If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn't exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar. He was tall and he gangled. When he sat in his deckchair gazing at the Pacific, not so much with any kind of wild surmise any longer as with a peaceful deep dejection, it was a little difficult to tell exactly where the deckchair ended and he began, and you would hesitate to put your hand on, say, his forearm in case the whole structure suddenly collapsed with a snap and took your thumb off. But his smile when he turned it on you was quite remarkable. It seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to you, but which, when he briefly reassembled them in that particular order on his face, made you suddenly fee, "Oh. Well that's all right then." When he spoke, you were glad that he used the smile that made you feel like that pretty often. "Oh yes," he said, "they come and see me. They sit right here. They sit right where you're sitting." He was talking of the angels with the golden beards and green wings and Dr. Scholl sandals. "They eat nachos which they say they can't get where they come from. They do a lot of coke and are very wonderful about a whole range of things." "Do they?" said Arthur. "Are they? So, er... when is this then? When do they come?" He gazed out at the Pacific as well. There were little sandpipers running along the margin of the shore which seemed to have this problem: they needed to find their food in the sand which a wave had just washed over, but they couldn't bear to get their feet wet. To deal with this problem they ran with an odd kind of movement as if they'd been constructed by somebody very clever in Switzerland. Fenchurch was sitting on the sand, idly drawing patterns in it with her fingers. "Weekends, mostly," said Wonko the Sane, "on little scooters. They are great machines." He smiled. "I see," said Arthur. "I see." A tiny cough from Fenchurch attracted his attention and he looked round at her. She had scratched a little stick figure drawing in the sand of the two of them in the clouds. For a moment he thought she was trying to get him excited, then he realized that she was rebuking him. "Who are we," she was saying, "to say he's mad?" His house was certainly peculiar, and since this was the first thing that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered it would help to know what it was like. What it was like was this: It was inside out. Actually inside out, to the extent that they had to park on the carpet. All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves, also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures which were clearly designed to soothe. Where it got really odd was the roof. It folded back on itself like something that Maurits C. Escher, had he been given to hard nights on the town, which is no part of this narrative's purpose to suggest was the case, though it is sometimes hard, looking at his pictures, particularly the one with the awkward steps, not to wonder, might have dreamed up after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up. Confusing. The sign above the front door said, "Come Outside", and so, nervously, they had. Inside, of course, was where the Outside was. Rough brickwork, nicely done painting, guttering in good repair, a garden path, a couple of small trees, some rooms leading off. And the inner walls stretched down, folded curiously, and opened at the end as if, by an optical illusion which would have had Maurits C. Escher frowning and wondering how it was done, to enclose the Pacific Ocean itself. "Hello," said John Watson, Wonko the Sane. Good, they thought to themselves, "Hello" is something we can cope with. "Hello," they said, and all surprisingly was smiles. For quite a while he seemed curiously reluctant to talk about the dolphins, looking oddly distracted and saying, "I forget..." whenever they were mentioned, and had shown them quite proudly round the eccentricities of his house. "It gives me pleasure," he said, "in a curious kind of way, and does nobody any harm," he continued, "that a competent optician couldn't correct." They liked him. He had an open, engaging quality and seemed able to mock himself before anybody else did. "Your wife," said Arthur, looking around, "mentioned some toothpicks." He said it with a hunted look, as if he was worried that she might suddenly leap out from behind the door and mention them again. Wonko the Sane laughed. It was a light easy laugh, and sounded like one he had used a lot before and was happy with. "Ah yes," he said, "that's to so with the day I finally realized that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better." This was the point at which Arthur began to feel a little nervous again. "Here," said Wonko the Sane, "we are outside the Asylum." He pointed again at the rough brickwork, the pointing and the guttering. "Go through that door," he pointed at the first door through which they had originally entered, "and you go into the Asylum. I've tried to decorate it nicely to keep the inmates happy, but there's very little one can do. I never go in there now myself. If ever I am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I simply look at the sign written over the door and shy away." "That one?" said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at a blue plaque with some instructions written on it. "Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do." The sign said: Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion. "It seemed to me," said Wonko the sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane." He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the sandpipers. "And in case it crossed your mind to wonder, as I can see how it possibly might, I am completely sane. Which is why I call myself Wonko the Sane, just to reassure people on this point. Wonko is what my mother called me when I was a kid and clumsy and knocked things over, and sane is what I am, and how," he added, with one of his smiles that made you feel, "Oh. Well that's all right then." "I intend to remain. Shall we go on to the beach and see what we have to talk about?" They went out on to the beach, which was where he started talking about angels with golden beards and green wings and Dr. Scholl sandals. "About the dolphins..." said Fenchurch gently, hopefully. "I can show you the sandals," said Wonko the Sane. "I wonder, do you know..." "Would you like me to show you," said Wonko the Sane, "the sandals? I have them. I'll get them. They are made by the Dr. Scholl company, and the angels say that they particularly suit the terrain they have to work in. They say they run a concession stand by the message. When I say I don't know what that means they say no, you don't, and laugh. Well, I'll get them anyway." As he walked back towards the inside, or the outside depending on how you looked at it, Arthur and Fenchurch looked at each other in a wondering and slightly desperate sort of way, then each shrugged and idly drew figures in the sand. "How are the feet today?" said Arthur quietly. "OK. It doesn't feel so odd in the sand. Or in the water. The water touches them perfectly. I just think this isn't our world." She shrugged. "What do you think he meant," she said, "by the message?" "I don't know," said Arthur, though the memory of a man called Prak who laughed at him continuously kept nagging at him. When Wonko returned he was carrying something that stunned Arthur. Not the sandals, they were perfectly ordinary wooden-bottomed sandals. "I just thought you'd like to see," he said, "what angels wear on their feet. Just out of curiousity. I'm not trying to prove anything, by the way. I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that. I'll show you something to demonstrate that later. So, the other reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool. Anyway, I also thought you might like to see this." This was the thing that Arthur had been stunned to see him carrying, for it was a wonderful silver-grey glass fish bowl, seemingly identical to the one in Arthur's bedroom. Arthur had been trying for some thirty seconds now, without success, to say, "Where did you get that?" sharply, and with a gasp in his voice. Finally his time had come, but he missed it by a millisecond. "Where did you get that?" said Fenchurch, sharply and with a gasp in her voice. Arthur glanced at Fenchurch sharply and with a gasp in his voice said, "What? Have you seen one of these before?" "Yes," she said, "I've got one. Or at least I did have. Russell nicked it to put his golfballs in. I don't know where it came from, just that I was angry with Russell for nicking it. Why, have you got one?" "Yes, it was..." They both became aware that Wonko the Sane was glancing sharply backwards and forwards between them, and trying to get a gasp in edgeways. "You have one of those too?" he said to both of them. "Yes." They both said it. He looked long and calmly at each of them, then he held up the bowl to catch the light of the Californian sun. The bowl seemed almost to sing with the sun, to chime with the intensity of its light, and cast darkly brilliant rainbows around the sand and upon them. He turned it, and turned it. They could see quite clearly in the fine tracery of its etchwork the words "So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish." "Do you know," asked Wonko quietly, "what it is?" They each shook their heads slowly, and with wonder, almost hypnotized by the flashing of the lightning shadows in the grey glass. "It is a farewell gift from the dolphins," said Wonko in a low quiet voice, "the dolphins whom I loved and studied, and swam with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their language, a task which they seemed to make impossibly difficult, considering the fact that I now realize they were perfectly capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to." He shook his head with a slow, slow smile, and then looked again at Fenchurch, and then at Arthur. "Have you..." he said to Arthur, "what have you done with yours? May I ask you that?" "Er, I keep a fish in it," said Arthur, slightly embarrassed. "I happened to have this fish I was wondering what to do with, and, er, there was this bowl." He tailed off. "You've done nothing else? No," he said, "if you had, you would know." He shook his head again. "My wife kept wheatgerm in ours," resumed Wonko, with some new tone in his voice, "until last night..." "What," said Arthur slowly and hushedly, "happened last night?" "We ran out of wheatgerm," said Wonko, evenly. "My wife," he added, "has gone to get some more." He seemed lost with his own thoughts for a moment. "And what happened then?" said Fenchurch, in the same breathless tone. "I washed it," said Wonko. "I washed it very carefully, very very carefully, removing every last speck of wheatgerm, then I dried it slowly with a lint-free cloth, slowly, carefully, turning it over and over. Then I held it to my ear. Have you... have you held one to your ear?" They both shook their heads, again slowly, again dumbly. "Perhaps," he said, "you should."

