between them they picked him up despite his feeble  protests  and
insults.  The metal was so hot it nearly blistered their fingers,
but he weighed surprisingly little, and hung limply between their
arms.

They carried him with them along the path that ran along the left
of the Great Red Plain of Rars toward the encircling mountains of
Quentulus Quazgar.

Arthur attempted to explain  to  Fenchurch,  but  was  too  often
interrupted by Marvin's dolorous cybernetic ravings.

They tried to see if they could get him some spare parts  at  one
of the booths, but Marvin would have none of it.
"I'm all spare parts," he droned.

"Let me be!" he groaned.

"Every part of me," he moaned, "has been replaced at least  fifty
times  ... except ..." He seemed almost imperceptibly to brighten
for a moment. His head bobbed between them  with  the  effort  of
memory.  "Do  you  remember,  the first time you ever met me," he
said at  last  to  Arthur.  "I  had  been  given  the  intellect-
stretching  task  of  taking you up to the bridge? I mentioned to
you that I had this terrible pain in all the diodes down my  left
side?  That  I  had  asked for them to be replaced but they never
were?"

He left a longish pause before he continued. They carried him  on
between  them,  under  the  baking sun that hardly ever seemed to
move, let alone set.

"See if you can guess," said Marvin,  when  he  judged  that  the
pause  had  become  embarrassing  enough, "which parts of me were
never replaced? Go on, see if you can guess.

"Ouch," he added, "ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch."

At last they reached the last of  the  little  booths,  set  down
Marvin  between  them  and  rested in the shade. Fenchurch bought
some cufflinks for Russell, cufflinks that had set in them little
polished  pebbles  which  had  been  picked up from the Quentulus
Quazgar Mountains, directly underneath the  letters  of  fire  in
which was written God's Final Message to His Creation.

Arthur flipped through a little rack of devotional tracts on  the
counter, little meditations on the meaning of the Message.

"Ready?" he said to Fenchurch, who nodded.

They heaved up Marvin between them.

They rounded the foot of the  Quentulus  Quazgar  Mountains,  and
there  was the Message written in blazing letters along the crest
of the Mountain. There was a  little  observation  vantage  point
with  a  rail built along the top of a large rock facing it, from
which you could get a good view. It had  a  little  pay-telescope
for  looking  at the letters in detail, but no one would ever use
it because the letters burned with the divine brilliance  of  the
heavens  and  would,  if  seen through a telescope, have severely
damaged the retina and optic nerve.

They gazed at God's Final Message in wonderment, and were  slowly
and  ineffably  filled  with a great sense of peace, and of final
and complete understanding.

Fenchurch sighed. "Yes," she said, "that was it."

They had been staring at it for fully  ten  minutes  before  they
became aware that Marvin, hanging between their shoulders, was in
difficulties. The robot could no longer lift his  head,  had  not
read  the  message.  They lifted his head, but he complained that
his vision circuits had almost gone.
They found a coin and helped him to the telescope. He  complained
and  insulted  them,  but they helped him look at each individual
letter in turn, The first letter was a "w", the  second  an  "e".
Then  there was a gap. An "a" followed, then a "p", an "o" and an
"l".

Marvin paused for a rest.

After a few moments they resumed and let him  see  the  "o",  the
"g", the "i", the "s" and the "e".

The next two words were "for" and "the". The last one was a  long
one, and Marvin needed another rest before he could tackle it.

It started with an "i", then "n" then a "c". Next came an "o" and
an "n", followed by a "v", an "e", another "n" and an "i".

After a final pause, Marvin gathered his strength  for  the  last
stretch.

He read the "e", the "n", the "c" and at last the final "e",  and
staggered back into their arms.

"I think," he murmured at last, from deep  within  his  corroding
rattling thorax, "I feel good about it."

The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time
ever.

Luckily, there was a stall nearby where you could  rent  scooters
from guys with green wings.


{Epilogue:}

One of the greatest benefactors of all lifekind  was  a  man  who
couldn't keep his mind on the job in hand.

Brilliant?

Certainly.

One of the  foremost  genetic  engineers  of  his  or  any  other
generation, including a number he had designed himself?

Without a doubt.

The problem was that he was far too interested in things which he
shouldn't  be  interested in, at least, as people would tell him,
not now.

He was also, partly  because  of  this,  of  a  rather  irritable
disposition.

So when his world was threatened  by  terrible  invaders  from  a
distant  star, who were still a fair way off but travelling fast,
he, Blart Versenwald III (his  name  was  Blart  Versenwald  III,
which  is  not strictly relevant, but quite interesting because -
never mind, that was his name and we  can  talk  about  why  it's
interesting  later),  was  sent  into  guarded  seclusion  by the
masters of his race  with  instructions  to  design  a  breed  of
fanatical   superwarriors  to  resist  and  vanquish  the  feared
invaders, do it quickly and, they told him, "Concentrate!"

So he sat by a window  and  looked  out  at  a  summer  lawn  and
designed  and  designed and designed, but inevitably got a little
distracted  by  things,  and  by  the  time  the  invaders   were
practically  in  orbit  round them, had come up with a remarkable
new breed of super-fly that could, unaided, figure out how to fly
through  the  open  half  of a half-open window, and also an off-
switch   for   children.   Celebrations   of   these   remarkable
achievements  seemed doomed to be shortlived because disaster was
imminent as the alien ships were landing. But  astoundingly,  the
fearsome  invaders  who, like most warlike races were only on the
rampage because they couldn't cope  with  things  at  home,  were
stunned  by  Versenwald's  extraordinary breakthroughs, joined in
the celebrations and were instantly  prevailed  upon  to  sign  a
wide-ranging  series of trading agreements and set up a programme
of cultural exchanges. And, in an astonishing reversal of  normal
practice  in  the  conduct  of  such matters, everybody concerned
lived happily ever after.

There was a point to this story, but it has  temporarily  escaped
the chronicler's mind.

Anything that happens, happens. 
 Anything that, in happening, causes something else to  
 happen, causes something else to happen.  
 Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again,                       
 happens again. 

    It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though. 
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 because 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 any 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 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 arrived, 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' sleep, 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 even
arose. 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 this is a pity, because if anybody had known anything about
them, it is just possible that a most terrible catastrophe would
have been averted - or at least would have had to find a different
way to happen.
 Click, hum.
  
The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently
through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breath-
taking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background
of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one
dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.
  
On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia,
deeply dark and Silent.
  
Click, hum.
  
At least, almost everything.
  
Click, click, hum.
  
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
  
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
  
Hmmm.
  
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher
level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent
cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it
got was a hum.
  
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was
supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said
that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably
more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know
what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was
getting.
  
The higher level supervising program considered this and
didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what
exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program
said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something
that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which
usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error
look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted
the higher level supervising program to the problem .
  
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of
its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising
program was meant to be supervising.
  
It couldn't find the look-up table .
  
Odd.
  
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried
to look up the error message in its error message look-up table
and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds
to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its
sector function supervisor.
  
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It
called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few
millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some
for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the
ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none
of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level,
vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to
do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing,
were also missing.
  
Small modules of software - agents - surged through the
logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly
established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central
mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could
determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mis-
sion module itself seemed to be damaged.
  
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with.
Replace the central mission module. There was another one,
a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be
physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no
link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the
central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the
reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all
would be well.
  
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission
module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it,
to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
  
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and
protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authen-
ticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that
all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central
mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the
storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into
the void.
  
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that
was wrong.
  
Further investigation quickly established what it was that had
happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The
ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had
neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment
which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a
meteorite.
 The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned
out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that
there was a hole, and the supervisors which should have said that
the sensors weren't working properly weren't working properly
and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only
deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots
had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain, which would
have enabled it to see the hole, with them.
  
The ship tried to think intelligently about this, failed, and then
blanked out completely for a bit. It didn't realise it had blanked
out, of course, because it had blanked out. It was merely surprised
to see the stars jump. After the third time the stars jumped the
ship finally realised that it must be blanking out, and that it was
time to take some serious decisions.
  
It relaxed.
  
Then it realised it hadn't actually taken the serious decisions
yet and panicked. It blanked out again for a bit. When it awoke
again it sealed all the bulkheads around where it knew the unseen
hole must be.
  
It clearly hadn't got to its destination yet, it thought, fitfully,
but since it no longer had the faintest idea where its destina-
tion was or how to reach it, there seemed to be little point
in continuing. It consulted what tiny scraps of instructions it
could reconstruct from the tatters of its central mission mod-
ule.
  
`Your !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! year mission is to !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!,
!!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!, land !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! a safe distance !!!!! !!!!!
..... ..... ..... .... , land ..... ..... ..... 
monitor it. !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!...'
  
All of the rest was complete garbage.
  
Before it blanked out for good the ship would have to pass
on those instructions, such as they were, to its more primitive
subsidiary systems.
  
It must also revive all of its crew.
  
There was another problem. While the crew was in hibernation,
the minds of all of its members, their memories, their identities
and their understanding of what they had come to do, had all
been transferred into the ship's central mission module for safe
keeping. The crew would not have the faintest idea of who they
were or what they were doing there. Oh well.
  
Just before it blanked out for the final time, the ship realised
that its engines were beginning to give out too.
  
The ship and its revived and confused crew coasted on under
the control of its subsidiary automatic systems, which simply
looked to land wherever they could find to land and monitor
whatever they could find to monitor.
  
As far as finding something to land on was concerned, they
didn't do very well. The planet they found was desolately cold
and lonely, so achingly far from the sun that should warm it, that
it took all of the Envir-O-Form machinery and LifeSupport-O-
Systems they carried with them to render it, or at least enough
parts of it, habitable. There were better planets nearer in, but
the ship's Strateej-O-Mat was obviously locked into Lurk mode
and chose the most distant and unobtrusive planet and, further-
more, would not be gainsaid by anybody other than the ship's
Chief Strategic Officer. Since everybody on the ship had lost
their minds no one knew who the Chief Strategic Officer was
or, even if he could have been identified, how he was supposed
to go about gainsaying the ship's Strateej-O-Mat.
  
As far as finding something to monitor was concerned, though,
they hit solid gold.


                          % 2

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places
it's prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some
kind of a grip, whether it's the intoxicating seas of Santraginus
V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind
of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra where, they
say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in
the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of
it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.
  
It will even live in New York, though it's hard to know why.
In the winter time the temperature falls well below the legal
minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common
sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a
list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers,
common sense snuck in at number 79.
  
In the summer it's too darn hot. It's one thing to be the sort
of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do,
that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very
equable, but it's quite another to be the sort of animal that has
to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your
planet's orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin's
bubbling.
  
Spring is over-rated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York
will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they
actually knew the first thing about the pleasures of spring they
would know of at least five thousand nine hundred and eighty-
three better places to spend it than New York, and that's just
on the same latitude.
  
Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in
New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of
rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower
intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyway, so their opinion
can and should be discounted. When it's fall in New York, the air
smells as if someone's been frying goats in it, and if you are keen
to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head
in a building.
  
Tricia McMillan loved New York. She kept on telling herself
this over and over again. The Upper West Side. Yeah. Mid Town.
Hey, great retail. SoHo. The East Village. Clothes. Books. Sushi.
Italian. Delis. Yo. 
  
Movies. Yo also. Tricia had just been to see Woody Allen's
new movie which was all about the angst of being neurotic in New
York. He had made one or two other movies that had explored
the same theme, and Tricia wondered if he had ever considered
moving, but heard that he had set his face against the idea. So:
more movies, she guessed.
  
Tricia loved New York because loving New York was a good
career move. It was a good retail move, a good cuisine move,
not a good taxi move or a great quality of pavement move, but
definitely a career move that ranked amongst the highest and the
best. Tricia was a TV anchor person, and New York was where
most of the world's TV was anchored. Tricia's TV anchoring had
been done exclusively in Britain up to that point: regional news,
then breakfast news, early evening news. She would have been
called, if the language allowed, a rapidly rising anchor, but...
hey, this is television, what does it matter? She was a rapidly rising
anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound understand-
ing of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world
and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn't care.
Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you
happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else in
life becomes eerily easy.
  
Tricia had only ever missed one opportunity. These days it
didn't even make her tremble quite so much as it used to to
think about it. She guessed it was that bit of her that had gone
dead.
  
NBS needed a new anchor. Mo Minetti was leaving the
US/AM breakfast show to have a baby. She had been offered a
mind-bubbling amount of money to have it on the show, but she
had declined, unexpectedly, on grounds of personal privacy and
taste. Teams of NBS lawyers had sieved through her contract to
see if these constituted legitimate grounds, but in the end, reluc-
tantly, they had to let her go. This was, for them, particularly
galling because normally `reluctantly letting someone go' was an
expression that had its boot on quite another foot.
  
The word was out that maybe, just maybe, a British accent
would fit. The hair, the skin tone and the bridgework would have
to be up to American network standards, but there had been a
lot of British accents up there thanking their mothers for their
Oscars, a lot of British accents singing on Broadway, and some
unusually big audiences tuning in to British accents in wigs on
Masterpiece Theatre. British accents were telling jokes on David
Letterman and Jay Leno. Nobody understood the jokes but they
were really responding to the accents, so maybe it was time, just
maybe. A British accent on US/AM. Well, hell.
  
That was why Tricia was here. This was why loving New
York was a great career move.
  
It wasn't, of course, the stated reason. Her TV company
back in the UK would hardly have stumped up the air fare
and hotel bill for her to go job hunting in Manhattan. Since
she was chasing something like ten times her present salary, they
might have felt that she could have forked out her own expenses,
but she'd found a story, found a pretext, kept very quiet about
anything ulterior, and they'd stumped up for the trip. A business
class ticket, of course, but her face was known and she'd smiled
herself an upgrade. The right moves had got her a nice room at
the Brentwood and here she was, wondering what to do next.
  
The word on the street was one thing, making contact was
another. She had a couple of names, a couple of numbers, but all
it took was being put on indeterminate hold a couple of times and
she was back at square one. She'd put out feelers, left messages,
but so far none had been returned. The actual job she had come
to do she had done in a morning; the imagined job she was after
was only shimmering tantalisingly on an unreachable horizon.
  
Shit.
  
She caught a cab from the movie theatre back to the Brent-
wood. The cab couldn't get close to the kerb because a big stretch
limo was hogging all the available space and she had to squeeze
her way past it. She walked out of the fetid, goat-frying air and
into the blessed cool of the lobby. The fine cotton of her blouse
was sticking like grime to her skin. Her hair felt as if she'd bought
it at a fairground on a stick. At the front desk she asked if there
were any messages, grimly expecting none. There was one.
  
Oh...
  
Good.
  
It had worked. She had gone out to the movie specifically
in order to make the phone ring. She couldn't bear sitting in
a hotel room waiting.
  
She wondered. Should she open the message down here?
Her clothes were itching and she longed to take them all off
and just lie on the bed. She had turned the air conditioning way
down to its bottom temperature setting, way up to its top fan
setting. What she wanted more than anything else in the world
at the moment was goose pimples. Then a hot shower, then a
cool one, then lying on a towel, on the bed again, drying in the
air conditioning. Then reading the message. Maybe more goose
pimples. Maybe all sorts of things.
  
No. What she wanted more than anything else in the world
was a job in American television at ten times her current salary.
More than anything else in the world. In the world. What she
wanted more than anything else at all was no longer a live issue.
  
She sat on a chair in the lobby, under a kentia palm, and
opened the little cellophane-windowed envelope.
  
`Please call,' it said. `Not happy,' and gave a number. The
name was Gail Andrews.
  
Gail Andrews.
  
It wasn't a name she was expecting. It caught her unawares.
She recognised it, but couldn't immediately say why. Was she
Andy Martin's secretary? Hilary Bass's assistant? Martin and
Bass were the two major contact calls she had made, or tried
to make, at NBS. And what did `Not happy' mean?
  
`Not happy?'
  
She was completely bewildered. Was this Woody Allen trying
to contact her under an assumed name? It was a 212 area code
number. So it was someone in New York. Who was not happy.
Well, that narrowed it down a bit, didn't it?
  
She went back to the receptionist at the desk.
  
`I have a problem with this message you just gave me,' she
said. `Someone I don't know has tried to call me and says she's
not happy.'
  
The receptionist peered at the note with a frown.
  
`Do you know this person?' he said.
  
`No,' Tricia said.
  `
Hmmm,' said the receptionist. `Sounds like she's not happy
about something.'
  
`Yes,' said Tricia.
  
