ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless Read online

  woman decided that the solar panels had absorbed enough

  sunlight to run the photocopier now and she disappeared to

  rummage inside her cave. She emerged at last with a few sheaves

  of paper and fed them through the machine.

  She handed the copies to Arthur.

  `This is, er, this your advice then, is it?' said Arthur, leafing

  through them uncertainly.

  `No,' said the old lady. `It's the story of my life. You see,

  the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged

  against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look

  through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major

  decisions I ever made to make them stand out. They're all indexed

  and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take

  decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that

  I've taken, then maybe you won't finish up at the end of your

  life...' she paused, and filled her lungs for a good shout, `...

  in a smelly old cave like this!'

  She grabbed up her table tennis bat, rolled up her sleeve,

  stomped off to her pile of dead goat-like things, and started

  to set about the flies with vim and vigour.

  The last village Arthur visited consisted entirely of extremely

  high poles. They were so high that it wasn't possible to tell,

  from the ground, what was on top of them, and Arthur had to

  climb three before he found one that had anything on top of it

  at all other than a platform covered with bird droppings.

  Not an easy task. You went up the poles by climbing on

  the short wooden pegs that had been hammered into them in

  slowly ascending spirals. Anybody who was a less diligent tourist

  than Arthur would have taken a couple of snapshots and sloped

  right off to the nearest Bar & Grill, where you also could buy a

  range of particularly sweet and gooey chocolate cakes to eat in

  front of the ascetics. But, largely as a result of this, most of the

  ascetics had gone now. In fact they had mostly gone and set up

  lucrative therapy centres on some of the more affluent worlds

  in the North West ripple of the Galaxy, where the living was

  easier by a factor of about seventeen million, and the chocolate

  was just fabulous. Most of the ascetics, it turned out, had not

  known about chocolate before they took up asceticism. Most of

  the clients who came to their therapy centres knew about it all

  too well.

  At the top of the third pole Arthur stopped for a breather. He

  was very hot and out of breath, since each pole was about fifty or

  sixty feet high. The world seemed to swing vertiginously around

  him, but it didn't worry Arthur too much. He knew that, logically.

  he could not die until he had been to Stavromula Beta 4, and had

  therefore managed to cultivate a merry attitude towards extreme

  personal danger. He felt a little giddy perched fifty feet up in the

  air on top of a pole, but he dealt with it by eating a sandwich. He

  was just about to embark on reading the photocopied life history

  of the oracle, when he was rather startled to hear a slight cough

  behind him.

  He turned so abruptly that he dropped his sandwich, which

  turned downwards through the air and was rather small by the

  time it was stopped by the ground.

  About thirty feet behind Arthur was another pole, and, alone

  amongst the sparse forest of about three dozen poles, the top of

  it was occupied. It was occupied by an old man who, in turn,

  seemed to be occupied by profound thoughts that were making

  him scowl.

  `Excuse me,' said Arthur. The man ignored him. Perhaps he

  couldn't hear him. The breeze was moving about a bit. It was

  only by chance that Arthur had heard the slight cough.

  `Hello?' called Arthur. `Hello!'

  The man at last glanced round at him. He seemed surprised

  to see him. Arthur couldn't tell if he was surprised and pleased

  to see him or just surprsised.

  `Are you open?' called Arthur.

  The man frowned in incomprehension. Arthur couldn't tell

  if he couldn't understand or couldn't hear.

  4 See Life, the Universe and Everything, {bf Chapter 18}.

  `I'll pop over,' called Arthur. `Don't go away.'

  He clambered off the small platform and climbed quickly

  down the spiralling pegs, arriving at the bottom quite dizzy.

  He started to make his way over to the pole on which

  the old man was sitting, and then suddenly realised that he

  had disoriented himself on the way down and didn't know for

  certain which one it was.

  He looked around for landmarks and worked out which was

  the right one.

  He climbed it. It wasn't.

  `Damn,' he said. `Excuse me!' he called out to the old man

  again, who was now straight in front of him and forty feet away.

  `Got lost. Be with you in a minute.' Down he went again, getting

  very hot and bothered.

  When he arrived, panting and sweating, at the top of the

  pole that he knew for certain was the right one he realised that

  the man was, somehow or other, mucking him about.