Chapter 32

The deep roar of the ocean. The break of waves on further shores than thought can find. The silent thunders of the deep. And from among it, voices calling, and yet not voices, humming trillings, wordlings, the half-articulated songs of thought. Greetings, waves of greetings, sliding back down into the inarticulate, words breaking together. A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth. Waves of joy on-where? A world indescribably found, indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water. A fugue of voices now, clamouring explanations, of a disaster unavertable, a world to be destroyed, a surge of helplessness, a spasm of despair, a dying fall, again the break of words. And then the fling of hope, the finding of a shadow Earth in the implications of enfolded time, submerged dimensions, the pull of parallels, the deep pull, the spin of will, the hurl and split of it, the flight. A new Earth pulled into replacement, the dolphins gone. Then stunningly a single voice, quite clear. "This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans. We bid you farewell." And then the sound of long, heavy, perfectly grey bodies rolling away into an unknown fathomless deep, quietly giggling.

Chapter 33

That night they stayed Outside the Asylum and watched TV from inside it. "This is what I wanted you to see," said Wonko the Sane when the news came around again, "an old colleague of mine. He's over in your country running an investigation. Just watch." It was a press conference. "I'm afraid I can't comment on the name Rain God at this present time, and we are calling him an example of a Spontaneous Para-Causal Meteorological Phenomenon." "Can you tell us what that means?" "I'm not altogether sure. Let's be straight here. If we find something we can't understand we like to call it something you can't understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let you go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don't, and I'm afraid we couldn't have that. "No, first we have to call it something which says it's ours, not yours, then we set about finding some way of proving it's not what you said it is, but something we say it is. "And if it turns out that you're right, you'll still be wrong, because we will simply call him a... er 'Supernormal...'-not paranormal or supernatural because you think you know what those mean now, no, a 'Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer'. We'll probably want to shove a 'Quasi' in there somewhere to protect ourselves. Rain God! Huh, never heard such nonsense in my life. Admittedly, you wouldn't catch me going on holiday with him. Thanks, that'll be all for now, other than to say 'Hi!' to Wonko if he's watching."

Chapter 34

On the way home there was a woman sitting next to them on the plane who was looking at them rather oddly. They talked quietly to themselves. "I still have to know," said Fenchurch, "and I strongly feel that you know something that you're not telling me." Arthur sighed and took out a piece of paper. "Do you have a pencil?" he said. She dug around and found one. "What are you doing, sweetheart?" she said, after he had spent twenty minutes frowning, chewing the pencil, scribbling on the paper, crossing things out, scribbling again, chewing the pencil again and grunting irritably to himself. "Trying to remember an address someone once gave me." "Your life would be an awful lot simpler," she said, "if you bought yourself an address book." Finally he passed the paper to her. "You look after it," he said. She looked at it. Among all the scratchings and crossings out were the words "Quentulus Quazgar Mountains. Sevorbeupstry. Planet of Preliumtarn. Sun-Zarss. Galactic Sector QQ7 Active J Gamma." "And what's there?" "Apparently," said Arthur, "it's God's Final Message to His Creation." "That sounds a bit more like it," said Fenchurch. "How do we get there?" "You really...?" "Yes," said Fenchurch firmly, "I really want to know." Arthur looked out of the scratchy little perspex window at the open sky outside. "Excuse me," said the woman who had been looking at them rather oddly, suddenly, "I hope you don't think I'm rude. I get so bored on these long flights, it's nice to talk to somebody. My name's Enid Kapelsen, I'm from Boston. Tell me, do you fly a lot?"