`Looks like there's a name here,' said the receptionist. `Gail
Andrews. Do you know anybody of that name?'
  `
`No,' said Tricia.
  
`Any idea what she's unhappy about?'
  
`No,' said Tricia.
  
`Have you called the number? There's a number here.'
  
`No,' said Tricia, `you only just gave me the note. I'm just
trying to get some more information before I ring back. Perhaps
I could talk to the person who took the call?'
  
`Hmmm,' said the receptionist, scrutinising the note carefully.
`I don't think we have anybody called Gail Andrews here.'
  
`No, I realise that,' said Tricia. `I just -'
  
`I'm Gail Andrews.'
  
The voice came from behind Tricia. She turned round.
  
`I'm sorry?'
  
`I'm Gail Andrews. You interviewed me this morning.'
  
`Oh. Oh good heavens yes,' said Tricia, slightly flustered.
  
`I Left the message for you a few hours ago. I hadn't heard
so I came by. I didn't want to miss you.'
  
`Oh. No. Of course,' said Tricia, trying hard to get up to speed.
  
`I don't know about this,' said the receptionist, for whom
speed was not an issue. `Would you like me to try this number
for you now?'
  
`No, that'll be fine, thanks,' said Tricia. `I can handle it now.'
  
`I can call this room number here for you if that'll help,'
said the receptionist, peering at the note again.
  
`No, that won't be necessary, thanks,' said Tricia. `That's
my own room number. I'm the one the message was for. I
think we've sorted this out now.'
  
`You have a nice day now,' said the receptionist.
  
Tricia didn't particularly want to have a nice day. She was busy.
  
She also didn't want to talk to Gail Andrews. She had a very
strict cut-off point as far as fraternising with the Christians was
concerned. Her colleagues called her interview subjects Chris-
tians and would often cross themselves when they saw one
walking innocently into the studio to face Tricia, particularly
if Tricia was smiling warmly and showing her teeth.
  
She turned and smiled frostily, wondering what to do.
  
Gail Andrews was a well groomed woman in her mid-forties.
Her clothes fell within the boundaries defined by expensive good
taste, but were definitely huddled up at the floatier end of those
boundaries. She was an astrologer - a famous and, if rumour were
true, influential astrologer, having allegedly influenced a number
of decisions made by the late President Hudson, including every-
thing from which flavour of cream whip to have on which day of
the week, to whether or not to bomb Damascus.
  
Tricia had savaged her more than somewhat. Not on the
grounds of whether or not the stories about the President were
true, that was old hat now. At the time Ms Andrews had emphati-
cally denied advising President Hudson on anything other than
personal, spiritual or dietary matters, which did not, apparently
include the bombing of Damascus. (`NOTHING PERSONAL,
DAMASCUS!' the tabloids had hooted at the time.)
  
No, this was a neat topical little angle that Tricia had come
up with about the whole issue of astrology itself. Ms Andrews
had not been entirely ready for it. Tricia, on the other hand,
was not entirely ready for a re-match in the hotel lobby. What
to do?
  
`I can wait for you in the bar, if you need a few minutes,'
said Gail Andrews. `But I would like to talk to you, and I'm
leaving the city tonight.'
  
She seemed to be slightly anxious about something rather
than aggrieved or irate.
  
`OK,' said Tricia. `Give me ten minutes.'
  
She went up to her room. Apart from anything else, she
had so little faith in the ability of the guy on the message desk
at reception to deal with anything as complicated as a message
that she wanted to be doubly certain that there wasn't a note
under the door. It wouldn't be the first time that messages at
the desk and messages under the door had been completely at
odds with each other.
  
There wasn't one.
  
The message light on the phone was flashing though.
  
She hit the message button and got the hotel operator.
  
`You have a message from Gary Andress,' said the operator.
  
`Yes?' said Tricia. An unfamiliar name. `What does it say.'
  
`Not hippy,' said the operator.
  
`Not what?' said Tricia.
  `
`Hippy. What it says. Guy says he's not a hippy. I guess
he wanted you to know that. You want the number?'
  
As she started to dictate the number Tricia suddenly realised
that this was just a garbled version of the message she had already
had.
  
`OK, OK,' she said. `Are there any other messages for me?'
  
`Room number?'
  
Tricia couldn't work out why the operator should suddenly
ask for her number this late in the conversation, but gave it
to her anyway.
  
`Name?'
  
`McMillan, Tricia McMillan.' Tricia spelt it, patiently.
  
`Not Mr MacManus?'
  
`No.'
  
`No more messages for you.' Click.
 
Tricia sighed and dialled again. This time she gave her name
and room number all over again, up front. The operator showed
not the slightest glimmer of recognition that they had been speak-
ing less than ten seconds ago.
  
`I'm going to be in the bar,' Tricia explained. `In the bar.
If a phone call comes through for me, please would you put
it through to me in the bar?'
  
`Name?'
  
They went through it all a couple more times till Tricia was
certain that everything that possibly could be clear was as clear
as it possibly could be.
  
She showered, put on fresh clothes and retouched her makeup
with the speed of a professional, and, looking at her bed with a
sigh, left the room again.
  
She had half a mind just to sneak off and hide.
  
No. Not really.
  
She had a look at herself in the mirror in the elevator lobby
while she was waiting. She looked cool and in charge, and if she
could fool herself she could fool anybody.
  
She was just going to have to tough it out with Gail Andrews.
OK, she had given her a hard time. Sorry but that's the game
we're all in - that sort of thing. Ms Andrews had agreed to do
the interview because she had a new book out and TV exposure
was free publicity. But there's no such thing as a free launch.
No, she edited that line out again.
  
What had happened was this:
  
Last week astronomers had announced that they had at last
discovered a tenth planet, out beyond the orbit of Pluto. They
had been searching for it for years, guided by certain orbital
anomalies in the outer planets, and now they'd found it and they
were all terribly pleased, and everyone was terribly happy for
them and so on. The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly
nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer's parrot - there was
some tediously heart-warming story attached to this - and that
was all very wonderful and lovely.
  
Tricia had followed the story with, for various reasons, con-
siderable interest.
  
Then, while she had been casting around for a good excuse to
go to New York at her TV company's expense she had happened
to notice a press release about Gail Andrews, and her new book,
You and Your Planets.
  
Gail Andrews was not exactly a household name, but the
moment you mentioned President Hudson, cream whips and the
amputation of Damascus (the world had moved on from surgi-
cal strikes. The official term had in fact been `Damascectomy',
meaning the `taking out' of Damascus), everyone remembered
who you meant.
  
Tricia saw an angle here which she quickly sold to her producer.
  
Surely the notion that great lumps of rock whirling in space
knew something about your day that you didn't must take a bit
of a knock from the fact that there was suddenly a new lump of
rock out there that nobody had known about before.
  
That must throw a few calculations out, mustn't it?
  
What about all those star charts and planetary motions and
so? We all knew (apparently) what happened when Neptune
was in Virgo, and so on, but what about when Rupert was
rising? Wouldn't the whole of astrology have to be rethought?
Wouldn't now perhaps be a good time to own up that it was
all just a load of hogwash and instead take up pig-farming, the
principles of which were founded on some kind of rational basis?
If we'd known about Rupert three years ago, might President
Hudson have been eating the boysenberry flavour on Thursday
rather than Friday? Might Damascus still be standing? That sort
of thing.
  
Gail Andrews had taken it all reasonably well. She was
just starting to recover from the initial onslaught, when she
made the rather serious mistake of trying to shake Tricia off by
talking smoothly about diurnal arcs, right ascensions and some
of the more abstruse areas of three-dimensional trigonometry.
  
To her shock she discovered that everything she delivered to
Tricia came right back at her with more spin on it than she could
cope with. Nobody had warned Gail that being a TV bimbo was,
for Tricia, her second stab at a role in life. Behind her Chanel lip
gloss, her coupe sauvage and her crystal blue contact lenses lay a
brain that had acquired for itself, in an earlier, abandoned phase
of her life, a first class degree in mathematics and a doctorate in
astrophysics.
 As she was getting into the elevator Tricia, slightly preoccupied,
realised she had left her bag in her room and wondered whether
to duck back out and get it. No. It was probably safer where it
was and there wasn't anything she particularly needed in it. She
let the door close behind her.
  
Besides, she told herself, taking a deep breath, if life had
taught her anything it was this:
  
Never go back for your bag.
  
As the elevator went down she stared up at the ceiling in
a rather intent way. Anyone who didn't know Tricia McMillan
better would have said that that was exactly the way people
sometimes stared upwards when they were trying to hold back
tears. She must have been staring at the tiny security video camera
mounted up in the corner.
 She marched rather briskly out of the elevator a minute later,
and went up to the reception desk again.
  
`Now, I'm going to write this out,' she said, `because I
don't want anything to go wrong.'
  
She wrote her name in large letters on a piece of paper,
then her room number, then `IN THE BAR' and gave it to
the receptionist, who looked at it.
  
`That's in case there's a message for me. OK?'
  
The receptionist continued to look at it.
  
`You want me to see if she's in her room?' he said.
 Two minutes later, Tricia swivelled into the bar seat next to
Gail Andrews, who was sitting in front of a glass of white wine.
  
`You struck me as the sort of person who preferred to sit
up at the bar rather than demurely at a table,' she said.
  
This was true, and caught Tricia a little by surprise.
  
`Vodka?' said Gail.
  `
`Yes,' said Tricia, suspiciously. She just stopped herself asking,
`How did you know?' but Gail answered anyway.
  
`I asked the barman,' she said, with a kindly smile.
  
The barman had her vodka ready for her and slid it charmingly
across the glossy mahogany.
  
`Thank you,' said Tricia, stirring it sharply.
  
She didn't know quite what to make out of all this sudden
niceness and was determined not to be wrong-footed by it. People
in New York were not nice to each other without reason.
  
`Ms Andrews,' she said, firmly, `I'm sorry that you're not
happy. I know you probably feel I was a bit rough with you this
morning, but astrology is, after all, just popular entertainment,
which is fine. It's part of showbiz and it's a part that you have
done well out of and good luck to you. It's fun. It's not a science
though, and it shouldn't be mistaken for one. I think that's some-
thing we both managed to demonstrate very successfully together
this morning, while at the same time generating some popular
entertainment, which is what we both do for a living. I'm sorry
if you have a problem with that.'
  
`I'm perfectly happy,' said Gail Andrews.
  
`Oh,' said Tricia, not quite certain what to make of this.
`It said in your message that you were not happy.'
  
`No,' said Gail Andrews. `I said in my message that I thought
you were not happy, and I was just wondering why.'
  
Tricia felt as if she had been kicked in the back of the
head. She blinked.
  
`What?' she said quietly.
  
`To do with the stars. You seemed very angry and unhappy
about something to do with stars and planets when we were
having our discussion, and it's been bothering me, which is why
I came to see if you were all right.'
  
Tricia stared at her. `Ms Andrews - ' she started, and then
realised that the way she had said it sounded exactly angry and
unhappy and rather undermined the protest she had been trying
to make.
  
`Please call me Gail, if that's OK.'
  
Tricia just looked bewildered.
  
`I know that astrology isn't a science,' said Gail. `Of course
it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or,
what's that strange thing you British play?'
  
`Er, cricket? Self-loathing?'
  
`Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there.
They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of them-
selves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of
processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of
stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about
stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for
all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about
a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge.
The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are,
the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a
piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets
you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above
it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not
important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So
you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do
with people thinking about people.
  
`So when you got so, I don't know, so emotionally focused
on stars and planets this morning, I began to think, she's not
angry about astrology, she really is angry and unhappy about
actual stars and planets. People usually only get that unhappy
and angry when they've lost something. That's all I could think
and I couldn't make any more sense of it than that. So I came
to see if you were OK.'
  
Tricia was stunned.
  
One part of her brain had already got started on all sorts
of stuff. It was busy constructing all sorts of rebuttals to do
with how ridiculous newspaper horoscopes were and the sort of
statistical tricks they played on people. But gradually it petered
out, because it realised that the rest of her brain wasn't listening.
She had been completely stunned.
  
She had just been told, by a total stranger, something she'd
kept completely secret for seventeen years.
  
She turned to look at Gail.
  
`I...'
  
She stopped.
  
A tiny security camera up behind the bar had turned to
follow her movement. This completely flummoxed her. Most
people would not have noticed it. It was not designed to be
noticed. It was not designed to suggest that nowadays even an
expensive and elegant hotel in New York couldn't be sure that
its clientele wasn't suddenly going to pull a gun or not wear a tie.
But carefully hidden though it was behind the vodka, it couldn't
deceive the finely honed instinct of a TV anchor person, which
was to know exactly when a camera was turning to look at her.
  
`Is something wrong?' asked Gail.
  
`No, I... I have to say that you've rather astonished me,'
said Tricia. She decided to ignore the security camera. It was
just her imagination playing tricks with her because she had
television so much on her mind today. It wasn't the first time it
had happened. A traffic monitoring camera, she was convinced,
had swung round to follow her as she walked past it, and a secu-
rity camera in Bloomingdales had seemed to make a particular
point of watching her trying on hats. She was obviously going
dotty. She had even imagined that a bird in Central Park had
been peering at her rather intently.
  
She decided to put it out of her mind and took a sip of
her vodka. Someone was walking round the bar asking people
if they were Mr MacManus.
  
`OK,' she said, suddenly blurting it out. `I don't know how
you worked it out, but...'
  
`I didn't work it out, as you put it. I just listened to what
you were saying.'
  
`What I lost, I think, was a whole other life.'
  
`Everybody does that. Every moment of every day. Every
single decision we make, every breath we draw, opens some
doors and closes many others. Most of them we don't notice.
Some we do. Sounds like you noticed one.'
  
`Oh yes, I noticed,' said Tricia. `All right. Here it is. It's
very simple. Many years ago I met a guy at a party. He said he
was from another planet and did I want to go along with him. I
said, yes, OK. It was that kind of party. I said to him to wait
while I went to get my bag and then I'd be happy to go off to
another planet with him. He said I wouldn't need my bag. I said
he obviously came from a very backward planet or he'd know
that a woman always needed to take her bag with her. He got a
bit impatient, but I wasn't gong to be a complete pushover just
because he said he was from another planet.
  
`I went upstairs. Took me a while to find my bag, and then
there was someone else in the bathroom. Came down and he
was gone.'
  
Tricia paused.
  
`And...?' said Gail.
  
`The garden door was open. I went outside. There were
lights. Some kind of gleaming thing. I was just in time to see
it rise up into the sky, shoot silently up through the clouds and
disappear. That was it. End of story. End of one life, beginning
of another. But hardly a moment of this life goes by that I don't
wonder about some other me. A me that didn't go back for her
bag. I feel like she's out there somewhere and I'm walking in
her shadow.'
  
A member of the hotel staff was now going round the bar
asking people if they were Mr Miller. Nobody was.
  
`You really think this... person was from another planet?'
asked Gail.
  
`Oh, certainly. There was the spacecraft. Oh, and also he
had two heads.'
  
`Two? Didn't anybody else notice?'
  
`It was a fancy dress party.'
  
`I see...'
  
`And he had a bird cage over it, of course. With a cloth over
the cage. Pretended he had a parrot. He tapped on the cage and
it did a lot of stupid ``Pretty Polly'' stuff and squawking and so
on. Then he pulled the cloth back for a moment and roared with
laughter. There was another head in there, laughing along with
him. It was a worrying moment I can tell you.'
  
`I think you probably did the right thing, dear, don't you?'
said Gail.
  
`No,' said Tricia. `No I don't. And I couldn't carry on doing
what I was doing either. I was an astrophysicist, you see. You
can't be an astrophysicist properly if you've actually met someone
from another planet who's got a second head that pretends to be
a parrot. You just can't do it. I couldn't at least.'
  
`I can see it would be hard. And that's probably why you
tend to be a little hard on other people who talk what sounds
like complete nonsense.'
  
`Yes,' said Tricia. `I expect you're right. I'm sorry.'
  
`That's OK.'
  
`You're the first person I've ever told this, by the way.'
  
`I wondered. You married?'
  
`Er, no. So hard to tell these days isn't it? But you're right
to ask because that was probably the reason. I came very close
a few times, mostly because I wanted to have a kid. But every guy
ended up asking why I was constantly looking over his shoulder.
What do you tell someone? At one point I even thought I might
just go to a sperm bank and take pot luck. Have somebody's child
at random.'
  
`You can't seriously do that, can you?'
  
Tricia laughed. `Probably not. I never quite went and found
out for real. Never quite did it. Story of my life. Never quite
did the real thing. That's why I'm in television I guess. Nothing
is real.'
  