  `What do you want?' shouted the old man crossly at him. He

  was now sitting on top of the pole that Arthur recognised was

  the one that he had been on himself when eating his sandwich.

  `How did you get over there?' called Arthur in bewilder-

  ment.

  `You think I'm going to tell you just like that what it took

  me forty springs, summers and autumns of sitting on top of a

  pole to work out?'

  `What about winter?'

  `What about winter?'

  `Don't you sit on the pole in the winter?'

  `Just because I sit up a pole for most of my life,' said the

  man, `doesn't mean I'm an idiot. I go south in the winter. Got

  a beach house. Sit on the chimney stack.'

  `Do you have any advice for a traveller?'

  `Yes. Get a beach house.'

  `I see.'

  The man stared out over the hot, dry scrubby landscape.

  From here Arthur could just see the old woman, a tiny speck

  in the distance, dancing up and down swatting flies.

  `You see her?' called the old man, suddenly.

  `Yes,' said Arthur. `I consulted her in fact.'

  `Fat lot she knows. I got the beach house because she turned

  it down. What advice did she give you?'

  `Do exactly the opposite of everything she's done.'

  `In other words, get a beach house.'

  `I suppose so,' said Arthur. `Well, maybe I'll get one.'

  `Hmmm.'

  The horizon was swimming in a fetid heat haze.

  `Any other advice?' asked Arthur. `Other than to do with

  real estate?'

  `A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind,'

  said the man. He turned and looked at Arthur.

  Oddly, the man's face was now only a couple of feet away.

  He seemed in one way to be a perfectly normal shape, but his

  body was sitting cross-legged on a pole forty feet away while his

  face was only two feet from Arthur's. Without moving his head,

  and without seeming to do anything odd at all, he stood up and

  stepped on to the top of anot
her pole. Either it was just the heat,

  thought Arthur, or space was a different shape for him.

  `A beach house,' he said, `doesn't even have to be on the

  beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate,'

  he went on, `at boundary conditions.'

  `Really?' said Arthur.

  `Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where

  body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be

  on one side, and look at the other.'

  Arthur got terribly excited. This was exactly the sort of

  thing he'd been promised in the brochure. Here was a man who

  seemed to be moving through some kind of Escher space saying

  really profound things about all sorts of stuff.

  It was unnerving though. The man was now stepping from

  pole to ground, from ground to pole, from pole to pole, from

  pole to horizon and back: he was making complete nonsense of

  Arthur's spatial universe. `Please stop!' Arthur said, suddenly.

  `Can't take it, huh?' said the man. Without the slightest

  movement he was now back, sitting cross-legged, on top of the

  pole forty feet in front of Arthur. `You come to me for advice,

  but you can't cope with anything you don't recognise. Hmmm.

  So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make

  it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual I suppose.' He

  sighed and squinted mournfully into the distance.

  `Where you from, boy?' he then asked.

  Arthur decided to be clever. He was fed up with being

  mistaken for a complete idiot by everyone he ever met. `Tell

  you what,' he said. `You're a seer. Why don't you tell me?'

  The old man sighed again. `I was just,' he said, passing his

  hand round behind his head, `making conversation.' When he

  brought his hand round to the front again, he had a globe of the

  Earth spinning on his up-pointed forefinger. It was unmistakable.

  He put it away again. Arthur was stunned.

  `How did you -'

  `I can't tell you.'

  `Why not? I've come all this way.'

  `You cannot see what I see because you see what you see.

  You cannot know what I know because you know what you

  know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what

  you see and what you know because they are not of the same

  kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know,

  because that would be to replace you yourself.'

  `Hang on, can I write this down?' said Arthur, excitedly

  fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.

  `You can pick up a copy at the spaceport,' said the old

  man . `They've got racks of the stuff.'

  `Oh,' said Arthur, disappointed. `Well, isn't there anything

  that's perhaps a bit more specific to me?'

  `Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at

  all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it,

  so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.'

  Arthur looked at him doubtfully. `Can I get that at the

  spaceport, too?' he said.

  `Check it out,' said the old man.

  `It says in the brochure,' said Arthur, pulling it out of his

  pocket and looking at it again, `that I can have a special prayer,

  individually tailored to me and my special needs.'