Chapter 35

They went to Arthur's house in the West Country, shoved a couple of towels and stuff in a bag, and then sat down to do what every Galactic hitch hiker ends up spending most of his time doing. They waited for a flying saucer to come by. "Friend of mine did this for fifteen years," said Arthur one night as they sat forlornly watching the sky. "Who was that?" "Called Ford Prefect." He caught himself doing something he had never really expected to do again. He wondered where Ford Prefect was. By an extraordinary coincidence, the following day there were two reports in the paper, one concerning the most astonishing incidents with a flying saucer, and the other about a series of unseemly riots in pubs. Ford Prefect turned up the day after that looking hung over and complaining that Arthur never answered the phone. In fact he looked extremely ill, not merely as if he'd been pulled through a hedge backwards, but as if the hedge was being simultaneously pulled backwards through a combine harvester. He staggered into Arthur's sitting room, waving aside all offers of support, which was an error, because the effort caused him to lose his balance altogether and Arthur had eventually to drag him to the sofa. "Thank you," said Ford, "thank you very much. Have you..." he said, and fell asleep for three hours. "... the faintest idea" he continued suddenly, when he revived, "how hard it is to tap into the British phone system from the Pleiades? I can see that you haven't, so I'll tell you," he said, "over the very large mug of black coffee that you are about to make me." He followed Arthur wobbily into the kitchen. "Stupid operators keep asking you where you're calling from and you try and tell them Letchworth and they say you couldn't be if you're coming in on that circuit. What are you doing?" "Making you some black coffee." "Oh." Ford seemed oddly disappointed. He looked about the place forlornly. "What's this?" he said. "Rice Crispies." "And this?" "Paprika." "I see," said Ford, solemnly, and put the two items back down, one on top of the other, but that didn't seem to balance properly, so he put the other on top of the one and that seemed to work. "A little space-lagged," he said. "What was I saying?" "About not phoning from Letchworth." "I wasn't. I explained this to the lady. 'Bugger Letchworth,' I said, 'if that's your attitude. I am in fact calling from a sales scoutship of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, currently on the sub-light-speed leg of a journey between the stars known on your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady.'-I said 'dear lady'," explained Ford Prefect, "because I didn't want her to be offended by my implication that she was an ignorant cretin..." "Tactful," said Arthur Dent. "Exactly," said Ford, "tactful." He frowned. "Space-lag," he said, "is very bad for sub-clauses. You'll have to assist me again," he continued, "by reminding me what I was talking about." "'Between the stars,'" said Arthur, "'known on your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady, as...'" "'Pleiades Epsilon and Pleiades Zeta,'" concluded Ford triumphantly. "This conversation lark is quite gas isn't it?" "Have some coffee." "Thank you, no. 'And the reason,' I said, 'why I am bothering you with it rather than just dialling direct as I could, because we have some pretty sophisticated telecommunications equipment out here in the Pleiades, I can tell you, is that the penny pinching son of a starbeast piloting this son of a starbeast spaceship insists that I call collect. Can you believe that?'" "And could she?" "I don't know. She had hung up," said Ford, "by this time. So! What do you suppose," he asked fiercely, "I did next?" "I've no idea, Ford," said Arthur. "Pity," said Ford, "I was hoping you could remind me. I really hate those guys you know. They really are the creeps of the cosmos, buzzing around the celestial infinite with their junky little machines that never work properly or, when they do, perform functions that no sane man would require of them and," he added savagely, "go beep to tell you when they've done it!" This was perfectly true, and a very respectable view widely held by right thinking people, who are largely recognizable as being right thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-five thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation product that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. "In other words-and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded-their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws." "And this guy," ranted Ford, "was on a drive to sell more of them! His five-year mission to seek out and explore strange new worlds, and sell Advanced Music Substitute Systems to their restaurants, elevators and wine bars! Or if they didn't have restaurants, elevators and wine bars yet, to artificially accelerate their civilization growth until they bloody well did have! Where's that coffee!" "I threw it away." "Make some more. I have now remembered what I did next. I saved civilization as we know it. I knew it was something like that." He stumbled determinedly back into the sitting room, where he seemed to carry on talking to himself, tripping over the furniture and making beep beep noises. A couple of minutes later, wearing his very placid face, Arthur followed him. Ford looked stunned. "Where have you been?" he demanded. "Making some coffee," said Arthur, still wearing his very placid face. He had long ago realized that the only way of being in Ford's company successfully was to keep a large stock of very placid faces and wear them at all times. "You missed the best bit!" raged Ford. "You missed the bit where I jumped the guy! Now," he said, "I shall have to jump him, all over him!" He hurled himself recklessly at a chair and broke it. "It was better," he said sullenly, "last time," and waved vaguely in the direction of another broken chair which he had already got trussed up on the dining table. "I see," said Arthur, casting a placid eye over the trussed up wreckage, "and, er, what are all the ice cubes for?" "What?" screamed Ford. "What? You missed that bit too? That's the suspended animation facility! I put the guy in the suspended animation facility. Well I had to didn't I?" "So it would seem," said Arthur, in his placid voice. "Don't touch that!!!" yelled Ford. Arthur, who was about to replace the phone, which was for some mysterious reason lying on the table, off the hook, paused, placidly. "OK," said Ford, calming down, "listen to it." Arthur put the phone to his ear. "It's the speaking clock," he said. "Beep, beep, beep," said Ford, "is exactly what is being heard all over that guy's ship, while he sleeps, in the ice, going slowly round a little-known moon of Sesefras Magna. The London Speaking Clock!" "I see," said Arthur again, and decided that now was the time to ask the big one. "Why?" he said, placidly. "With a bit of luck," said Ford, "the phone bill will bankrupt the buggers." He threw himself, sweating, on to the sofa. "Anyway," he said, "dramatic arrival don't you think?"

Chapter 36

The flying saucer in which Ford Prefect had stowed away had stunned the world. Finally there was no doubt, no possibility of mistake, no hallucinations, no mysterious CIA agents found floating in reservoirs. This time it was real, it was definite. It was quite definitely definite. It had come down with a wonderful disregard for anything beneath it and crushed a large area of some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including much of Harrods. The thing was massive, nearly a mile across, some said, dull silver in colour, pitted, scorched and disfigured with the scars of unnumbered vicious space battles fought with savage forces by the light of suns unknown to man. A hatchway opened, crashed down through the Harrods Food Halls, demolished Harvey Nicholls, and with a final grinding scream of tortured architecture, toppled the Sheraton Park Tower. After a long, heart-stopping moment of internal crashes and grumbles of rending machinery, there marched from it, down the ramp, an immense silver robot, a hundred feet tall. It held up a hand. "I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard." Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the non-stop frenetic news reports on the television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages. "It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..." "You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?" "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards role the people." "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want." "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course." "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?" "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?" "What?" "I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?" "I'll look. Tell me about the lizards." Ford shrugged again. "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."

Chapter 37

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.

Chapter 38

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."

Chapter 39

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.

Chapter 40

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.