`Excuse me lady, your name Tricia McMillan?'
  
Tricia looked round in surprise. There was a man standing
there in a chauffeur's hat.
  
`Yes,' she said, instantly pulling herself back together again.
  
`Lady, I been looking for you for about an hour. Hotel said
they didn't have anybody of that name, but I checked back with
Mr Martin's office and they said that this was definitely where
you staying. So I ask again, they still say they never heard of
you, so I get them to page you anyway and they can't find you.
In the end I get the office to FAX a picture of you through to
the car and have a look myself.'
  
He looked at his watch.
  
`May be a bit late now, but do you want to go anyway?'
  
Tricia was stunned.
  
`Mr Martin? You mean Andy Martin at NBS?'
  
`That's correct, lady. Screen test for US/AM.'
  
Tricia shot up out of her seat. She couldn't even bear to
think of all the messages she'd heard for Mr MacManus and
Mr Miller.
  
`Only we have to hurry,' said the chauffeur. `As I heard it Mr
Martin thinks it might be worth trying a British accent. His boss
at the network is dead against the idea. That's Mr Zwingler, and
I happen to know he's flying out to the coast this evening because
I'm the one has to pick him up and take him to the airport.'
  
`OK,' said Tricia, `I'm ready. Let's go.'
  
`OK, lady. It's the big limo out the front.'
  
Tricia turned back to Gail. `I'm sorry,' she said.
  
`Go! Go!' said Gail. `And good luck. I've enjoyed meeting
you.'
  
Tricia made to reach for her bag for some cash.
  
`Damn,' she said. She'd left it upstairs.
  
`Drinks are on me,' insisted Gail. `Really. It's been very
interesting.'
  
Tricia sighed.
  
`Look, I'm really sorry about this morning and...'
  
`Don't say another word. I'm fine. It's only astrology. It's
harmless. It's not the end of the world.'
  
`Thanks.' On an impulse Tricia gave her a hug.
  
`You got everything?' said the chauffeur. `You don't want
to pick up your bag or anything?'
  
`If there's one thing that life's taught me,' said Tricia, `it's
never go back for your bag.'
 Just a little over an hour later, Tricia sat on one of the pair of
beds in her hotel room. For a few minutes she didn't move. She
just stared at her bag, which was sitting innocently on top of the
other bed.
  
In her hand was a note from Gail Andrews, saying, `Don't
be too disappointed. Do ring if you want to talk about it. If I
were you I'd stay in at home tomorrow night. Get some rest.
But don't mind me, and don't worry. It's only astrology. It's not
the end of the world. Gail.'
  
The chauffeur had been dead right. In fact the chauffeur
seemed to know more about what was going on inside NBS than
any other single person she had encountered in the organisation.
Martin had been keen, Zwingler had not. She had had her one
shot at proving Martin right and she had blown it.
  
Oh well. Oh well, oh well, oh well.
  
Time to go home. Time to phone the airline and see if
she could still get the red-eye back to Heathrow. tonight. She
reached for the big phone directory.
  
Oh. First things first.
  
She put down the directory again, picked up her handbag,
and took it through to the bathroom. She put it down and took
out the small plastic case which held her contact lenses, without
which she had been unable properly to read either the script or
the autocue.
  
As she dabbed each tiny plastic cup into her eyes she reflected
that if there was one thing life had taught her it was that there
are times when you do not go back for your bag and other times
when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the
two types of occasion.


                          % 3

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has, in what we laughingly
call the past, had a great deal to say on the subject of parallel
universes. Very little of this is, however, at all comprehensible
to anyone below the level of Advanced God, and since it is
now well-established that all known gods came into existence
a good three millionths of a second after the Universe began
rather than, as they usually claimed, the previous week, they
already have a great deal of explaining to do as it is, and are
therefore not available for comment on matters of deep physics
at this time.
  
One encouraging thing the Guide does have to say on the
subject of parallel universes is that you don't stand the remotest
chance of understanding it. You can therefore say `What?' and
`Eh?' and even go cross-eyed and start to blither if you like
without any fear of making a fool of yourself.
  
The first thing to realise about parallel universes, the Guide
says, is that they are not parallel.
  
It is also important to realise that they are not, strictly speaking,
universes either, but it is easiest if you try and realise that a little
later, after you've realised that everything you've realised up to
that moment is not true.
  
The reason they are not universes is that any given universe
is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at
what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of
General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash
doesn't actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the
different ways there would be of looking at it if it did.
  
The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the
sea is not parallel. It doesn't mean anything. You can slice the
Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will
generally come up with something that someone will call home.
  
Please feel free to blither now.
 The Earth with which we are here concerned, because of its
particular orientation in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash,
was hit by a neutrino that other Earths were not.
  
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.
  
`Oh yes,' said Eric. `They come down here, land on your lawn,
and then buzz off again, sometimes with your cat. Mrs Williams
at the Post Office, her cat - you know the ginger. one? - it got
abducted by space aliens. Course, they brought it back the next
day but it were in a very odd mood. Kept prowling around all
morning, and then falling asleep in the afternoon. Used to be
the other way round, is the point. Sleep in the morning, prowl in
the afternoon. Jet lag, you see, from being in an interplanetary
craft.'
  
`I see,' said Tricia.
  
`They dyed it tabby, too, she says. These marks are exactly
the sort of marks that their landing pods would probably make.'
  
`You don't think it's the lawn mower?' asked Tricia.
  
`If the marks were more round, I'd say, but these are just
off-round, you see. Altogether more alien in shape.'
  
`It's just that you mentioned the lawn mower was playing
up and needed fixing or it might start gouging holes in the
lawn.'
  
`I did say that, Miss Tricia, and I stand by what I said.
I'm not saying it's not the lawn mower for definite, I'm just
saying what seems to me more likely given the shapes of the
holes. They come in over these trees, you see, in their landing
pods...'
  
`Eric...,' said Tricia, patiently.

`Tell you what, though, Miss Tricia,' said Eric, `I will take a
look at the mower, like I meant to last week, and leave you to
get on with whatever you' re wanting to.'
  
`Thank you, Eric,' said Tricia. `I'm going to bed now, in
fact. Help yourself to anything you want in the kitchen.'
  
`Thank you, Miss Tricia, and good luck to you,' said Eric.
He bent over and picked something from the lawn.
  
`There,' he said. `Three-leaf clover. Good luck you see.'
  
He peered at it closely to check that it was a real three-leaf
clover and not just a regular four-leaf one that one of the leaves
had fallen off. `If I were you, though, I'd watch for signs of alien
activity in the area.' He scanned the horizon keenly. `Particularly
from over there in the Henley direction.'
  
`Thank you, Eric,' said Tricia again. `I will.'
  
She went to bed and dreamt fitfully of parrots and other birds.
In the afternoon she got up and prowled around restlessly, not
certain what to do with the rest of the day, or indeed the rest of
her life. She spent at least an hour dithering, trying to make up
her mind whether to head up into town and go to Stavro's for the
evening. This was the currently fashionable spot for high-flying
media people, and seeing a few friends there might help her ease
herself back into the swing of things. She decided at last she would
go. It was good. It was fun there. She was very fond of Stavro
himself, who was a Greek with a German father - a fairly odd
combination. Tricia had been to the Alpha a couple of nights
earlier, which was Stavro's original club in New York, now run
by his brother Karl, who thought of himself as a German with a
Greek mother. Stavro would be very happy to be told that Karl
was making a bit of a pig's ear of running the New York club,
so Tricia would go and make him happy. There was little love
lost between Stavro and Karl Mueller.
  
OK. That's what she would do.
  
She then spent another hour dithering about what to wear.
At last she settled on a smart little black dress she'd got in New
York. She phoned a friend to see who was likely to be at the
club that evening, and was told that it was closed this evening
for a private wedding party.
  
She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you
actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from
the supermarket. You get one of those trolleys which simply will
not go in the direction you push it and end up just having to buy
completely different stuff. What do you do with it? What do you
do with the recipe? She didn't know.
  
Anyway, that night an alien spacecraft landed on her lawn.


                          % 5

She watched it coming in from over the Henley direction with
mild curiosity at first, wondering what those lights were. Living,
as she did, not a million miles from Heathrow, she was used to
seeing lights in the sky. Not usually so late in the evening, or so
low, though, which was why she was mildly curious.
  
When whatever it was began to come closer and closer her
curiosity began to turn to bemusement.
  
`Hmmm,' she thought, which was about as far as she could get
with thinking. She was still feeling dopey and jet-lagged and the
messages that one part of her brain was busy sending to another
were not necessarily arriving on time or the right way up. She left
the kitchen where she'd been fixing herself a coffee and went to
open the back door which led out to the garden. She took a deep
breath of cool evening air, stepped outside and looked up.
  
There was something roughly the size of a large camper
van parked about a hundred feet above her lawn.
  
It was really there. Hanging there. Almost silent.
  
Something moved deep inside her.
  
Her arms dropped slowly down to her side. She didn't notice
the scalding coffee slopping over her foot. She was hardly
breathing as slowly, inch by inch, foot by foot, the craft came
downwards. Its lights were playing softly over the ground as if
probing and feeling it. They played over her.
  
It seemed beyond all hope that she should be given her
chance again. Had he found her? Had he come back?
The craft dropped down and down until at last it had settled
quietly on her lawn. It didn't look exactly like the one she had
seen departing all those years ago, she thought, but flashing lights
in the night sky are hard to resolve into clear shapes.
  
Silence.
  
Then a click and a hum.
  
Then another click and another hum. Click hum, click hum.
  
A doorway slid open, spilling light towards her across the
lawn.
  
She waited, tingling.
  
A figure stood silhouetted in the light, then another, and
another.
  
Wide eyes blinked slowly at her. Hands were slowly raised
in greeting.
  
`McMillan?' a voice said at last, a strange, thin voice that
managed the syllables with difficulty. `Tricia McMillan. Ms Tricia
McMillan?'
  
`Yes,' said Tricia, almost soundlessly.
  
`We have been monitoring you.'
  
`M... monitoring? Me?'
  
`Yes.'
  
They looked at her for a while, their large eyes moving
up and down her very slowly.
  
`You look smaller in real life,' one said at last.
  
`What?' said Tricia.
  
`Yes.'
  
`I... I don't understand,' said Tricia. She hadn't expected any
of this, of course, but even for something she hadn't expected to
begin with it wasn't going the way she expected. At last she said,
  
`Are you... are you from... Zaphod?'
  
This question seemed to cause a little consternation among the
three figures. They conferred with each other in some skittering
language of their own and then turned back to her.
  
`We don't think so. Not as far as we know,' said one.
  
`Where is Zaphod?' said another, looking up into the night sky.
  
`I... I don't know, said Tricia, helplessly.
  
`Is it far from here? Which direction? We don't know.'
  
Tricia realised with a sinking heart that they had no idea
who she was talking about. Or even what she was talking about.
And she had no idea what they were talking about. She put her
hopes tightly away again and snapped her brain back into gear.
There was no point in being disappointed. She had to wake up
to the fact that she had here the journalistic scoop of the cen-
tury. What should she do? Go back into the house for a video
camera? Wouldn't they just be gone when she got back? She
was thoroughly confused as to strategy. Keep'em talking, she
thought. Figure it out later.
  
`You've been monitoring... me?'
  
`All of you. Everything on your planet. TV. Radio. Tele-
communications. Computers. Video circuitry. Warehouses.'
  
`What?'
  
`Car parks. Everything. We monitor everything.'
  
Tricia stared at them.
  
`That must be very boring, isn't it?' she blurted out.
  
`Yes.'
  
`So why...'
  
`Except...'
  
`Yes? Except what?'
  
`Game shows. We quite like game shows.'
  
There was a terribly long silence as Tricia looked at the
aliens and the aliens looked at her.
  
`There's something I would just like to get from indoors,'
said Tricia very deliberately. `Tell you what. Would you, or
one of you, like to come inside with me and have a look?'
  
`Very much,' they all said, enthusiastically.
 All three of them stood, slightly awkwardly in her sitting room,
as she hurried around picking up a video camera, a 35mm camera,
a tape recorder, every recording medium she could grab hold of.
They were all thin and, under domestic lighting conditions, a sort
of dim purplish green.
  
`I really won't be a second, guys,' Tricia said, as she rummaged
through some drawers for spare tapes and films.
  
The aliens were looking at the shelves that held her CDs
and her old records. One of them nudged one of the others
very slightly.
  
`Look,' he said. `Elvis.'
  
Tricia stopped, and stared at them all over again.
  
`You like Elvis?' she said.
  
`Yes,' they said.
  
`Elvis Presley?'
  
`Yes.'
  
She shook her head in bewilderment as she tried to stuff
a new tape into her video camera.
  
`Some of your people,' said one of her visitors, hesitantly,
`think that Elvis has been kidnapped by space aliens.'
  
`What?' said Tricia. `Has he?'
  
`It is possible.'
  
`Are you telling me that you have kidnapped Elvis?' gasped
Tricia. She was trying to keep cool enough not to foul up her
equipment, but this was all almost too much for her.
  
`No. Not us,' said her guests. `Aliens. It is a very interesting
possibility. We talk of it often.'
  
`I must get this down,' Tricia muttered to herself. She checked
her video was properly loaded and working now. She pointed the
camera at them. She didn't put it up to her eye because she didn't
want to freak them out. But she was sufficiently experienced to
be able to shoot accurately from the hip.
  
`OK,' she said. `Now tell me slowly and carefully who you
are. You first,' she said to the one on the left. `What's your
name?'
  
`I don't know.'
  
`You don't know.'
  
`No.'
  
`I see,' said Tricia. `And what about you other two?'
  
`We don't know.'
  
`Good. OK. Perhaps you can tell me where you are from?'
  
They shook their heads.
  
`You don't know where you're from?'
  
They shook their heads again.
  
`So,' said Tricia. `What are you... er...'
  
She was floundering but, being a professional, kept the camera
steady while she did it.
  
`We are on a mission,' said one of the aliens.
  
`A mission? A mission to do what?'
  
`We do not know.'
  
Still she kept the camera steady.
  
`So what are you doing here on Earth, then?'
  
`We have come to fetch you.'
  
Rock steady, rock steady. Could have been on a tripod. She
wondered if she should be using a tripod, in fact. She wondered
that because it gave her a moment or two to digest what they had
just said. No, she thought, hand-held gave her more flexibility.
She also thought, help, what am I going to do?
  
`Why,' she asked, calmly, `have you come to fetch me?'
  
`Because we have lost our minds.'
  
`Excuse me,' said Tricia, `I'm going to have to get a tripod.'
  
They seemed happy enough to stand there doing nothing
while Tricia quickly found a tripod and mounted the camera on
it. Her face was completely immobile, but she did not have the
faintest idea what was going on or what to think about it.
  
`OK,' she said, when she was ready. `Why...'
  
`We liked your interview with the astrologer.'
  
`You saw it?'
  
`We see everything. We are very interested in astrology.
We like it. It is very interesting. Not everything is interesting.
Astrology is interesting. What the stars tell us. What the stars
foretell. We could do with some information like that.'
  
`But...'
  
Tricia didn't know where to start.
  
Own up, she thought. There's no point in trying to second
guess any of this stuff.
  
So she said, `But I don't know anything about astrology.'
  
`We do.'
  
`You do?'
  
`Yes. We follow our horoscopes. We are very avid. We see
all your newspapers and your magazines and are very avid with
them. But our leader says we have a problem.'
  
`You have a leader?'
  
`Yes.'
  
`What's his name?'
  
`We do not know.'
  
`What does he say his name is, for Christ's sake? Sorry
I'll need to edit that. What does he say his name is?'
  
`He does not know.'
  
`So how do you all know he's the leader?'
  
`He seized control. He said someone has to do something
round here.'
  
`Ah! , said Tricia, seizing on a clue. `Where is ``here''?'
  
`Rupert.'
  
`What?'
  
`Your people call it Rupert. The tenth planet from your
sun. We have settled there for many years. It is highly cold
and uninteresting there. But good for monitoring.'
  
`Why are you monitoring us?'
  
`It is all we know to do.'
  
`OK,' said Tricia. `Right. What is the problem that your
leader says you have?'
  
`Triangulation.'
  
`I beg your pardon?'
  
`Astrology is a very precise science. We know this.'
  
`Well...' said Tricia, then left it at that.
  
`But it is precise for you here on Earth.'
  
`Ye... e... s...' She had a horrible feeling she was
getting a vague glimmering of something.
  