  `Oh, all right,' said the old man. `Here's a prayer for you.

  Got a pencil?'

  `Yes,' said Arthur.

  `It goes like this. Let's see now: ``Protect me from knowing what

  I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there

  are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing

  that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to

  know about. Amen.'' That's it. It's what you pray silently inside

  yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.'

  `Hmmm,' said Arthur. `Well, thank you -'

  `There's another prayer that goes with it that's very impor-

  tant,' continued the old man, `so you'd better jot this down,

  too.'

  `OK.'

  `It goes, ``Lord, lord, lord...'' It's best to put that bit

  in, just in case. You can never be too sure ``Lord, lord, lord.

  Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen...''

  And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes

  from missing out that last part.'

  `Ever heard of a place called Stavromula Beta?' asked Arthur.

  `No.'

  `Well, thank you for your help,' said Arthur.

  `Don't mention it,' said the man on the pole, and vanished.

  10

  Ford hurled himself at the door of the editor-in-chief's office,

  tucked himself into a tight ball as the frame splintered and gave

  way once again, rolled rapidly across the floor to where the smart

  grey crushed leather sofa was and set up his strategic operational

  base behind it.

  That, at least, was the plan.

  Unfortunately the smart grey crushed leather sofa wasn't there.

  Why, thought Ford, as he twisted himself round in mid-air,

  lurched, dived and scuttled for cover behind Harl's desk, did

  people have this stupid obsession with rearranging their office

  furniture every five minutes?

  Why, for instance, replace a perfectly serviceable if rather

  muted grey crushed leather sofa with what appeared to be a

  small tank?

  And who was the big guy with the mobile rocket launcher

  on his shoulder? Someone from head office? Couldn't be. This

  was head office. At least it was the head office of the Guide.

  Where these InfiniDim Enterprises guys came from Zarquon

  knew. Nowhere very sunny, judging from the slug-like colour

  and texture of their skins. This was all wrong, thought Ford.

  People connected with the Guide should come from sunny

  places.

  There were several of them, in fact, and all of them seemed

  to be more heavily armed and armoured than you normally

  expected corporate executives to be, even in today's rough and

  tumble business world.

  He was making a lot of assumptions here, of course. He

  was assuming that the big, bull-necked, slug-like guys were

  in some way connected with InfiniDim Enterprises, but it was

  a reasonable assumption and he felt happy about it because

  they had logos on their armour-plating which said `InfiniDim

  Enterprises' on them. He had a nagging suspicion that this was

  not a business meeting, though. He also had a nagging feeling

  that these slug-like creatures were familiar to him in some way.

  Familiar, but in an unfamiliar guise.

  Well, he had been in the room for a good two and a half

  seconds now, and thought that it was probably about time to

  start doing something constructive. He could take a hostage.

  That would be good.

  Vann Harl was in his swivel chair, looking alarmed, pale

  and shaken. Had probably had some bad news as well as a

  nasty bang to the back of his head. Ford leapt to his feet and

  made a running grab for him.

  Under the pretext of getting him into a good solid double

  underpinned elbow-lock, Ford managed surreptitiously to slip

  the Ident-i-Eeze back into Harl's inner pocket.

  Bingo!

  He'd
done what he came to do. Now he just had to talk

  his way out of here.

  `OK,' he said. `I...' He paused.

  The big guy with the rocket launcher was turning towards

  Ford Prefect and pointing it at him, which Ford couldn't help

  feeling was wildly irresponsible behaviour.

  `I...' he started again, and then on a sudden impulse

  decided to duck.

  There was a deafening roar as flames leapt from the back

  of the rocket launcher and a rocket leapt from its front.

  The rocket hurtled past Ford and hit the large plate-glass

  window, which billowed outwards in a shower of a million

  shards under the force of the explosion. Huge shock waves of

  noise and air pressure reverberated around the room, sweeping

  a couple of chairs, a filing cabinet and Colin the security robot

  out of the window.

  Ah! So they're not totally rocket-proof after all, thought Ford

  Prefect to himself. Someone should have a word with somebody

  about that. He disentangled himself from Harl and tried to work

  out which way to run.

  He was surrounded.

  The big guy with the rocket launcher was moving it up

  into position for another shot.

  Ford was completely at a loss for what to do next.