DOUGLAS ADAMS

YOUNG ZAPHOD PLAYS IT SAFE

A large flying craft moved swiftly across the surface of an astoundingly beautiful sea. From mid-morning onward it plied back and forth in great widening arcs, and at last attracted the attention of the local islanders' a peaceful, sea-food-loving people who gathered on the beach and squinted up into the blinding sun, trying to see what was there. Any sophisticated knowledgeable person, who had knocked about, seen a few things, would probably have remarked on how much the craft looked like a filing cabinet-a large and recently burgled filing cabinet lying on its back with its drawers in the air and flying. The islanders, whose experience was of a different kind, were instead struck by how little it looked like a lobster. They chattered excitedly about its total lack of claws, its stiff unbending back, and the fact that it seemed to experience the greatest difficulty staying on the ground. This last feature seemed particularly funny to them. They jumped up and down on the spot a lot to demonstrate to the stupid thing that they themselves found staying on the ground the easiest thing in the world. But soon this entertainment began to pall for them. After all, since it was perfectly clear to them that the thing was not a lobster, and since their world was blessed with an abundance of things that were lobsters (a good half dozen of which were now marching succulently up the beach toward them), they saw no reason to waste any more time on the thing but decided instead to adjourn immediately for a late lobster lunch. At that exact moment the craft stopped suddenly in mid-air, then upended itself and plunged headlong into the ocean with a great crash of spray which sent them shouting into the trees. When they reemerged, nervously, a few minutes later, all they were able to see was a smoothly scarred circle of water and a few gulping bubbles. That's odd, they said to each other between mouthfuls of the best lobster to be had anywhere in the Western Galaxy, that's the second time that's happened in a year.

The craft which wasn't a lobster dived direct to a depth of two hundred feet, and hung there in the heavy blueness, while vast masses of water swayed about it. High above, where the water was magically clear, a brilliant formation of fish flashed away. Below, where the light had difficulty reaching, the color of the water sank to a dark and savage. Here, at two hundred feet, the sun streamed feebly. A large, silk-skinned sea-mammal rolled idly by, inspecting the craft with a kind of half interest, as if it had half expected to find something of this kind around about here, and then it slid on up and away toward the rippling light. The craft waited for a minute or two, taking readings, and then descended another hundred feet. At this depth it was becoming seriously dark. After a moment or two the internal lights of the craft shut down, an in the second or so that passed before the main external beams suddenly; stabbed out, the only visible light came from a small hazily illuminated pink sign which read The Beeblebrox Salvage and Really Wild Stuff Corporation. The huge beams switched downward, catching a vast shoal of silver fish which swiveled away in silent panic. In the dim control room, which extended in a broad bow from the craft's blunt prow, four heads were gathered around a computer display that was analyzing the very, very faint and intermittent signals that emanated from deep on the sea bed. "That's it," said the owner of one of the heads finally. "Can we be quite sure?" said the owner of another of the heads. "One hundred percent positive," replied the owner of the first head. "You're one hundred percent positive that the ship which is crashed on the bottom of this ocean is the ship which you said you were one hundred percent positive could one hundred percent positively never crash?" said the owner of the two remaining heads. "Hey," he put up two of his hands, "I'm only asking." The two officials from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration responded to this with a very cold stare, but the man with the odd, or rather the even, number of heads missed it. He flung himself back on the pilot couch, opened a couple of beers-one for himself and the other also for himself-stuck his feet on the console and said "Hey, baby" through the ultra-glass at a passing fish. "Mr. Beeblebrox..." began the shorter and less reassuring of the two officials in a low voice. "Yup?" said Zaphod, rapping a suddenly empty can down on some of the more sensitive instruments. "You ready to dive; Let's go." "Mr. Beeblebrox, let us make one thing perfectly clear..." "Yeah let's," said Zaphod. "How about this for a start. Why don't you just tell me what's really on this ship." "We have told you," said the official. "By-products." Zaphod exchanged weary glances with himself. "By-products," he said. "By-products of what?" "Processes," said the official. "What processes?" "Processes that are perfectly safe." "Santa Zarquana Voostra!" exclaimed both of Zaphod's heads in chorus. "So safe that you have to build a zarking fortress ship to take the byproducts to the nearest black hole and tip them in! Only it doesn't get there because the pilot takes a detour-is this right?-to pick up some lobster...? OK, so the guy is cool, but... I mean own up, this is barking time, this is major lunch, this is stool approaching critical mass, this is... this is... total vocabulary failure!" "Shut up!" his right head yelled at his left, "we're flanging!" He got a good calming grip on the remaining beer can. "Listen, guys," he resumed after a moment's peace and contemplation. The two officials had said nothing. Conversation at this level was not something to which they felt they could aspire. "I just want to know," insisted Zaphod, "what you're getting me into here." He stabbed a finger at the intermittent readings trickling over the computer screen. They meant nothing to him but he didn't like the look of them at all. They were all squiggly with lots of long numbers and things. "It's breaking up, is that it?" he shouted. "It's got a hold full of epsilonic radiating aorist rods or something that'll fry this whole space sector for zillions of years back and it's breaking up. Is that the story? Is that what we're going down to find? Am I going to come out of that wreck with even more heads?" "It cannot possibly be a wreck, Mr. Beeblebrox," insisted the official, "the ship is guaranteed to be perfectly safe. It cannot possibly break up." "Then why are you so keen to go and look at it?" "We like to look at things that are perfectly safe." "Freeeooow!" "Mr. Beeblebrox," said the official, patiently, "may I remind you that you have a job to do?" "Yeah, well, maybe I don't feel so keen on doing it all of a sudden. What do you think I am, completely without any moral whatsits, what are they called, those moral things?" "Scruples?" "Scruples, thank you, whatsoever? Well?" The two officials waited calmly. They coughed slightly to help pass the time. Zaphod sighed a "what is the world coming to" sort of sigh to absolve himself from all blame, and swung himself around in his seat. "Ship?" he called. "Yup?" said the ship. "Do what I do." The ship thought about this for a few milliseconds and then, after double checking all the seals on its heavy duty bulkheads, it began slowly, inexorably, in the hazy blaze of its lights, to sink to the lowest depths.