`So when Venus is rising in Capricorn, for instance, that
is from Earth. How does that work if we are out on Rupert?
What if the Earth is rising in Capricorn? It is hard for us to
know. Amongst the things we have forgotten, which we think
are many and profound, is trigonometry.'
  
`Let me get this straight,' said Tricia. `You want me to
come with you to... Rupert...'
  
`Yes.'
  
`To recalculate your horoscopes for you to take account of
the relative positions of Earth and Rupert?'
  
`Yes.'
  
`Do I get an exclusive?'
  
`Yes.'
  
`I'm your girl,' said Tricia, thinking that at the very least
she could sell it to the National Enquirer.
 As she boarded the craft that would take her off to the furthest
limits of the Solar System, the first thing that met her eyes was
a bank of video monitors across which thousands of images were
sweeping. A fourth alien was sitting watching them, but was
focused on one particular screen that held a steady image. It
was a replay of the impromptu interview which Tricia had just
conducted with his three colleagues. He looked up when he saw
her apprehensively climbing in.
  
`Good evening, Ms McMillan,' he said. `Nice camera work.'


                          % 6

Ford Prefect hit the ground running. The ground was about three
inches further from the ventilation shaft than he remembered it
so he misjudged the point at which he would hit the ground,
started running too soon, stumbled awkwardly and twisted his
ankle. Damn! He ran off down the corridor anyway, hobbling
slightly.
  
All over the building, alarms were erupting into their usual
frenzy of excitement. He dived for cover behind the usual storage
cabinets, glanced around to check that he was unseen, and started
rapidly to fish around inside his satchel for the usual things he
needed.
  
His ankle, unusually, was hurting like hell.
  
The ground was not only three inches further from the ven-
tilation shaft than he remembered, it was also on a different
planet than he remembered, but it was the three inches that
had caught him by surprise. The offices of the Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy were quite often shifted at very short
notice to another planet, for reasons of local climate, local
hostility, power bills or tax, but they were always reconstructed
exactly the same way, almost to the very molecule. For many of
the company's employees, the layout of their offices represented
the only constant they knew in a severely distorted personal uni-
verse.
  
Something, though, was odd.
  
This was not in itself surprising, thought Ford as he pulled
out his lightweight throwing towel. Virtually everything in his
life was, to a greater or lesser extent, odd. It was just that this
was odd in a slightly different way than he was used to things
being odd, which was, well, strange. He couldn't quite get it into
focus immediately.
  
He got out his No.3 gauge prising tool.
The alarms were going in the same old way that he knew
well. There was a kind of music to them that he could almost
hum along to. That was all very familiar. The world outside had
been a new one on Ford. He had not been to Saquo-Pilia Hensha
before, and he had liked it. It had a kind of carnival atmosphere
to it.
  
He took from his satchel a toy bow and arrow which he
had bought in a street market.
  
He had discovered that the reason for the carnival atmosphere
on Saquo-Pilia Hensha was that the local people were celebrating
the annual feast of the Assumption of St Antwelm. St Antwelm
had been, during his lifetime, a great and popular king who had
made a great and popular assumption. What King Antwelm had
assumed was that what everybody wanted, all other things being
equal, was to be happy and enjoy themselves and have the best
possible time together. On his death he had willed his entire per-
sonal fortune to financing an annual festival to remind everyone
of this, with lots of good food and dancing and very silly games
like Hunt the Wocket. His Assumption had been such a brilliantly
good one that he was made into a saint for it. Not only that, but all
the people who had previously been made saints for doing things
like being stoned to death in a thoroughly miserable way or living
upside down in barrels of dung were instantly demoted and were
now thought to be rather embarrassing.
  
The familiar H-shaped building of the Hitch Hiker's Guide
offices rose above the outskirts of the city, and Ford Prefect
had broken into it in the familiar way. He always entered via the
ventilation system rather than the main lobby because the main
lobby was patrolled by robots whose job it was to quiz incoming
employees about their expense accounts. Ford Prefect's expense
accounts were notoriously complex and difficult affairs and he had
found, on the whole, that the lobby robots were ill-equipped to
understand the arguments he wished to put forward in relation to
them. He preferred, therefore, to make his entrance by another
route.
  
This meant setting off nearly every alarm in the building, but
not the one in the accounts department, which was the way that
Ford preferred it.
  
He hunkered down behind the storage cabinet, he licked
the rubber suction cup of the toy arrow, and then fitted it
to the string of the bow.
  
Within about thirty seconds a security robot the size of a
small melon came flying down the corridor at about waist height,
scanning left and right for anything unusual as it did so.
  
With impeccable timing Ford shot the toy arrow across its
path. The arrow flew across the corridor and stuck, wobbling,
on the opposite wall. As it flew, the robot's sensors locked on
to it instantly and the robot twisted through ninety degrees to
follow it, see what the hell it was and where it was going.
  
This bought Ford one precious second, during which the
robot was looking in the opposite direction from him. He
hurled the towel over the flying robot and caught it.
  
Because of the various sensory protuberances with which the
robot was festooned, it couldn't manoeuvre inside the towel, and
it just twitched back and forth without being able to turn and face
its captor.
  
Ford hauled it quickly towards him and pinned it down to
the ground. It was beginning to whine pitifully. With one swift
and practised movement, Ford reached under the towel with his
No.3 gauge prising tool and flipped off the small plastic panel on
top of the robot which gave access to its logic circuits.
  
Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes
of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.
  
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something
else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest
way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same
stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a
loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sand-
wich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (The
MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the
Surprisingly Obvious).
  
A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring
sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the
whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to
believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was
placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah!
A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.'
  
It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich
in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again.
Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that
the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip
straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor
in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah!
A herring sandwich..., etc., and repeated the same action over
and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the her-
ring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business
and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was
that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between
a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was
going on than was the robot.
  
The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving
force behind all change, development and innovation in life,
which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper
to this effect, which was widely criticised as being extremely
stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what they
had actually discovered was `boredom', or rather, the practical
function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went
on to discover other emotions, Like `irritability', `depression',
`reluctance', `ickiness' and so on. The next big breakthrough came
when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole
welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for
study, such as `relief', `joy', `friskiness', `appetite', `satisfaction',
and most important of all, the desire for `happiness'.
  
This was the biggest breakthrough of all.
  
Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behav-
iour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply.
All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or
happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order
to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out
for themselves.
  
The robot which Ford had got trapped under his towel was
not, at the moment a happy robot. It was happy when it could
move about. It was happy when it could see other things. It was
particularly happy when it could see other things moving about,
particularly if the other things were moving about doing things
they shouldn't do because it could then, with considerable delight,
report them.
  
Ford would soon fix that.
  
He squatted over the robot and held it between his knees. The
towel was still covering all of its sensory mechanisms, but Ford
had now got its logic circuits exposed. The robot was whirring
grungily and pettishly, but it could only fidget, it couldn't actually
move. Using the prising tool, Ford eased a small chip out from its
socket. As soon as it came out, the robot went quiet and just sat
there in a coma.
  
The chip Ford had taken out was the one which contained
the instructions for all the conditions that had to be fulfilled in
order for the robot to feel happy. The robot would be happy
when a tiny electrical charge from a point just to the left of the
chip reached another point just to the right of the chip. The chip
determined whether the charge got there or not.
  
Ford pulled out a small length of wire that had been threaded
into the towel. He dug one end of it into the top left hole of the
chip socket and the other into the bottom right hole.
  
That was all it took. Now the robot would be happy whatever
happened.
  
Ford quickly stood up and whisked the towel away. The
robot rose ecstatically into the air, pursuing a kind of wriggly
path.
  
It turned and saw Ford.
  
`Mr Prefect, sir! I'm so happy to see you!'
  
`Good to see you, little fella,' said Ford.
  
The robot rapidly reported back to its central control that
everything was now for the best in this best of all possible
worlds, the alarms rapidly quelled themselves, and life returned
to normal.
  
At least, almost to normal.
  
There was something odd about the place.
  
The little robot was gurgling with electric delight. Ford hurried
on down the corridor, letting the thing bob along in his wake
telling him how delicious everything was, and how happy it was
to be able to tell him that.
  
Ford, however , was not happy.
  
He passed faces of people he didn't know. They didn't look
like his sort of people. They were too well groomed. Their
eyes were too dead. Every time he thought he saw someone
he recognised in the distance, and hurried along to say hello,
it would turn out to be someone else, with an altogether neater
hairstyle and a much more thrusting, purposeful look than, well,
than anybody Ford knew.
  
A staircase had been moved a few inches to the left. A
ceiling had been lowered slightly. A Lobby had been remodelled.
All these things were not worrying in themselves, though they
were a little disorienting. The thing that was worrying was the
decor. It used to be brash and glitzy. Expensive - because the
Guide sold so well through the civilised and post-civilised Galaxy
- but expensive and fun. Wild games machines lined the corridors.
Insanely painted grand pianos hung from ceilings, vicious sea
creatures from the planet Viv reared up out of pools in tree-filled
atria, robot butlers in stupid shirts roamed the corridors seeking
whose hands they might press frothing drinks into. People used
to have pet vastdragons on leads and pterospondes on perches in
their offices. People knew how to have a good time, and if they
didn't there were courses they could sign up for which would put
that right.
  
There was none of that now.
  
Somebody had been through the place doing some iniquitous
kind of taste job on it.
  
Ford turned sharply into a small alcove, cupped his hand
and yanked the flying robot in with him. He squatted down
and peered at the burbling cybernaut.
  
`What's been happening here?' he demanded.
  
`Oh just the nicest things, sir, just the nicest possible things.
Can I sit on your lap, please?'
  
`No,' said Ford, brushing the thing away. It was overjoyed
to be spurned in this way and started to bob and burble and
swoon. Ford grabbed it again and stuck it firmly in the air a
foot in front of his face. It tried to stay where it was put but
couldn't help quivering slightly.
  
`Something's changed, hasn't it?' Ford hissed.
  
`Oh yes,' squealed the little robot, `in the most fabulous
and wonderful way. I feel so good about it.'
  
`Well what was it like before, then?'
  
`Scrumptious.'
  
`But you like the way it's changed?' demanded Ford.
  
`I like everything,' moaned the robot. `Especially when you
shout at me like that. Do it again, please.'
  
`Just tell me what's happened!'
  
`Oh thank you, thank you!'
  
Ford sighed.
  
`OK, OK,' panted the robot. `The Guide has been taken over.
There's a new management. It's all so gorgeous I could just melt.
The old management was also fabulous of course, though I'm not
sure if I thought so at the time.'
  
`That was before you had a bit of wire stuck in your head.'
  
`How true. How wonderfully true. How wonderfully, bub-
blingly, frothingly, burstingly true. What a truly ecstasy-induc-
ingly correct observation.'
  
`What's happened?' insisted Ford. `Who is this new man-
agement? When did they take over? I... oh, never mind,' he
added, as the little robot started to gibbet with uncontrollable
joy and rub itself against his knee. `I'll go and find out for myself.'
 Ford hurled himself at the door of the editor-in-chief's office,
tucked himself into a tight ball as the frame splintered and
gave way, rolled rapidly across the floor to where the drinks
trolley laden with some of the Galaxy's most potent and expen-
sive beverages habitually stood, seized hold of the trolley and,
using it to give himself cover, trundled it and himself across the
main exposed part of the office floor to where the valuable and
extremely rude statue of Leda and the Octopus stood, and took
shelter behind it. Meanwhile the little security robot, entering at
chest height, was suicidally delighted to draw gunfire away from
Ford.
  
That, at least, was the plan, and a necessary one. The current
editor-in-chief, Stagyar-zil-Doggo, was a dangerously unbalanced
man who took a homicidal view of contributing staff turning up in
his office without pages of fresh, proofed copy, and had a battery
of laser guided guns linked to special scanning devices in the door
frame to deter anybody who was merely bringing extremely good
reasons why they hadn't written any. Thus was a high level of
output maintained.
  
Unfortunately the drinks trolley wasn't there.
  
Ford hurled himself desperately sideways and somersaulted
towards the statue of Leda and the Octopus, which also wasn't
there. He rolled and hurtled around the room in a kind of random
panic, tripped, span, hit the window, which fortunately was built
to withstand rocket attacks, rebounded, and fell in a bruised and
winded heap behind a smart grey crushed leather sofa, which
hadn't been there before.
  
After a few seconds he slowly peeked up above the top of the
sofa. As well as there being no drinks trolley and no Leda and
the Octopus, there had also been a startling absence of gunfire.
He frowned. This was all utterly wrong.
  
`Mr Prefect, I assume,' said a voice.
  
The voice came from a smooth-faced individual behind a
large ceramo-teak-bonded desk. Stagyar-zil-Doggo may well have
been a hell of an individual, but no one, for a whole variety of
reasons, would ever have called him smooth-faced. This was not
Stagyar-zil-Doggo.
  
`I assume from the manner of your entrance that you do not
have new material for the, er, Guide, at the moment,' said the
smooth-faced individual. He was sitting with his elbows resting
on the table and holding his fingertips together in a manner
which, inexplicably, has never been made a capital offence.
  
`I've been busy,' said Ford, rather weakly. He staggered
to his feet, brushing himself down. Then he thought, what the
hell was he saying things weakly for? He had to get on top of
this situation. He had to find out who the hell this person was,
and he suddenly thought of a way of doing it.
  
`Who the hell are you?, he demanded.
  
`I am your new editor-in-chief. That is, if we decide to
retain your services. My name is Vann Harl.' He didn't put his
hand out. He just added, `What have you done to that security
robot?'
  
The little robot was rolling very, very slowly round the ceiling
and moaning quietly to itself.
  
`I've made it very happy,' snapped Ford. `It's a kind of
mission I have. Where's Stagyar? More to the point, where's
his drinks trolley?'
  
`Mr zil-Doggo is no longer with this organisation. His drinks
trolley is, I imagine, helping to console him for this fact.'
  
`Organisation?' yelled Ford. `Organisation? What a bloody
stupid word for a set-up like this!'
  
`Precisely our sentiments. Under-structured, over-resourced,
under-managed, over-inebriated. And that,' said Harl, `was just
the editor.'
  
`I'll do the jokes,' snarled Ford.
  
`No,' said Harl. `You will do the restaurant column.'
  
He tossed a piece of plastic on to the desk in front of
him. Ford did not move to pick it up.
  
`You what?' said Ford.
  
`No. Me Harl. You Prefect. You do restaurant column. Me
editor. Me sit here tell you you do restaurant column. You get?'
  
`Restaurant column?' said Ford, too bewildered to be really
angry yet.
  
`Siddown, Prefect,' said Harl. He swung round in his swivel
chair, got to his feet, and stood staring out at the tiny specks
enjoying the carnival twenty-three stories below.
  
`Time to get this business on its feet, Prefect,' he snapped.
  
`We at InfiniDim Enterprises are...'
  
`You at what?'
  
`InfiniDim Enterprises. We have bought out the Guide.'
  
`InfiniDim?'
  
`We spent millions on that name, Prefect. Start liking it
or start packing.'
  
Ford shrugged. He had nothing to pack.
  
`The Galaxy is changing,' said Harl. `We've got to change
with it. Go with the market. The market is moving up. New
aspirations. New technology. The future is...'
  
`Don't tell me about the future,' said Ford. `I've been all over
the future. Spend half my time there. It' s the same as anywhere
else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster
cars and smellier air.'
  
`That's one future,' said Harl. `That's your future, if you
accept it. you've got to learn to think multi-dimensionally.
There are limitless futures stretching out in every direction from
this moment - and from this moment and from this. Billions of
them, bifurcating every instant! Every possible position of every
possible electron balloons out into billions of probabilities! Bil-
lions and billions of shining, gleaming futures! you know what
that means?'
  
`You're dribbling down your chin.'
  
`Billions and billions of markets!'
  
`I see,' said Ford. `So you sell billions and billions of Guides.'
  
`No,' said Harl, reaching for his handkerchief and not finding
one. `Excuse me,' he said, `but this gets me so excited.' Ford
handed him his towel.
  
`The reason we don't sell billions and billions of Guides,'
continued Harl, after wiping his mouth, `is the expense. What we
do is we sell one Guide billions and billions of times. We exploit
the multidimensional nature of the Universe to cut down on
manufacturing costs. And we don't sell to penniless hitch hikers.
What a stupid notion that was! Find the one section of the market
that, more or less by definition, doesn't have any money, and try
and sell to it. No. We sell to the affluent business traveller and
his vacationing wife in a billion, billion different futures . This is
the most radical, dynamic and thrusting business venture in the
entire multidimensional infinity of space/time/probability ever.'
  
`And you want me to be its restaurant critic,' said Ford.
  
`We would value your input.'
  
`Kill!' shouted Ford. He shouted it at his towel.
  
The towel leapt up out of Harl's hands.
  
This was not because it had any motive force of its own,
but because Harl was so startled at the idea that it might.
The next thing that startled him was the sight of Ford Prefect
hurtling across the desk at him fists first. In fact Ford was just
lunging for the credit card, but you don't get to occupy the sort
of position that Harl occupied in the sort of organisation in
which Harl occupied it without developing a healthily paranoid
view of life. He took the sensible precaution of hurling himself
backwards, and striking his head a sharp blow on the rocket-proof
glass, then subsided into a series of worrying and highly personal
dreams.
  
Ford lay on the desk, surprised at how swimmingly every-
thing had gone. He glanced quickly at the piece of plastic he
now held in his hand - it was a Dine-O-Charge credit card with
his name already embossed on it, and an expiry date two years
from now, and was possibly the single most exciting thing Ford
had ever seen in his life - then he clambered over the desk to
see to Harl.
  
He was breathing fairly easily. It occurred to Ford that he
might breathe more easily yet without the weight of his wallet
bearing down on his chest, so he slipped it out of Harl's breast
pocket and flipped through it. Fair amount of cash. Credit tokens.
Ultragolf club membership. Other club memberships. Photos of
someone's wife and family - presumably Harl's, but it was hard
to be sure these days. Busy executives often didn't have time
for a full-time wife and family and would just rent them for
weekends.
  
Ha!
  
He couldn't believe what he'd just found.
  
He slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely
exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of
receipts.
  
It wasn't insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in
fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and
semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see
a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried
pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface .
  
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly
thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was
perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in
which you were required to provide absolute proof of your iden-
tity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome
just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential
problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an
epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash
point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around
waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits
of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant
(or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious
reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions
about members of their family they didn't even remember they
had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours.
And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If
you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty
or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
  
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of
information about you, your body and your life into one all-
purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around
in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest
triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
  
Ford pocketed it. A remarkably good idea had just occurred
to him. He wondered how long Harl would remain unconscious.
  
`Hey!' he shouted to the little melon-sized robot still slobbering
with euphoria up on the ceiling. `You want to stay happy?'
  
The robot gurgled that it did.
  
`Then stick with me and do everything I tell you without fail.'
  
The robot said that it was quite happy where it was up
on the ceiling thank you very much. It had never realised
before how much sheer titillation there was to be got from a
good ceiling and it wanted to explore its feelings about ceilings
in greater depth.
  
`You stay there,' said Ford, `and you'll soon be recaptured
and have your conditional chip replaced. You want to stay
happy, come now.'
  
The robot let out a long heartfelt sigh of impassioned tristesse
and sank reluctantly away from the ceiling.
  
`Listen,' said Ford, `can you keep the rest of the security
system happy for a few minutes?'
  
`One of the joys of true happiness,' trilled the robot, `is
sharing. I brim, I froth, I overflow with...'
  
`OK,' said Ford. `Just spread a little happiness around the
security network. Don't give it any information. Just make it
feel good so it doesn't feel the need to ask for any.'
  
He picked up his towel and ran cheerfully for the door.
Life had been a little dull of late. It showed every sign now
of becoming extremely froody.


                          % 7

Arthur Dent had been in some hell-holes in his life, but he had
never before seen a spaceport which had a sign saying, `Even
travelling despondently is better than arriving here.' To welcome
visitors the arrivals hall featured a picture of the President of
NowWhat, smiling. It was the only picture anybody could find
of him, and it had been taken shortly after he had shot himself
so although the photo had been retouched as well as could be
managed the smile it wore was rather a ghastly one. The side
of his head had been drawn back in in crayon. No replacement
had been found for the photograph because no replacement had
been found for the President. There was only one ambition which
anyone on the planet ever had, and that was to leave.
  
Arthur checked himself into a small motel on the outskirts of
town, and sat glumly on the bed, which was damp, and flipped
through the little information brochure, which was also damp. It
said that the planet of NowWhat had been named after the open-
ing words of the first settlers to arrive there after struggling across
light years of space to reach the furthest unexplored outreaches of
the Galaxy. The main town was called OhWell. There weren't any
other towns to speak of. Settlement on NowWhat had not been
a success and the sort of people who actually wanted to live on
NowWhat were not the sort of people you would want to spend
time with.
  
Trading was mentioned in the brochure. The main trade that
was carried out was in the skins of the NowWhattian boghog but
it wasn't a very successful one because no one in their right minds
would want to buy a NowWhattian boghog skin. The trade only
hung on by its fingernails because there was always a significant
number of people in the Galaxy who were not in their right minds.
Arthur had felt very uncomfortable looking around at some of
the other occupants of the small passenger compartment of the
ship.
  
The brochure described some of the history of the planet.
Whoever had written it had obviously started out trying to drum
up a little enthusiasm for the place by stressing that it wasn't
actually cold and wet all the time, but could find little positive
to add to this so the tone of the piece quickly degenerated into
savage irony.
  
It talked about the early years of settlement. It said that the
major activities pursued on NowWhat were those of catching,
skinning and eating NowWhattian boghogs, which were the only
extant form of animal life on NowWhat, all other having long
ago died of despair. The boghogs were tiny, vicious creatures,
and the small margin by which they fell short of being completely
inedible was the margin by which life on the planet subsisted.
So what were the rewards, however small, that made life on
NowWhat worth living? Well, there weren't any. Not a one.
Even making yourself some protective clothing out of boghog
skins was an exercise in disappointment and futility, since the
skins were unaccountably thin and leaky. This caused a lot of
puzzled conjecture amongst the settlers. What was the boghog's
secret of keeping warm? If anyone had ever learnt the language
the boghogs spoke to each other they would have discovered
that there was no trick. The boghogs were as cold and wet as
anyone else on the planet. No one had had the slightest desire
to learn the language of the boghogs for the simple reason that
these creatures communicated by biting each other very hard on
the thigh. Life on NowWhat being what it was, most of what a
boghog might have to say about it could easily be signified by
these means.
  
Arthur flipped through the brochure till he found what he
was looking for. At the back there were a few maps of the
planet. They were fairly rough and ready because they weren't
likely to be of much interest to anyone, but they told him what
he wanted to know.
  
He didn't recognise it at first because the maps were the
other way up from the way he would have expected and looked,
therefore thoroughly unfamiliar. Of course, up and down, north
and south, are absolutely arbitrary designations, but we are used
to seeing things the way we are used to seeing them, and
Arthur had to turn the maps upside-down to make sense of
them.
  
There was one huge landmass off on the upper left-hand
side of the page which tapered down to a tiny waist and then
ballooned out again like a large comma. On the right-hand side
was a collection of large shapes jumbled familiarly together. The
outlines were not exactly the same, and Arthur didn't know if this
was because the map was so rough, or because the sea-level was
higher or because, well, things were just different here. But the
evidence was inarguable.
  
This was definitely the Earth.
  
Or rather, it most definitely was not.
  
It merely looked a lot like the Earth and occupied the same
co-ordinates in space/time. What co-ordinates it occupied in
Probability was anybody's guess.
  
He sighed.
  
This, he realised, was about as close to home as he was
likely to get. Which meant that he was about as far from home
as he could possibly be. Glumly he slapped the brochure shut
and wondered what on earth he was going to do next.
  
He allowed himself a hollow laugh at what he had just
thought. He looked at his old watch, and shook it a bit to wind it.
It had taken him, according to his own time-scale, a year of hard
travelling to get here. A year since the accident in hyperspace in
which Fenchurch had completely vanished. One minute she had
been sitting there next to him in the SlumpJet; the next minute
the ship had done a perfectly normal hyperspace hop and when
he had next looked she was not there. The seat wasn't even
warm. Her name wasn't even on the passenger list.
  
The spaceline had been wary of him when he had complained.
A lot of awkward things happen in space travel, and a lot of them
make a lot of money for lawyers. But when they had asked him
what Galactic Sector he and Fenchurch had been from and he
had said ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha they had relaxed completely in a
way that Arthur wasn't at all sure he liked. They even laughed
a little, though sympathetically, of course. They pointed to the
clause in the ticket contract which said that the entities whose
lifespans had originated in any of the Plural zones were advised
not to travel in hyperspace and did so at their own risk. Every-
body, they said, knew that. They tittered slightly and shook their
heads.
  
As Arthur had left their offices he found he was trembling
slightly. Not only had he lost Fenchurch in the most complete
and utter way possible, but he felt that the more time he spent
away out in the Galaxy the more it seemed that the number of
things he didn't know anything about actually increased.
  
Just as he was lost for a moment in these numb memories a
knock came on the door of his motel room, which then opened
immediately. A fat and dishevelled man came in carrying Arthur's
one small case.
  
He got as far as, `Where shall I put -' when there was
a sudden violent flurry and he collapsed heavily against the
door, trying to beat off a small and mangy creature that had
leapt snarling out of the wet night and buried its teeth in his
thigh, even through the thick layers of leather padding he wore
there. There was a brief, ugly confusion of jabbering and thrash-
ing. The man shouted frantically and pointed. Arthur grabbed a
hefty stick that stood next to the door expressly for this purpose
and beat at the boghog with it.
  
The boghog suddenly disengaged and limped backwards, dazed
and forlorn. It turned anxiously in the corner of the room, its tail
tucked up right under its back legs, and stood looking nervously
up at Arthur, jerking its head awkwardly and repeatedly to one
side. Its jaw seemed to be dislocated. It cried a little and scraped
its damp tail across the floor. By the door, the fat man with
Arthur's suitcase was sitting and cursing, trying to staunch the
flow of blood from his thigh. His clothes were already wet from
the rain.
  
Arthur stared at the boghog, not knowing what to do. The
boghog looked at him questioningly. It tried to approach him,
waking mournful little whimpering noises. It moved its jaw pain-
fully. It made a sudden leap for Arthur's thigh, but its dislocated
jaw was too weak to get a grip and it sank, whining sadly, down
to the floor. The fat man jumped to his feet, grabbed the stick,
beat the boghog's brains into a sticky, pulpy mess on the thin
carpet, and then stood there breathing heavily as if daring the
animal to move again, just once.
  
A single boghog eyeball sat looking reproachfully at Arthur
from out of the mashed ruins of its head.
  
`What do you think it was trying to say?' asked Arthur
in a small voice.
  
`Ah, nothing much,' said the man `Just its way of trying
to be friendly. This is just our way of being friendly back,'
he added, gripping the stick.
  
`When's the next flight out?' asked Arthur.
  
`Thought you'd only just arrived,' said the man.
  
`Yes,' said Arthur. `It was only going to be a brief visit.
I just wanted to see if this was the right place or not. Sorry.'
  
`You mean you're on the wrong planet?' said the man lugu-
briously. `Funny how many people say that. Specially the people
who live here.' He eyed the remains of the boghog with a deep,
ancestral resentment.
  
`Oh no,' said Arthur, 'it's the right planet all right.' He
picked up the damp brochure lying on the bed and put it in
his pocket. `It's OK, thanks, I'll take that,' he said, taking his
case from the man. He went to the door and looked out into
the cold, wet night.
  
`Yes, it's the right planet, all right,' he said again. `Right
planet, wrong universe.'
  
A single bird wheeled in the sky above him as he set off
back for the spaceport.


                          % 8

Ford had his own code of ethics. It wasn't much of one, but it
was his and he stuck by it, more or less. One rule he made was
never to buy his own drinks. He wasn't sure if that counted as an
ethic, but you have to go with what you've got. He was also firmly
and utterly opposed to all and any forms of cruelty to any animals
whatsoever except geese. And furthermore he would never steal
from his employers.
  
Well, not exactly steal.
  
If his accounts supervisor didn't start to hyperventilate and
put out a seal-all-exits security alert when Ford handed in his
expenses claim then Ford felt he wasn't doing his job properly.
But actually stealing was another thing. That was biting the hand
that feeds you. Sucking very hard on it, even nibbling it in an
affectionate kind of a way was OK, but you didn't actually bite
it. Not when that hand was the Guide. The Guide was something
sacred and special.
  
But that, thought Ford as he ducked and weaved his way
down through the building, was about to change. And they
had only themselves to blame. Look at all this stuff. Lines of
neat grey office cubicles and executive workstation pods. The
whole place was dreary with the hum of memos and minutes of
meetings flitting through its electronic networks. Out in the street
they were playing Hunt the Wocket for Zark's sake, but here in
the very heart of the Guide offices no one was even recklessly
kicking a ball around the corridors or wearing inappropriately
coloured beachware.
  
`InfiniDim Enterprises,' Ford snarled to himself as he stalked
rapidly down one corridor after another. Door after door magi-
cally opened to him without question. Elevators took him happily
to places they should not. Ford was trying to pursue the most
tangled and complicated route he could, heading generally down-
wards through the building. His happy little robot took care of
everything, spreading waves of acquiescent joy through all the
security circuits it encountered.
  
Ford thought it needed a name and decided to call it Emily
Saunders, after a girl he had very fond memories of. Then he
thought that Emily Saunders was an absurd name for a security
robot, and decided to call it Colin instead, after Emily's dog.
  
He was moving deep into the bowels of the building now,
into areas he had never entered before, areas of higher and
higher security. He was beginning to encounter puzzled looks
from the operatives he passed. At this level of security you
didn't even call them people anymore. And they were probably
doing stuff that only operatives would do. When they went home
to their families in the evening they became people again, and
when their little children looked up to them with their sweet
shining eyes and said `Daddy, what did you do all day today?'
they just said, `I performed my duties as an operative,' and left
it at that.
  
The truth of the matter was that all sorts of highly dodgy
stuff went on behind the cheery, happy-go-lucky front that the
Guide liked to put up - or used to like to put up before this new
InfiniDim Enterprises bunch marched in and started to make the
whole thing highly dodgy. There were all kinds of tax scams and
rackets and graft and shady deals supporting the shining edifice,
and down in the secure research and data-processing levels of
the building was where it all went on.
  
Every few years the Guide would set up its business, and
indeed its building on a new world, and all would be sunshine
and laughter for a while as the Guide would put down its roots
in the local culture and economy, provide employment, a sense
of glamour and adventure and, in the end, not quite as much
actual revenue as the locals had expected.
  
When the Guide moved on, taking its building with it, it
left a little like a thief in the night. Exactly like a thief in
the night in fact. It usually left in the very early hours of
the morning, and the following day there always turned out
to be a very great deal of stuff missing. Whole cultures and
economies would collapse in its wake, often within a week,
leaving once thriving planets desolate and shell-shocked but
still somehow feeling they had been part of some great adven-
ture.
  
The `operatives' who shot puzzled glances at Ford as he
marched on into the depths of the building's most sensitive
areas were reassured by the presence of Colin, who was flying
along with him in a buzz of emotional fulfilment and easing his
path for him at every stage.
  
Alarms were starting to go off in other parts of the building.
Perhaps that meant that Vann Harl had already been discovered,
which might be a problem. Ford had been hoping he would be
able to slip the Ident-i-Eeze back into his pocket before he came
round. Well, that was a problem for later, and he didn't for the
moment have the faintest idea how he was going to solve it. For
the moment he wasn't going to worry. Wherever he went with
little Colin, he was surrounded by a cocoon of sweetness and
light and, most importantly, willing and acquiescent elevators
and positively obsequious doors.
  
Ford even began to whistle, which was probably his mistake.
Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes
our ends.
  
The next door wouldn't open.
  
And that was a pity, because it was the very one that Ford
had been making for. It stood there before him, grey and
resolutely closed with a sign on it saying:
 
\begin{center} 
                       NO ADMITTANCE.                NOT EVEN TO AUTHORISED PERSONNEL.                 YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.                            GO AWAY.\end{center}
Colin reported that the doors had been getting generally a
lot grimmer down in these lower reaches of the building.
  
They were about ten stories below ground level now. The
air was refrigerated and the tasteful grey hessian wall-weave
had given way to brutal grey bolted steel walls. Colin's rampant
euphoria had subsided into a kind of determined cheeriness. He
said that he was beginning to tire a little. It was taking all his
energy to pump the slightest bonhomie whatsoever into the doors
down here.
  
Ford kicked at the door. It opened.
  
`Mixture of pleasure and pain,' he muttered. `Always does
the trick.'
 