Five hundred feet. A thousand. Two thousand. Here, at a pressure of nearly seventy atmospheres, in the chilling depths where no light reaches, nature keeps its most heated imaginings. Two foo6: long nightmares loomed wildly into the bleaching light, yawned, and vanished back into the blackness. Two and a half thousand feet. At the dim edges of the ship's lights guilty secrets flitted by with their eyes on stalks. Gradually the topography of the distantly approaching ocean bed resolved with greater and greater clarity on the computer displays until as last a shape could be made out that was separate and distinct from its surroundings. It was like a huge lopsided cylindrical fortress that widened sharply halfway along its length to accommodate the heavy ultraplating with which the crucial storage holds were clad, and which were supposed by its builders to have made this the most secure and impregnable spaceship ever built. Before launch the material structure of this section had been battered, rammed, blasted and subjected to every assault its builders knew it could withstand in order to demonstrate that it could withstand them. The tense silence in the cockpit tightened perceptibly as it became dear that it was this section that had broken rather neatly in two. "In fact it's perfectly safe," said one of the officials, "it's built so that even if the ship does break up, the storage holds cannot possibly be breached."

Three thousand, eight hundred and twenty-five feet. Four Hi-Presh-A Smart Suits moved slowly out of the open hatchway of the salvage craft and waded through the barrage of its lights toward the monstrous shape that loomed darkly out of the sea night. They moved with a sort of clumsy grace, near weightlessness though weighed on by a world of water. With his right-hand head Zaphod peered up into the black immensities above him and for a moment his mind sang with a silent roar of horror. He glanced to his left and was relieved to see that his other head was busy watching the Brockian Ultra-Cricket broadcasts on the helmet vid without concern. Slightly behind him to his left walked the two officials from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration, slightly in front of him to his right walked the empty suit, carrying their implements and testing the way for them. They passed the huge rift in the broken backed Starship Billion Year Bunker, and played their flashlights up into it. Mangled machinery loomed between torn and twisted bulkheads, two feet thick. A family of large transparent eels lived in there now and seemed to like it. The empty suit preceded them along the length of the ship's gigantic murky hull, trying the airlocks. The third one it tested ground open uneasily. They crowded inside it and waited for several long minutes while the pump mechanisms dealt with the hideous pressure that the ocean exerted, and slowly replaced it with an equally hideous pressure of air and inert gases. At last the inner door slid open and they were admitted to a dark outer holding area of the Starship Billion Year Bunker. Several more high security Titan-O-Hold doors had to be passed through, each of which the officials opened with a selection of quark keys. Soon they were so deep within the heavy security fields that the UltraCricket broadcasts were beginning to fade, and Zaphod had to switch to one of the rock video stations, since there was nowhere that they were not able to reach. A final doorway slid open, and they emerged into a large sepulchral space. Zaphod played his flashlight against the opposite wall and it fell full on a wild-eyed screaming face. Zaphod screamed a diminished fifth himself, dropped his light and sat heavily on the floor, or rather on a body which had been lying there undisturbed for around six months and which reacted to being sat on by exploding with great violence. Zaphod wondered what to do about all this, and after a brief but hectic internal debate decided that passing out would be the very thing. He came to a few minutes later and pretended not to know who he was, where he was or how he had got there, but was nor able to convince anybody. He then pretended that his memory suddenly retuned with a rush and that the shock caused him to pass out again, but he was helped unwillingly to his feet by the empty suit-which he was beginning to take a serious dislike to-and forced to come to terms with his surroundings: They were dimly and fitfully lit and unpleasant in a number of respects, the most obvious of which was the colorful arrangement of parts of the ship's late lamented Navigation Officer over the floor, walls and ceiling, and especially over the lower half of his, Zaphod's, suit. The effect of this was so astoundingly nasty that we shall not be referring to it again at any point in this narrative-other than to record briefly the fact that it caused Zaphod to throw up inside his suit, which he therefore removed and swapped, after suitable headgear modifications, with the empty one. Unfortunately the stench of the fetid air in the ship, followed by the sight of his own suit walking around casually draped in rotting intestines was enough to make him throw up in the other suit as well, which was a problem that he and the suit would simply have to live with. There. All done. No more nastiness. At least, no more of that particular nastiness. The owner of the screaming face had calmed down very slightly now and was babbling