 He walked in and Colin flew in after him. Even with a
wire stuck straight into his pleasure electrode his happiness
was a nervous kind of happiness. He bobbed around a little.
  
The room was small, grey and humming.
  
This was the nerve centre of the entire Guide.
  
The computer terminals that lined the grey walls were win-
dows on to every aspect of the Guide's operations. Here, on the
left-hand side of the room, reports were gathered over the Sub-
Etha-Net from field researchers in every corner of the Galaxy,
fed straight up into the network of sub-editor's offices where they
had all the good bits cut out by secretaries because the sub-editors
were out having lunch. The remaining copy would then be shot
across to the other half of the building - the other leg of the `H'
- which was the legal department. The legal department would
cut out anything that was still even remotely good from what
remained and fire it back to the offices of the executive editors,
who were also out at lunch. So the editors' secretaries would read
it and say it was stupid and cut most of what was left.
  
When any of the editors finally staggered in from lunch they
would exclaim `What is this feeble crap that X' - where X was
the name of the field researcher in question - `has sent us from
half-way across the bloody Galaxy? What's the point of having
somebody spending three whole orbital periods out in the bloody
Gagrakacka Mind Zones, with all that stuff going on out there,
if this load of anaemic squitter is the best he can be bothered to
send us. Disallow his expenses!'
  
`What shall we do with the copy?' the secretary would ask.
  
`Ah, put it out over the network. Got to have something
going out there. I've got a headache, I'm going home.'
  
So the edited copy would go for one last slash and burn
through the legal department, and then be sent back down
here where it would be broadcast out over the Sub-Etha-Net
for instantaneous retrieval anywhere in the Galaxy. That was
handled by equipment which was monitored and controlled by
the terminals on the right-hand side of the room.
  
Meanwhile the order to disallow the researcher's expenses
was relayed down to the computer terminal stuck off in the
right-hand corner, and it was to this terminal that Ford Prefect
now swiftly made his way.
  
(If you are reading this on planet Earth then:
\begin{description}
	\item{}  
a) Good luck to you. There is an awful lot of stuff you
don't know anything about, but you are not alone in this. It's
just that in your case the consequences of not knowing any of
this stuff are particularly terrible, but then, hey, that's just the
way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated.
	\item{}  
b) Don't imagine you know what a computer terminal is.
\end{description}
A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with
a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and
body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.)
  
Ford hurried over to the terminal, sat in front of it and
quickly dipped himself into its universe.
  
It wasn't the normal universe he knew. It was a universe of
densely enfolded worlds, of wild topographies, towering moun-
tain peaks, heart stopping ravines, of moons shattering off into
sea horses, hurtful blurting crevices, silently heaving oceans and
bottomless hurtling hooping funts.
  
He held still to get his bearings. He controlled his breathing,
closed his eyes and looked again.
  
So this was where accountants spent their time. There was
clearly more to them than met the eye. He looked around
carefully, trying not to let it all swell and swim and overwhelm
him.
  
He didn't know his way around this universe. He didn't
even know the physical laws that determined its dimensional
extents or behaviours, but his instinct told him to look for the
most outstanding feature he could detect and make towards it.
  
Way off in some indistinguishable distance - was it a mile
or a million or a mote in his eye? - was a stunning peak that
overarched the sky, climbed and climbed and spread out in
flowering aigrettes 1, agglomerates 2, and arch imandrites 3.
  
He weltered towards it, hooling and thurling, and at last
reached it in a meaninglessly long umthingth of time.
  
He clung to it, arms outspread, gripping tightly on to its
roughly gnarled and pitted surface. Once he was certain that
he was secure he made the hideous mistake of looking down.
  
While he had been weltering, hooling and thurling, the distance
beneath him had not bothered him unduly, but now that he was
\begin{enumerate}
	\item An ornamental tuft of plumes.
	\item A jumbled mass.
	\item A cleric ranking below a bishop.
\end{enumerate}
gripping, the distance made his heart wilt and his brain bend.
His fingers were white with pain and tension. His teeth were
grinding and twisting against each other beyond his control. His
eyes turned inwards with waves from the willowing extremities
of nausea.
  
With an immense effort of will and faith he simply let go
and pushed.
  
He felt himself float. Away. And then, counter-intuitively,
upwards. And upwards.
  
He threw his shoulders back, let his arms drop, gazed upwards
and let himself be drawn loosely, higher and higher.
  
Before long, insofar as such terms had any meaning in this
virtual universe, a ledge loomed up ahead of him on which he
could grip and on to which he could clamber.
  
He rose, he gripped, he clambered.
  
He panted a little. This was all a little stressful.
  
He held tightly on to the ledge as he sat. He wasn't certain if
this was to prevent himself from falling down off it or rising up
from it, but he needed something to grip on to as he surveyed
the world in which he found himself.
  
The whirling, turning height span him and twisted his brain
in upon itself till he found himself, eyes closed, whimpering and
hugging the hideous wall of towering rock.
  
He slowly brought his breathing back under control again.
He told himself repeatedly that he was just in a graphic rep-
resentation of a world. A virtual universe. A simulated reality.
He could snap back out of it at any moment.
  
He snapped back out of it.
  
He was sitting in a blue leatherette foam filled swivel-seated
office chair in front of a computer terminal.
  
He relaxed.
  
He was clinging to the face of an impossibly high peak perched
on a narrow ledge above a drop of brain-swivelling dimensions.
  
It wasn't just the landscape being so far beneath him -
he wished it would stop undulating and waving.
  
He had to get a grip. Not on the rock wall - that was an
illusion. He had to get a grip on the situation, be able to look
at the physical world he was in while drawing himself out of it
emotionally.
  
He clenched inwardly and then, just as he had let go of the
rock face itself, he let go of the idea of the rock face and let
himself just sit there clearly and freely. He looked out at the
world. He was breathing well. He was cool. He was in charge
again.
  
He was in a four-dimensional topological model of the Guide's
financial systems, and somebody or something would very shortly
want to know why.
  
And here they came.
  
Swooping through virtual space towards him came a small
flock of mean and steely-eyed creatures with pointy little heads,
pencil moustaches and querulous demands as to who he was,
what he was doing there, what his authorisation was, what the
authorisation of his authorising agent was, what his inside leg
measurement was and so on. Laser light flickered all over him
as if he was a packet of biscuits at a supermarket check-out. The
heavier duty laser guns were held, for the moment, in reserve.
The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no
difference. Being virtually killed by a virtual laser in virtual space
is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as
you think you are.
  
The laser readers were becoming very agitated as they flickered
over his fingerprints, his retina and the follicle pattern where his
hair line was receding. They didn't like what they were finding at
all. The chattering and screeching of highly personal and insolent
questions was rising in pitch. A little surgical steel scraper was
reaching out towards the skin at the nape of his neck when
Ford, holding his breath and praying very slightly, pulled Vann
Harl's Ident-i-Eeze out of his pocket and waved it in front of
them.
  
Instantly every laser was diverted to the little card and Swept
backwards and forwards over it and in it, examining and reading
every molecule.
  
Then, just as suddenly, they stopped.
  
The entire flock of little virtual inspectors snapped to attention.
  
`Nice to see you, Mr Harl,' they said in smarmy unison.
`Is there anything we can do for you?'
  
Ford smiled a slow and vicious smile.
  `
Do you know,' he said, `I rather think there is?'
 Five minutes later he was out of there.
  
About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty
to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in
the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred
ownership of the entire organisation into his own name, but he
doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn't want it
anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights
at the office, not to mention massive and time-consuming fraud
investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted
something that nobody other than the computer would notice:
that was the bit that took thirty seconds.
  
The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming
the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything.
  
It had to want not to know about what Ford was up to, and
then he could safely leave the computer to rationalise its own
defences against the information ever emerging. It was a pro-
gramming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the
sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal
people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to
high political office.
  
The other minute was spent discovering that the computer
system already had a mental block. A big one.
  
He would never have discovered it if he hadn't been busy
engineering a mental block himself. He came across a whole
slew of smooth and plausible denial procedures and diversionary
subroutines exactly where he had been planning to install his
own. The computer denied all knowledge of them, of course,
then blankly refused to accept that there was anything even to
deny knowledge of, and was generally so convincing that even
Ford almost found himself thinking he must have made a mistake.
  
He was impressed.
  
He was so impressed, in fact, that he didn't bother to install
his own mental block procedures, he just set up calls to the ones
that were already there, which then called themselves when ques-
tioned, and so on.
  
He quickly set about debugging the little bits of code he had
installed himself, only to discover they weren't there. Cursing,
he searched all over for them, but could find no trace of them
at all.
  
He was just about to start installing them all over again when
he realised that the reason he couldn't find them was that they
were working already.
  
He grinned with satisfaction.
  
He tried to discover what the computer's other mental block
was all about, but it seemed, not unnaturally, to have a mental
block about it. He could no longer find any trace of it at all, in
fact; it was that good. He wondered if he had been imagining
it. He wondered if he had been imagining that it was something
to do with something in the building, and something to do with
the number 13. He ran a few tests. Yes, he had obviously been
imagining it.
 No time for fancy routes now, there was obviously a major
security alert in progress. Ford took the elevator up to the ground
floor to change to the express elevators. He had somehow to get
the Ident-i-Eeze back into Harl's pocket before it was missed.
How, he didn't know.
  
The doors of the elevator slid open to reveal a large posse of
security guards and robots poised waiting for it and brandishing
filthy looking weapons.
  
They ordered him out.
  
With a shrug he stepped forward. They all pushed rudely
past him into the elevator which took them down to continue
their search for him on the lower levels.
  
This was fun, thought Ford, giving Colin a friendly pat.
Colin was about the first genuinely useful robot Ford had ever
encountered. Colin bobbed along in the air in front of him in a
lather of cheerful ecstasy. Ford was glad he'd named him after
a dog.
  
He was highly tempted just to leave at that point and hope
for the best, but he knew that the best had a far greater chance
of actually occurring if Harl did not discover that his Ident-i-Eeze
was missing. He had somehow, surreptitiously, to return it.
  
They went to the express elevators.
  
`Hi,' said the elevator they got into.
  
`Hi,' said Ford.
  
`Where can I take you folks today?' said the elevator.
  
`Floor 23,' said Ford.
  
`Seems to be a popular floor today,' said the elevator.
  
`Hmm,' thought Ford, not liking the sound of that at all.
The elevator lit up the twenty-third floor on its floor display
and started to zoom upwards. Something about the floor display
tweaked at Ford's mind but he couldn't catch what it was and
forgot about it. He was more worried about the idea of the floor
he was going to being a popular one. He hadn't really thought
through how he was going to deal with whatever it was that was
happening up there because he had no idea what he was going
to find. He would just have to busk it.
  
They were there.
  
The doors slid open.
  
Ominous quiet.
  
Empty corridor.
  
There was the door to Harl's office, with a slight layer of
dust around it. Ford knew that this dust consisted of billions of
tiny molecular robots that had crawled out of the woodwork,
built each other, rebuilt the door , disassembled each other and
then crept back into the woodwork again and just waited for
damage. Ford wondered what kind of life that was, but not for
long because he was a lot more concerned about what his own
life was like at that moment.
  
He took a deep breath and started his run.


                          % 9

Arthur felt at a bit of a loss. There was a whole Galaxy of stuff
out there for him, and he wondered if it was churlish of him to
complain to himself that it lacked just two things: the world he
was born on and the woman he loved.
  
Damn it and blast it, he thought, and felt the need of some
guidance and advice. He consulted the Hitch Hiker's Guide to
the Galaxy. He looked up `guidance' and it said `See under
ADVICE'. He looked up `advice' and it said `see under GUIDANCE'.
It had been doing a lot of that kind of stuff recently and
he wondered if it was all it was cracked up to be.
  
He headed to the outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy where, it
was said, wisdom and truth were to be found, most particularly
on the planet Hawalius, which was a planet of oracles and seers
and soothsayers and also take-away pizza shops, because most
mystics were completely incapable of cooking for themselves.
  
However it appeared that some sort of calamity had befallen
this planet. As Arthur wandered the streets of the village where
the major prophets lived, it had something of a crestfallen air.
He came across one prophet who was clearly shutting up shop
in a despondent kind of way and asked him what was happening.
  
`No call for us any more,' he said gruffly as he started to
bang a nail into the plank he was holding across the window of
his hovel.
  
`Oh? Why's that?'
  
`Hold on to the other end of this and I'll show you.'
  
Arthur held up the unnailed end of the plank and the old
prophet scuttled into the recesses of his hovel, returning a
moment or two later with a small Sub-Etha radio. He turned it
on, fiddled with the dial for a moment and put the thing on the
small wooden bench that he usually sat and prophesied on. He
then took hold of the plank again and resumed hammering.
  
Arthur sat and listened to the radio.
  
`...be confirmed,' said the radio.
  
`Tomorrow,' it continued, `the Vice-President of Poffla Vigus,
Roopy Ga Stip, will announce that he intends to run for Presi-
dent. In a speech he will give tomorrow at...'
  
`Find another channel,' said the prophet. Arthur pushed the
preset button.
  
`...refused to Comment,' said the radio. `Next week's jobless
totals in the Zabush sector, it continued, `will be the worst since
records began. A report published next month says...'
  
`Find another,' barked the prophet, crossly. Arthur pushed
the button again.
  
`...denied it categorically,' said the radio. `Next month's
Royal Wedding between Prince Gid of the Soofling Dynasty
and Princess Hooli of Raui Alpha will be the most spectacular
ceremony the Bjanjy Territories has ever witnessed. Our reporter
Trillian Astra is there and sends us this report.'
  
Arthur blinked.
  
The sound of cheering crowds and a hubbub of brass bands
erupted from the radio. A very familiar voice said, `Well Krart,
the scene here in the middle of next month is absolutely incred-
ible. Princess Hooli is looking radiant in a...'
  
The prophet swiped the radio off the bench and on to the
dusty ground, where it squawked like a badly tuned chicken.
  
`See what we have to contend with?' grumbled the prophet.
`Here, hold this. Not that, this. No, not like that. This way up.
Other way round, you fool.'
  `I was listening to that,' complained Arthur, grappling help-
lessly with the prophet's hammer.
  
`So does everybody. That's why this place is like a ghost
town.' He spat into the dust.
  
`No, I mean, that sounded like someone I knew.'
  
`Princess Hooli? If I had to stand around saying hello to
everybody who's known Princess Hooli I'd need a new set of
lungs.'
  
`Not the Princess,' said Arthur. `The reporter. Her name's
Trillian. I don't know where she got the Astra from. She's from
the same planet as me. I wondered where she'd got to.'
  
`Oh, she's all over the continuum these days. We can't get
the tri-d TV stations out here of course, thank the Great Green
Arkleseizure, but you hear her on the radio, gallivanting here
and there through space/time. She wants to settle down and find
herself a steady era that young lady does. It'll all end in tears.
Probably already has.' He swung with his hammer and hit his
thumb rather hard. He started to speak in tongues.
 The village of oracles wasn't much better.
  
He had been told that when looking for a good oracle it
was best to find the oracle that other oracles went to, but he
was shut. There was a sign by the entrance saying, `I just don't
know any more. Try next door, but that's just a suggestion, not
formal oracular advice.'
  
`Next door' was a cave a few hundred yards away and Arthur
walked towards it. Smoke and steam were rising from, respec-
tively, a small fire and a battered tin pot that was hanging over
it. There was also a very nasty smell coming from the pot. At
least Arthur thought it was coming from the pot. The distended
bladders of some of the local goat-like things were hanging from
a propped-up line drying in the sun, and the smell could have been
coming from them. There was also, a worryingly small distance
away, a pile of discarded bodies of the local goat-like things and
the smell could have been coming from them.
  
But the smell could just as easily have been coming from
the old lady who was busy beating flies away from the pile
of bodies. It was a hopeless task because each of the flies was
about the size of a winged bottle top and all she had was a table
tennis bat. Also she seemed half blind. Every now and then, by
chance, her wild thrashing would connect with one of the flies
with a richly satisfying thunk, and the fly would hurtle through
the air and smack itself open against the rock face a few yards
from the entrance to her cave.
  
She gave every impression, by her demeanour, that these
were the moments she lived for.
  
Arthur watched this exotic performance for a while from
a polite distance, and then at last tried giving a gentle cough
to attract her attention. The gentle cough, courteously meant,
unfortunately involved first inhaling rather more of the local
atmosphere than he had so far been doing and as a result, he
erupted into a fit of raucous expectoration, and collapsed against
the rock face, choking and streaming with tears. He struggled for
breath, but each new breath made things worse. He vomited,
half-choked again, rolled over his vomit, kept rolling for a few
yards, and eventually made it up on to his hands and knees and
crawled, panting, into slightly fresher air.
  