away incoherently in a large tank of yellow liquid- emergency suspension tank. "It was crazy," he babbled, "crazy! I told him we could always try the lobster on the way back, but he was crazy. Obsessed! Do you ever get like that about lobster? Because I don't. Seems to me it's all rubbery and fiddly to eat, and not that much taste, well I mean is there? I infinitely prefer scallops, and said so. Oh Zarquon, I said so!" Zaphod stared at this extraordinary apparition, flailing in its tank. The man was attached to all kinds of life-support tubes, and his voice was bubbling out of speakers that echoed insanely around the ship, returning as haunting echoes from deep and distant corridors. "That was where I went wrong," the madman yelled, "I actually said that I preferred scallops and he said it was because I hadn't had real lobster like they did where his ancestors came from, which was here, and he'd prove it. He said it was no problem, he said the lobster here was worth a whole journey, let alone the small diversion it would take to get here, and he swore he could handle the ship in the atmosphere, but it was madness, madness!" he screamed, and paused with his eyes rolling, as if the word had rung some kind of bell in his mind. "The ship went right out of control! I couldn't believe what we were doing and just to prove a point about lobster which is really so overrated as a food, I'm sorry to go on about lobsters so much, I'll try and stop in a minute, but they've been on my mind so much for the months I've been in this tank, can you imagine what it's like to be stuck in a ship with the same guys for months eating junk food when all one guy will talk about is lobster and then spend six months floating by yourself in a tank thinking about it. I promise I will try and shut up about the lobsters, I really will. Lobsters, lobsters, lobsters-enough! I think I'm the only survivor. I'm the only one who managed to get to an emergency tank before we went down. I sent out the Mayday and then we hit. It's a disaster, isn't it? A total disaster, and all because the guy liked lobsters. How much sense am I making? It's really hard for me to tell." He gazed at them beseechingly, and his mind seemed to sway slowly back down to earth like a falling leaf. He blinked and looked at them oddly like a monkey peering at a strange fish. He scrabbled curiously with his wrinkled up fingers at the glass side of the tank. Tiny, thick yellow bubbles loosed themselves from his mouth and nose, caught briefly in his swab of hair and strayed on upward. "Oh Zarquon, oh heavens," he mumbled pathetically to himself, "I've been found. I've been rescued...." "Well," said one of the officials, briskly,"you've been found at least." He strode over to the main computer bank in the middle of the chamber and started checking quickly through the ship's main monitor circuits for damage reports. "The aorist rod chambers are intact," he said. "Holy dingo's dos," snarled Zaphod, "there are aorist rods on board...!" Aorist rods were devices used in a now happily abandoned form of energy production. When the hunt for new sources of energy had at one point got particularly frantic, one bright young chap suddenly spotted that one place which had never used up all its available energy-the past. And with the sudden rush of blood to the head that such insights tend to induce, he invented a way of mining it that very same night, and within a year huge tracts of the past were being drained of all their energy and simply wasting away Those who claimed that the past should be left unspoiled were accused of indulging in an extremely expensive form of sentimentality. The past provided a very cheap, plentiful and clean source of energy, there could always be a few Natural Past Reserves set up if anyone wanted to pay for their upkeep, and as for the claim that draining the past impoverished the present, well, maybe it did, slightly, but the effects were immeasurable and you really had to keep a sense of proportion. It was only when it was realized that the present really was being impoverished, and that the reason for it was that those selfish plundering wastrel bastards up in the future were doing exactly the same thing, that everyone realized that every single aorist rod, and the terrible secret of how they were made, would have to be utterly and forever destroyed. They claimed it was for the sake of their grandparents and grandchildren, but it was of course for the sake of their grandparent's grandchildren, and their grandchildren's grandparents. The official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration gave a dismissive shrug. "They're perfectly safe," he said. He glanced up at Zaphod and suddenly said with uncharacteristic frankness,"There's worse than that on board. At least," he added, tapping at one of the computer screens, "I hope it's on board." The other official rounded on him sharply. "What the hell do you think you're saying?" he snapped. The first shrugged again. He said, "It doesn't matter. He can say what he likes. No one would believe him. It's why we chose to use him rather than do anything official, isn't it? The more wild the story he tells, the more it'll sound like he's some hippy adventurer making it up. He can even say that we said this and it'll make him sound like a paranoid." He smile' pleasantly at Zaphod who was seething in his nasty suit. "You may accompany us," he told him, "if you wish."

"You see?" said the official, examining the ultra-titanium outer seals of the aorist rod hold. "Perfectly secure, perfectly safe." He said the same thing as they passed holds containing chemical weapons so powerful that a teaspoonful could fatally infect an entire planet. He said the same thing as they passed holds containing zeta-activq. compounds so powerful that a teaspoonful could blow up a whole planet. He said the same thing as they passed holds containing theta-active compounds so powerful that a teaspoonful could irradiate a whole planet. "I'm glad I'm not a planet," muttered Zaphod. "You'd have nothing to fear," assured the official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration, "planets are very safe. Provided," he added-and paused. They were approaching the hold nearest to the point where the back of the Starship Billion Year Bunker was broken. The corridor here was twisted and deformed, and the floor was damp and sticky in patches. "Ho hum," he said,"ho very much hum." "What's in this hold?" demanded Zaphod. "By-products," said the official, clamming up again. "By-products...," insisted Zaphod, quietly, "of what?" Neither official answered. Instead, they examined the hold door very carefully and saw that its seals were twisted apart by the forces that had deformed the whole corridor. One of them touched the door lightly. It swung open to his touch. There was darkness inside, with just a couple of dim yellow lights deep within it. "Of what?" hissed Zaphod. The leading official turned to the other. "There's an escape capsule," he said, "that the crew were to use to abandon ship before jettisoning it into the black hole," he said. "I think it would be good to know that it's still there." The other official nodded and left without a word. The first official quietly beckoned Zaphod in. The large dim yellow lights glowed about twenty feet from them. "The reason," he said, quietly, "why everything else in this ship is, I maintain, safe, is that no one is really crazy enough to use them. No one. At least no one that crazy would ever get near them. Anyone that mad or dangerous rings very deep alarm bells. People may be stupid but they're not that stupid." "By-products," hissed Zaphod again, he had to hiss in order that his voice shouldn't be heard to tremble, "of what." "Er, Designer People." "What? " "The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation was awarded a huge research grant to design and produce synthetic personalities to order. The results were uniformly disastrous. All the 'people' and 'personalities' turned out to be amalgams of characteristics that simply could not co-exist in naturally occurring life forms. Most of them were just poor pathetic misfits, but some were deeply, deeply dangerous. Dangerous because they didn't ring alarm bells in other people. They could walk through situations the way that ghosts walk through walls, because no one spotted the danger. "The most dangerous of all were three identical ones-they were put in this hold, to be blasted, with this ship, right out of this universe. They are not evil, in fact they are rather simple and charming. But they are the most dangerous creatures that ever lived because there is nothing they will not do if allowed, and nothing they will not be allowed to do...." Zaphod looked at the dim yellow lights, the two dim yellow lights. As his eyes became accustomed to the light he saw that the two lights framed a third space where something was broken. Wet sticky patches gleamed dully on the floor. Zaphod and the official walked cautiously toward the lights. At that moment, four words came crashing into the helmet headsets from the other official. "The capsule is gone," he said tersely. "Trace it," snapped Zaphod's companion. "Find exactly where it has gone. We must know where it has gone!" Zaphod slid aside a large ground-glass door. Beyond it lay a tank full of thick yellow liquid, and floating in it was a man, a kindly looking man with lots of pleasant laugh lines around his face. He seemed to be floating quite contentedly and smiling to himself. Another terse message suddenly came through his helmet headset. The planet toward which the escape capsule had headed had already been identified. It was in Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha. The kindly looking man in the tank seemed to be babbling gently to himself, just as the co-pilot had been in his tank. Little yellow bubbles beaded on the man's lips. Zaphod found a small speaker by the tank and turned it on. He heard the man babbling gently about a shining city on a hill. He also heard the official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration issue instructions that the planet in ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha must be made "perfectly safe."

DOUGLAS ADAMS

MOSTLY HARMLESS

For Ron

With grateful thanks to Sue Freestone and Michael Bywater for their support, help and the constructive abuse.

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.

Chapter 1

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 mission 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 authenticity 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 destination 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 module. "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.

Chapter 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 understanding 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 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, reluctantly, 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 Brentwood. 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 Christians 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 emphatically 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 speaking 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, considerable 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 surgical 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 something 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 themselves. 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 security 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.

Chapter 3

The Hitchhiker'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 important 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 variations 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 currently at the prayer meeting by the poolside appears to feel any sense of urgency about the problem.

Chapter 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.

Chapter 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 century. 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. Telecommunications. 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."

Chapter 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 ventilation 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 Hitchhiker'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 universe. 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 personal fortune to financing an annual festival to remind every one 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 Hitchhiker'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 Sandwich 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 herring 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 behaviour 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, bubblingly, frothingly, burstingly true. What a truly ecstasy-inducingly correct observation." "What's happened?" insisted Ford. "Who is this new management? 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 expensive 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, overresourced, 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 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! Billions 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 hitchhikers. 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 identity 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.

Chapter 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 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 opening 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 coordinates 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 thrashing. 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 lugubriously. "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.

Chapter 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 magically 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 adventure. 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:

NO ADMITTANCE. NOT EVEN TO AUTHORISED PERSONNEL. YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE. GO AWAY.

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 windows 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: 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. b) Don't imagine you know what a computer terminal is. 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 mountain 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 aigrettes3, agglomerates4, and arch imandrites5. 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 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 representation 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 programming 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 questioned, 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.

Chapter 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 Hitchhiker'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 President. 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 incredible. 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 helplessly 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 (r), 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, respectively, 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 wildly over-represented the level of accommodation available in Hawalion. Arthur still carried a copy of The Hitchhiker'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 Beta6, 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. "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 bewilderment. "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 important," 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.

Chapter 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.

Chapter 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 Hitchhiker'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 accident that eventually occurred was not what he had planned at all. The ship he was on blipped in hyperspace, flickered horribly between ninety-seven different points in the Galaxy simultaneously, caught the unexpected gravitational pull of an uncharted planet in one of them, became ensnared in its outer atmosphere and began to fall, screaming and tearing, into it. 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.