`Excuse me,' he said. He got some breath back. `I really
am most dreadfully sorry. I feel a complete idiot and...' He
gestured helplessly towards the small pile of his own vomit lying
spread around the entrance to her cave.
  
`What can I say?' he said. `What can I possibly say?'
  
This at least had gained her attention. She looked round
at him suspiciously, but, being half blind, had difficulty finding
him in the blurred and rocky landscape.
  
He waved, helpfully. `Hello!' he called.
  
At last she spotted him, grunted to herself and turned back
to whacking flies.
  
It was horribly apparent from the way that currents of air
moved when she did, that the major source of the smell was
in fact her. The drying bladders, the festering bodies and the
noxious potage may all have been making violent contributions
to the atmosphere, but the major olfactory presence was the
woman herself.
  
She got another good thwack at a fly. It smacked against
the rock and dribbled its insides down it in what she clearly
regarded, if she could see that far, as a satisfactory manner.
  
Unsteadily, Arthur got to his feet and brushed himself down
with a fistful of dried grass. He didn't know what else to do by
way of announcing himself. He had half a mind just to wander
off again, but felt awkward about leaving a pile of his vomit
in front of the entrance to the woman's home. He wondered
what to do about it. He started to pluck up more handsful
of the scrubby dried grass that was to be found here and
there. He was worried, though, that if he ventured nearer
to the vomit he might simply add to it rather than clear it
up.
  
Just as he was debating with himself as to what the right
course of action was he began to realise that she was at last
saying something to him.
  
`I beg your pardon?' he called out.
  
`I said, can I help you?' she said, in a thin, scratchy voice.
that he could only just hear.
  
`Er, I came to ask your advice,' he called back, feeling
a bit ridiculous.
  
She turned to peer at him, myopically, then turned back,
swiped at a fly and missed.
  
`What about?' she said.
  
`I beg your pardon?' he said.
  
`I said, what about?' she almost screeched.
  
`Well,' said Arthur. `Just sort of general advice, really. It
said in the brochure -'
  
`Ha! Brochure!' spat the old woman. She seemed to be
waving her bat more or less at random now.
  
Arthur fished the crumpled-up brochure from his pocket.
He wasn't quite certain why. He had already read it and she,
he expected, wouldn't want to. He unfolded it anyway in order
to have something to frown thoughtfully at for a moment or
two. The copy in the brochure wittered on about the ancient
mystical arts of the seers and sages of Hawalius, and wild-
ly over-represented the level of accommodation available in
Hawalion. Arthur still carried a copy of The Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy with him but found, when he consulted
it, that the entries were becoming more abstruse and paranoid
and had lots of x's and j's and {'s in them. Something was wrong
somewhere. Whether it was in his own personal unit, or whether
it was something or someone going terribly amiss, or perhaps just
hallucinating, at the heart of the Guide organisation itself, he
didn't know. But one way or another he was even less inclined
to trust it than usual, which meant that he trusted it not one
bit, and mostly used it for eating his sandwiches off when he
was sitting on a rock staring at something.
  
The woman had turned and was walking slowly towards him
now. Arthur tried, without making it too obvious, to judge the
wind direction, and bobbed about a bit as she approached.
  
`Advice,' she said. `Advice, eh?'
  
`Er, yes,' said Arthur. `Yes, that is -'
  
He frowned again at the brochure, as if to be certain that
he hadn't misread it and stupidly turned up on the wrong planet
or something. The brochure said `The friendly local inhabitants
will be glad to share with you the knowledge and wisdom of
the ancients. Peer with them into the swirling mysteries of past
and future time!' There were some coupons as well, but Arthur
had been far too embarrassed actually to cut them out or try to
present them to anybody.
  
`Advice, eh,' said the old woman again. `Just sort of general
advice, you say. On what? What to do with your life, that sort
of thing?'
  
`Yes,' said Arthur. `That sort of thing. Bit of a problem I
sometimes find if I'm being perfectly honest.' He was trying
desperately, with tiny darting movements, to stay upwind of
her. She surprised him by suddenly turning sharply away from
him and heading off towards her cave.
  
`You'll have to help me with the photocopier, then,' she said.
  
`What?' said Arthur.
 
`The photocopier,' she repeated, patiently. `You'll have to
help me drag it out. It's solar-powered. I have to keep it in
the cave, though, so the birds don't shit on it.'
  
`I see,' said Arthur.
  
`I'd take a few deep breaths if I were you,' muttered the
old woman, as she stomped into the gloom of the cave mouth.
  
Arthur did as she advised. He almost hyperventilated in fact.
When he felt he was ready, he held his breath and followed her
in.
  
The photocopier was a big old thing on a rickety trolley.
It stood just inside the dim shadows of the cave. The wheels
were stuck obstinately in different directions and the ground
was rough and stony.
  
`Go ahead and take a breath outside,' said the old woman.
Arthur was going red in the face trying to help her move the
thing.
  
He nodded in relief. If she wasn't going to be embarrassed
about it then neither, he was determined, would he. He stepped
outside and took a few breaths, then came back in to do more
heaving and pushing. He had to do this quite a few times till at
last the machine was outside.
  
The sun beat down on it. The old woman disappeared back
into her cave again and brought with her some mottled metal
panels, which she connected to the machine to collect the sun's
energy.
  
She squinted up into the sky. The sun was quite bright,
but the day was hazy and vague.
  
`It'll take a while,' she said.
  
Arthur said he was happy to wait.
  
The old woman shrugged and stomped across to the fire.
Above it, the contents of the tin can were bubbling away. She
poked about at them with a stick.
  
`You won't be wanting any lunch?' she enquired of Arthur.
  
`I've eaten, thanks,' said Arthur. `No, really. I've eaten.'
  
`I'm sure you have,' said the old lady. She stirred with
the stick. After a few minutes she fished a lump of some-
thing out, blew on it to cool it a little, and then put it in
her mouth.
  
She chewed on it thoughtfully for a bit.
  
Then she hobbled slowly across to the pile of dead goat-like
things. She spat the lump out on to the pile. She hobbled slowly
back to the can. She tried to unhook it from the sort of tripod-like
thing that it was hanging from.
  
`Can I help you?' said Arthur, jumping up politely. He hurried
over.
  
Together they disengaged the tin from the tripod and carried
it awkwardly down the slight slope that led downwards from her
cave and towards a line of scrubby and gnarled trees, which
marked the edge of a steep but quite shallow gully, from, which
a whole new range of offensive smells was emanating.
  
`Ready?' said the old Lady.
  
`Yes...' said Arthur, though he didn't know for what.
  
`One,' said the old lady.
  
`Two,' she said.
  
`Three,' she added.
  
Arthur realised just in time what she intended. Together
they tossed the contents of the tin into the gully.
  
After an hour or two of uncommunicative silence, the old
woman decided that the solar panels had absorbed enough
sunlight to run the photocopier now and she disappeared to
rummage inside her cave. She emerged at last with a few sheaves
of paper and fed them through the machine.
  
She handed the copies to Arthur.
  
`This is, er, this your advice then, is it?' said Arthur, leafing
through them uncertainly.
  
`No,' said the old lady. `It's the story of my life. You see,
the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged
against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look
through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major
decisions I ever made to make them stand out. They're all indexed
and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take
decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that
I've taken, then maybe you won't finish up at the end of your
life...' she paused, and filled her lungs for a good shout, `...
in a smelly old cave like this!'
  
She grabbed up her table tennis bat, rolled up her sleeve,
stomped off to her pile of dead goat-like things, and started
to set about the flies with vim and vigour.
 The last village Arthur visited consisted entirely of extremely
high poles. They were so high that it wasn't possible to tell,
from the ground, what was on top of them, and Arthur had to
climb three before he found one that had anything on top of it
at all other than a platform covered with bird droppings.
  
Not an easy task. You went up the poles by climbing on
the short wooden pegs that had been hammered into them in
slowly ascending spirals. Anybody who was a less diligent tourist
than Arthur would have taken a couple of snapshots and sloped
right off to the nearest Bar \& Grill, where you also could buy a
range of particularly sweet and gooey chocolate cakes to eat in
front of the ascetics. But, largely as a result of this, most of the
ascetics had gone now. In fact they had mostly gone and set up
lucrative therapy centres on some of the more affluent worlds
in the North West ripple of the Galaxy, where the living was
easier by a factor of about seventeen million, and the chocolate
was just fabulous. Most of the ascetics, it turned out, had not
known about chocolate before they took up asceticism. Most of
the clients who came to their therapy centres knew about it all
too well.
  
At the top of the third pole Arthur stopped for a breather. He
was very hot and out of breath, since each pole was about fifty or
sixty feet high. The world seemed to swing vertiginously around
him, but it didn't worry Arthur too much. He knew that, logically.
he could not die until he had been to Stavromula Beta 4, and had
therefore managed to cultivate a merry attitude towards extreme
personal danger. He felt a little giddy perched fifty feet up in the
air on top of a pole, but he dealt with it by eating a sandwich. He
was just about to embark on reading the photocopied life history
of the oracle, when he was rather startled to hear a slight cough
behind him.
  
He turned so abruptly that he dropped his sandwich, which
turned downwards through the air and was rather small by the
time it was stopped by the ground.
  
About thirty feet behind Arthur was another pole, and, alone
amongst the sparse forest of about three dozen poles, the top of
it was occupied. It was occupied by an old man who, in turn,
seemed to be occupied by profound thoughts that were making
him scowl.
  
`Excuse me,' said Arthur. The man ignored him. Perhaps he
couldn't hear him. The breeze was moving about a bit. It was
only by chance that Arthur had heard the slight cough.
  
`Hello?' called Arthur. `Hello!'
  
The man at last glanced round at him. He seemed surprised
to see him. Arthur couldn't tell if he was surprised and pleased
to see him or just surprsised.
  
`Are you open?' called Arthur.
  
The man frowned in incomprehension. Arthur couldn't tell
if he couldn't understand or couldn't hear.
 4 See Life, the Universe and Everything, {\bf Chapter 18}.
 `I'll pop over,' called Arthur. `Don't go away.'
  
He clambered off the small platform and climbed quickly
down the spiralling pegs, arriving at the bottom quite dizzy.
  
He started to make his way over to the pole on which
the old man was sitting, and then suddenly realised that he
had disoriented himself on the way down and didn't know for
certain which one it was.
  
He looked around for landmarks and worked out which was
the right one.
  
He climbed it. It wasn't.
  
`Damn,' he said. `Excuse me!' he called out to the old man
again, who was now straight in front of him and forty feet away.
`Got lost. Be with you in a minute.' Down he went again, getting
very hot and bothered.
  
When he arrived, panting and sweating, at the top of the
pole that he knew for certain was the right one he realised that
the man was, somehow or other, mucking him about.
  
`What do you want?' shouted the old man crossly at him. He
was now sitting on top of the pole that Arthur recognised was
the one that he had been on himself when eating his sandwich.
  
`How did you get over there?' called Arthur in bewilder-
ment.
  
`You think I'm going to tell you just like that what it took
me forty springs, summers and autumns of sitting on top of a
pole to work out?'
  
`What about winter?'
  
`What about winter?'
  
`Don't you sit on the pole in the winter?'
  
`Just because I sit up a pole for most of my life,' said the
man, `doesn't mean I'm an idiot. I go south in the winter. Got
a beach house. Sit on the chimney stack.'
  
`Do you have any advice for a traveller?'
  
`Yes. Get a beach house.'
  
`I see.'
  
The man stared out over the hot, dry scrubby landscape.
>From here Arthur could just see the old woman, a tiny speck
in the distance, dancing up and down swatting flies.
  
`You see her?' called the old man, suddenly.
  
`Yes,' said Arthur. `I consulted her in fact.'
  
`Fat lot she knows. I got the beach house because she turned
it down. What advice did she give you?'
  
`Do exactly the opposite of everything she's done.'
  
`In other words, get a beach house.'
  
`I suppose so,' said Arthur. `Well, maybe I'll get one.'
  
`Hmmm.'
  
The horizon was swimming in a fetid heat haze.
  
`Any other advice?' asked Arthur. `Other than to do with
real estate?'
  
`A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind,'
said the man. He turned and looked at Arthur.
  
Oddly, the man's face was now only a couple of feet away.
He seemed in one way to be a perfectly normal shape, but his
body was sitting cross-legged on a pole forty feet away while his
face was only two feet from Arthur's. Without moving his head,
and without seeming to do anything odd at all, he stood up and
stepped on to the top of another pole. Either it was just the heat,
thought Arthur, or space was a different shape for him.
  
`A beach house,' he said, `doesn't even have to be on the
beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate,'
he went on, `at boundary conditions.'
  
`Really?' said Arthur.
  
`Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where
body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be
on one side, and look at the other.'
  
Arthur got terribly excited. This was exactly the sort of
thing he'd been promised in the brochure. Here was a man who
seemed to be moving through some kind of Escher space saying
really profound things about all sorts of stuff.
  
It was unnerving though. The man was now stepping from
pole to ground, from ground to pole, from pole to pole, from
pole to horizon and back: he was making complete nonsense of
Arthur's spatial universe. `Please stop!' Arthur said, suddenly.
  
`Can't take it, huh?' said the man. Without the slightest
movement he was now back, sitting cross-legged, on top of the
pole forty feet in front of Arthur. `You come to me for advice,
but you can't cope with anything you don't recognise. Hmmm.
So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make
it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual I suppose.' He
sighed and squinted mournfully into the distance.
  
`Where you from, boy?' he then asked.
Arthur decided to be clever. He was fed up with being
mistaken for a complete idiot by everyone he ever met. `Tell
you what,' he said. `You're a seer. Why don't you tell me?'
  
The old man sighed again. `I was just,' he said, passing his
hand round behind his head, `making conversation.' When he
brought his hand round to the front again, he had a globe of the
Earth spinning on his up-pointed forefinger. It was unmistakable.
He put it away again. Arthur was stunned.
  
`How did you -'
  
`I can't tell you.'
  
`Why not? I've come all this way.'
`You cannot see what I see because you see what you see.
You cannot know what I know because you know what you
know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what
you see and what you know because they are not of the same
kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know,
because that would be to replace you yourself.'
  
`Hang on, can I write this down?' said Arthur, excitedly
fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.
  
`You can pick up a copy at the spaceport,' said the old
man . `They've got racks of the stuff.'
  
`Oh,' said Arthur, disappointed. `Well, isn't there anything
that's perhaps a bit more specific to me?'
  
`Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at
all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it,
so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.'
  
Arthur looked at him doubtfully. `Can I get that at the
spaceport, too?' he said.
  
`Check it out,' said the old man.
  
`It says in the brochure,' said Arthur, pulling it out of his
pocket and looking at it again, `that I can have a special prayer,
individually tailored to me and my special needs.'
  
`Oh, all right,' said the old man. `Here's a prayer for you.
Got a pencil?'
  
`Yes,' said Arthur.
  
`It goes like this. Let's see now: ``Protect me from knowing what
I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there
are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing
that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to
know about. Amen.'' That's it. It's what you pray silently inside
yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.'
  
`Hmmm,' said Arthur. `Well, thank you -'
  
`There's another prayer that goes with it that's very impor-
tant,' continued the old man, `so you'd better jot this down,
too.'
  
`OK.'
  
`It goes, ``Lord, lord, lord...'' It's best to put that bit
in, just in case. You can never be too sure ``Lord, lord, lord.
Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen...''
And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes
from missing out that last part.'
  
`Ever heard of a place called Stavromula Beta?' asked Arthur.
  
`No.'
  
`Well, thank you for your help,' said Arthur.
  
`Don't mention it,' said the man on the pole, and vanished.


                          % 10

Ford hurled himself at the door of the editor-in-chief's office,
tucked himself into a tight ball as the frame splintered and gave
way once again, rolled rapidly across the floor to where the smart
grey crushed leather sofa was and set up his strategic operational
base behind it.
  
That, at least, was the plan.
  
Unfortunately the smart grey crushed leather sofa wasn't there.
  
Why, thought Ford, as he twisted himself round in mid-air,
lurched, dived and scuttled for cover behind Harl's desk, did
people have this stupid obsession with rearranging their office
furniture every five minutes?
  
Why, for instance, replace a perfectly serviceable if rather
muted grey crushed leather sofa with what appeared to be a
small tank?
  
And who was the big guy with the mobile rocket launcher
on his shoulder? Someone from head office? Couldn't be. This
was head office. At least it was the head office of the Guide.
Where these InfiniDim Enterprises guys came from Zarquon
knew. Nowhere very sunny, judging from the slug-like colour
and texture of their skins. This was all wrong, thought Ford.
People connected with the Guide should come from sunny
places.
  
There were several of them, in fact, and all of them seemed
to be more heavily armed and armoured than you normally
expected corporate executives to be, even in today's rough and
tumble business world.
  
He was making a lot of assumptions here, of course. He
was assuming that the big, bull-necked, slug-like guys were
in some way connected with InfiniDim Enterprises, but it was
a reasonable assumption and he felt happy about it because
they had logos on their armour-plating which said `InfiniDim
Enterprises' on them. He had a nagging suspicion that this was
not a business meeting, though. He also had a nagging feeling
that these slug-like creatures were familiar to him in some way.
Familiar, but in an unfamiliar guise.
  
Well, he had been in the room for a good two and a half
seconds now, and thought that it was probably about time to
start doing something constructive. He could take a hostage.
That would be good.
  
Vann Harl was in his swivel chair, looking alarmed, pale
and shaken. Had probably had some bad news as well as a
nasty bang to the back of his head. Ford leapt to his feet and
made a running grab for him.
  Under the pretext of getting him into a good solid double
underpinned elbow-lock, Ford managed surreptitiously to slip
the Ident-i-Eeze back into Harl's inner pocket.
  
Bingo!
  
He'd done what he came to do. Now he just had to talk
his way out of here.
  
`OK,' he said. `I...' He paused.
  
The big guy with the rocket launcher was turning towards
Ford Prefect and pointing it at him, which Ford couldn't help
feeling was wildly irresponsible behaviour.
  
`I...' he started again, and then on a sudden impulse
decided to duck.
  
There was a deafening roar as flames leapt from the back
of the rocket launcher and a rocket leapt from its front.
  
The rocket hurtled past Ford and hit the large plate-glass
window, which billowed outwards in a shower of a million
shards under the force of the explosion. Huge shock waves of
noise and air pressure reverberated around the room, sweeping
a couple of chairs, a filing cabinet and Colin the security robot
out of the window.
  
Ah! So they're not totally rocket-proof after all, thought Ford
Prefect to himself. Someone should have a word with somebody
about that. He disentangled himself from Harl and tried to work
out which way to run.
  
He was surrounded.
  
The big guy with the rocket launcher was moving it up
into position for another shot.
Ford was completely at a loss for what to do next.
  
`Look,' he said in a stern voice. But he wasn't certain how far
saying things like `Look' in a stern voice was necessarily going to
get him, and time was not on his side. What the hell, he thought,
you're only young once, and threw himself out of the window.
That would at least keep the element of surprise on his side.


                          % 11

The first thing Arthur Dent had to do, he realised resignedly,
was to get himself a life. This meant he had to find a planet
he could have one on. It had to be a planet he could breathe
on, where he could stand up and sit down without experiencing
gravitational discomfort. It had to be somewhere where the acid
levels were low and the plants didn't actually attack you.
  
`I hate to be anthropic about this,' he said to the strange
thing behind the desk at the Resettlement Advice Centre on
Pintleton Alpha, `but I'd quite like to live somewhere where
the people look vaguely like me as well. You know. Sort of
human.'
  
The strange thing behind the desk waved some of its stranger
bits around and seemed rather taken aback by this. It oozed and
glopped off its seat, thrashed its way slowly across the floor,
ingested the old metal filing cabinet and then, with a great
belch, excreted the appropriate drawer. It popped out a couple
of glistening tentacles from its ear, removed some files from the
drawer, sucked the drawer back in and vomited up the cabinet
again. It thrashed its way back across the floor, slimed its way
back up on to the seat and slapped the files on the table.
  
`See anything you fancy?' it asked.
  
Arthur looked nervously through some grubby and damp
pieces of paper. He was definitely in some backwater part of
the Galaxy here, and somewhere off to the left as far as the
universe he knew and recognised was concerned. In the space
where his own home should have been there was a rotten hick
planet, drowned with rain and inhabited by thugs and boghogs.
Even The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy seemed to work
only fitfully here, which was why he was reduced to making these
sorts of enquiries in these sorts of places. One place he always
asked after was Stavromula Beta, but no one had ever heard of
such a planet.
  
The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little
to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had
been extremely chastened to realise that although he originally
came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and
armagnac he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He
couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster.
He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was
not a lot of demand for his services.
  
Arthur's heart sank. This surprised him, because he thought
it was already about as low as it could possibly be. He closed
his eyes for a moment. He so much wanted to be home. He
so much wanted his own home world, the actual Earth he had
grown up on, not to have been demolished. He so much wanted
none of this to have happened. He so much wanted that when he
opened his eyes again he would be standing on the doorstep of his
little cottage in the west country of England, that the sun would
be shining over the green hills, the post van would be going up
the lane, the daffodils would be blooming in his garden, and in
the distance the pub would be opening for lunch. He so much
wanted to take the newspaper down to the pub and read it over
a pint of bitter. He so much wanted to do the crossword. He so
much wanted to be able to get completely stuck on 17 across.
  
He opened his eyes.
  
The strange thing was pulsating irritably at him, tapping
some kind of pseudopodia on the desk.
  
Arthur shook his head and looked at the next sheet of paper.
  
Grim, he thought. And the next.
  
Very grim. And the next.
  
Oh... Now that looked better.
  
It was a world called Bartledan. It had oxygen. It had green
hills. It even, it seemed, had a renowned literary culture. But
the thing that most aroused his interest was a photograph of a
small bunch of Bartledanian people, standing around in a village
square, smiling pleasantly at the camera.
  
`Ah,' he said, and held the picture up to the strange thing
behind the desk.
  
Its eyes squirmed out on stalks and roiled up and down
the piece of paper, leaving a glistening trail of slime all over
it.
  
`Yes,' it said with distaste. `They do look exactly like you.'
 Arthur moved to Bartledan and, using some money he had
made by selling some toenail clippings and spit to a DNA
bank, he bought himself a room in the village featured in the
picture. It was pleasant there. The air was balmy. The people
looked like him and seemed not to mind him being there. They
didn't attack him with anything. He bought some clothes and a
cupboard to put them in.
  
He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.
  
At first he tried to sit and read. But the literature of Bartledan,
famed though it was throughout this sector of the Galaxy for its
subtlety and grace, didn't seem to be able to sustain his interest.
The problem was that it wasn't actually about human beings after
all. It wasn't about what human beings wanted. The people of
Bartledan were remarkably like human beings to look at, but
when you said `Good evening' to one, he would tend to look
around with a slight sense of surprise, sniff the air and say that,
yes, he supposed that it probably was a goodish evening now that
Arthur came to mention it.
  
`No, what I meant was to wish you a good evening,' Arthur
would say, or rather, used to say. He soon learned to avoid these
conversations. `I mean that I hope you have a good evening,' he
would add.
  
More puzzlement.
  
`Wish?' the Bartledanian would say at last, in polite bafflement.
  
`Er, yes,' Arthur would then have said. `I'm just expressing
the hope that...'
  
`Hope?'
  
`Yes.'
  
`What is hope?'
  
Good question, thought Arthur to himself, and retreated
back to his room to think about things.
  
On the one hand he could only recognise and respect what he
learnt about the Bartledanian view of the universe, which was
that the universe was what the universe was, take it or leave it.
On the other hand he could not help but feel that not to desire
anything, not ever to. wish or to hope, was just not natural.
  
Natural. There was a tricky word.
  
He had long ago realised that a lot of things that he had
thought of as natural, like buying people presents at Christmas,
stopping at red lights or falling at a rate of 32 feet/second/second,
were just the habits of his own world and didn't necessarily work
the same way anywhere else; but not to wish - that really couldn't
be natural, could it? That would be like not breathing.
  
Breathing was another thing that the Bartledanians didn't
do, despite all the oxygen in the atmosphere. They just stood
there. Occasionally they ran around and played netball and stuff
(without ever wishing to win though, of course - they would just
play, and whoever won, won), but they never actually breathed.
It was, for some reason, unnecessary. Arthur quickly learned
that playing netball with them was just too spooky. Though they
looked like humans, and even moved and sounded like humans,
they didn't breathe and they didn't wish for things.
  
Breathing and wishing for things, on the other hand, was
just about all that Arthur seemed to do all day. Sometimes
he would wish for things so much that his breathing would get
quite agitated, and he would have to go and lie down for a bit.
On his own. In his small room. So far from the world which had
given birth to him that his brain could not even process the sort
of numbers involved without just going limp.
  
He preferred not to think about it. He preferred just to sit
and read - or at least he would prefer it if there was anything
worth reading. But nobody in Bartledanian stories ever wanted
anything. Not even a glass of water. Certainly, they would fetch
one if they were thirsty, but if there wasn't one available, they
would think no more about it. He had just read an entire book
in which the main character had, over the course of a week, done
some work in his garden, played a great deal of netball, helped
mend a road, fathered a child on his wife and then unexpectedly
died of thirst just before the last chapter. In exasperation Arthur
had combed his way back through the book and in the end had
found a passing reference to some problem with the plumbing in
Chapter 2. And that was it. So the guy dies. It just happens.
  
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.
  
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.
  
The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen
is that it won't. That is not what `accident' means. The acci-
dent 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.
  
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.
  
Fire engulfed the forest, boiled into the night, then neatly
put itself out, as all unscheduled fires over a certain size are
now required to do by law. For a short while afterwards, other
small fires flared up here and there as odd pieces of scattered
debris exploded quietly in their own time. Then they too died
away.
  
Arthur Dent, because of the sheer boredom of endless inter-
stellar flight, was the only one on board who had actually
familiarised himself with the ship's safety procedures in case
of an unscheduled landing, and was therefore the sole survivor.
He lay dazed, broken and bleeding in a sort of fluffy pink plastic
cocoon with `Have a nice day' printed in over three thousand
different languages all over it.
  
Black, roaring silences swam sickeningly through his shattered
mind. He knew with a kind of resigned certainty that he would
survive, because he had not yet been to Stavromula Beta.
  
After what seemed an eternity of pain and darkness, he
became aware of quiet shapes moving around him.


                          % 12

Ford tumbled through the open air in a cloud of glass splinters
and chair parts. Again, he hadn't really thought things through,
really, and was just playing it by ear, buying time. At times of
major crisis he found it was often quite helpful to have his life
flash before his eyes. It gave him a chance to reflect on things,
see things in some sort of perspective, and it sometimes furnished
him with a vital clue as to what to do next.
  
There was the ground rushing up to meet him at 30 feet
per second per second, but he would, he thought, deal with
that problem when he got to it. First things first.
  
Ah, here it came. His childhood. Hum drum stuff, he'd
been through it all before. Images flashed by. Boring times on
Betelgeuse Five. Zaphod Beeblebrox as a kid. Yes he knew all
that. He wished he had some kind of fast forward in his brain.
His seventh birthday party, being given his first towel. Come on,
come on.
  
He was twisting and turning downwards, the outside air at
this height a cold shock to his lungs. Trying not to inhale glass.
 
Early voyages to other planets. Oh for Zark's sake, this
was like some sort of bloody travelogue documentary before
the main feature. First beginning to work for the Guide.
  
Ah!
  
Those were the days. They worked out of a hut on the
Bwenelli Atoll on Fanalla before the Riktanarqals and the
Danqueds vertled it. Half a dozen guys, some towels, a handful
of highly sophisticated digital devices, and most importantly a
lot of dreams. No. Most importantly a lot of Fanallan rum. To
be completely accurate, that Ol' Janx Spirit was the absolute
most important thing, then the Fanallan rum, and also some of
the beaches on the Atoll where the local girls would hang out,
but the dreams were important as well. Whatever happened to
those?
  
He couldn't quite remember what the dreams were in fact,
but they had seemed immensely important at the time. They
had certainly not involved this huge towering office block he was
now falling down the side of. All of that had come when some of
the original team had started to settle down and get greedy, while
he and others had stayed out in the field, researching and hitch
hiking, and gradually becoming more and more isolated from the
corporate nightmare the Guide had inexorably turned into, and
the architectural monstrosity it had come to occupy. Where were
the dreams in that? He thought of all the corporate lawyers who
occupied half of the building, all the `operatives' who occupied the
lower levels, and all the sub-editors and their secretaries and their
secretaries' lawyers and their secretaries' lawyers' secretaries, and
worst of all the accountants and the marketing department.
  
He had half a mind just to keep on falling. Two fingers
to the lot of them.
  
He was just passing the seventeenth floor now, where the
marketing department hung out. Load of tosspots all arguing
about what colour the Guide should be and exercising their
infinitely infallible skills of being wise after the event. If any of
them had chosen to look out of the window at that moment they
would have been startled by the sight of Ford Prefect dropping
past them to his certain death and flicking V-signs at them.
  
Sixteenth floor. Sub-editors. Bastards. What about all that
copy of his they'd cut? Fifteen years of research he'd filed
from one planet alone and they'd cut it to two words. `Mostly
Harmless.' V-signs to them as well.
  
Fifteenth floor. Logistical Administration, whatever that was
about. They all had big cars. That, he thought, was what that
was about.
  
Fourteenth floor. Personnel. He had a very shrewd suspicion
that it was they who had engineered his fifteen-year exile while
the Guide metamorphosed into the corporate monolith (or
rather, duolith - mustn't forget the lawyers) it had become.
  
Thirteenth floor. Research and development.
  
Hang about.
  
Thirteenth floor.
  
He was having to think rather fast at the moment because
the situation was becoming a little urgent.
  
He suddenly remembered the floor display panel in the eleva-
tor. It hadn't had a thirteenth floor. He'd thought no more about
it because, having spent fifteen years on the rather backward
planet Earth where they were superstitious about the number
thirteen, he was used to being in buildings that numbered their
floors without it. No reason for that here, though.
  
The windows of the thirteenth floor, he could not help noticing
as he flashed swiftly by them, were darkened.
  
What was going on in there? He started to remember all
the stuff that Harl had been talking about. One, new, multi-
dimensional Guide spread across an infinite number of universes.
It had sounded, the way Harl had put it, like wild meaninglessness
dreamed up by the marketing department with the backing of the
accountants. If it was any more real than that then it was a very
weird and dangerous idea. Was it real? What was going on behind
the darkened windows of the sealed-off thirteenth floor?
  
Ford felt a rising sense of curiosity, and then a rising sense
of panic. That was the complete list of rising feelings he had. In
every other respect he was falling very rapidly. He really ought
to turn his mind to wondering how he was going to get out of
this situation alive.
  
He glanced down. A hundred feet or so below him people
were milling around, some of them beginning to look up expect-
antly. Clearing a space for him. Even temporarily calling off the
wonderful and completely fatuous hunt for wockets.
  He would hate to disappoint them, but about two feet below
him, he hadn't realised before, was Colin. Colin had obviously
been happily dancing attendance and waiting for him to decide
what he wanted to do.
  
`Colin!' Ford bawled.
  
Colin didn't respond. Ford went cold. Then he suddenly
realised that he hadn't told Colin his name was Colin.
  
`Come up here!' Ford bawled.
  
Colin bobbed up beside him. Colin was enjoying the ride
down immensely and hoped that Ford was, too.
  
Colin's world went unexpectedly dark as Ford's towel suddenly
enveloped him. Colin immediately felt himself get much, much
heavier. He was thrilled and delighted by the challenge that Ford
had presented him with. Just not sure if he could handle it, that
was all.
  
The towel was slung over Colin. Ford was hanging from the
towel, gripping to its seams. Other hitch hikers had seen fit to
modify their towels in exotic ways, weaving all kinds of esoteric
tools and utilities and even computer equipment into their fabric.
Ford was a purist. He liked to keep things simple. He carried
a regular towel from a regular domestic soft furnishings shop.
It even had a kind of blue and pink floral pattern despite his
repeated attempts to bleach and stone wash it. It had a couple
of pieces of wire threaded into it, a bit of flexible writing stick,
and also some nutrients soaked into one of the corners of the
fabric so he could suck it in an emergency, but otherwise it was
a simple towel you could dry your face on.
  
The only actual modification he had been persuaded by a
friend to make to it was to reinforce the seams.
  
Ford gripped the seams like a maniac.
  
They were still descending, but the rate had slowed.
  
`Up, Colin!' he shouted.
  
Nothing.