ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless Page 11

  `Look,' he said in a stern voice. But he wasn't certain how far

  saying things like `Look' in a stern voice was necessarily going to

  get him, and time was not on his side. What the hell, he thought,

  you're only young once, and threw himself out of the window.

  That would at least keep the element of surprise on his side.

  11

  The first thing Arthur Dent had to do, he realised resignedly,

  was to get himself a life. This meant he had to find a planet

  he could have one on. It had to be a planet he could breathe

  on, where he could stand up and sit down without experiencing

  gravitational discomfort. It had to be somewhere where the acid

  levels were low and the plants didn't actually attack you.

  `I hate to be anthropic about this,' he said to the strange

  thing behind the desk at the Resettlement Advice Centre on

  Pintleton Alpha, `but I'd quite like to live somewhere where

  the people look vaguely like me as well. You know. Sort of

  human.'

  The strange thing behind the desk waved some of its stranger

  bits around and seemed rather taken aback by this. It oozed and

  glopped off its seat, thrashed its way slowly across the floor,

  ingested the old metal filing cabinet and then, with a great

  belch, excreted the appropriate drawer. It popped out a couple

  of glistening tentacles from its ear, removed some files from the

  drawer, sucked the drawer back in and vomited up the cabinet

  again. It thrashed its way back across the floor, slimed its way

  back up on to the seat and slapped the files on the table.

  `See anything you fancy?' it asked.

  Arthur looked nervously through some grubby and damp

  pieces of paper. He was definitely in some backwater part of

  the Galaxy here, and somewhere off to the left as far as the

  universe he knew and recognised was concerned. In the space

  where his own home should have been there was a rotten hick

  planet, drowned with rain and inhabited by thugs and boghogs.

  Even The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy seemed to work

  only fitfully here, which was why he was reduced to making these

  sorts of enquiries in these sorts of places. One place he always

  asked after was Stavromula Beta, but no one had ever heard of

  such a planet.

  The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little

  to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had

  been extremely chastened to realise that although he originally

  came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and

  armagnac he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He

  couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster.

  He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was

  not a lot of demand for his services.

  Arthur's heart sank. This surprised him, because he thought

  it was already about as low as it could possibly be. He closed

  his eyes for a moment. He so much wanted to be home. He

  so much wanted his own home world, the actual Earth he had

  grown up on, not to have been demolished. He so much wanted

  none of this to have happened. He so much wanted that when he

  opened his eyes again he would be standing on the doorstep of his

  little cottage in the west country of England, that the sun would

  be shining over the green hills, the post van would be going up

  the lane, the daffodils would be blooming in his garden, and in

  the distance the pub would be opening for lunch. He so much

  wanted to take the newspaper down to the pub and read it over

  a pint of bitter. He so much wanted to do the crossword. He so

  much wanted to be able to get completely stuck on 17 across.

  He opened his eyes.

  The strange thing was pulsating irritably at him, tapping

  some kind of pseudopodia on the desk.

  Arthur shook his head and looked at the next sheet of paper.

  Grim, he thought. And the next.

  Very grim. And the next.

  Oh... Now that looked better.

  It was a world called Bartledan. It had oxygen. It had green

  hills. It even, it seemed, had a renowned literary culture. But

  the thing that most aroused his interest was a photograph of a

  small bunch of Bartledanian people, standing around in a village

  square, smiling pleasantly at the camera.

  `Ah,' he said, and held the picture up to the strange thing

  behind the desk.

  Its eyes squirmed out on stalks and roiled up and down

  the piece of paper, leaving a glistening trail of slime all over

  it.

  `Yes,' it said with distaste. `They do look exactly like you.'

  Arthur moved to Bartledan and, using some money he had

  made by selling some toenail clippings and spit to a DNA

  bank, he bought himself a room in the village featured in the

  picture. It was pleasant there. The air was balmy. The people

  looked like him and seemed not to mind him being there. They

  didn't attack him with anything. He bought some clothes and a

  cupboard to put them in.

  He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.

  At first he tried to sit and read. But the literature of Bartledan,

  famed though it was throughout this sector of the Galaxy for its

  subtlety and grace, didn't seem to be able to sustain his interest.

  The problem was that it wasn't actually about human beings after

  all. It wasn't about what human beings wanted. The people of

  Bartledan were remarkably like human beings to look at, but

  when you said `Good evening' to one, he would tend to look

  around with a slight sense of surprise, sniff the air and say that,

  yes, he supposed that it probably was a goodish evening now that

  Arthur came to mention it.

  `No, what I meant was to wish you a good evening,' Arthur

  would say, or rather, used to say. He soon learned to avoid these

  conversations. `I mean that I hope you have a good evening,' he

  would add.

  More puzzlement.

  `Wish?' the Bartledanian would say at last, in polite bafflement.

  `Er, yes,' Arthur would then have said. `I'm just expressing

  the hope that...'

  `Hope?'

  `Yes.'

  `What is hope?'

  Good question, thought Arthur to himself, and retreated

  back to his room to think about things.

  On the one hand he could only recognise and respect what he

  learnt about the Bartledanian view of the universe, which was

  that the universe was what the universe was, take it or leave it.

  On the other hand he could not help but feel that not to desire

  anything, not ever to. wish or to hope, was just not natural.

  Natural. There was a tricky word.

  He had long ago realised that a lot of things that he had

  thought of as natural, like buying people presents at Christmas,

  stopping at red lights or falling at a rate of 32 feet/second/second,

  were just the habits of his own world and didn't necessarily work

  the same way anywhere else; but not to wish - that really couldn't

  be natural, could it? That would be like not breathing.

  Breathing was another thing that the Bartledanians didn't

  do, desp
ite all the oxygen in the atmosphere. They just stood

  there. Occasionally they ran around and played netball and stuff

  (without ever wishing to win though, of course - they would just

  play, and whoever won, won), but they never actually breathed.

  It was, for some reason, unnecessary. Arthur quickly learned

  that playing netball with them was just too spooky. Though they

  looked like humans, and even moved and sounded like humans,

  they didn't breathe and they didn't wish for things.

  Breathing and wishing for things, on the other hand, was

  just about all that Arthur seemed to do all day. Sometimes

  he would wish for things so much that his breathing would get

  quite agitated, and he would have to go and lie down for a bit.

  On his own. In his small room. So far from the world which had

  given birth to him that his brain could not even process the sort

  of numbers involved without just going limp.

  He preferred not to think about it. He preferred just to sit

  and read - or at least he would prefer it if there was anything

  worth reading. But nobody in Bartledanian stories ever wanted

  anything. Not even a glass of water. Certainly, they would fetch

  one if they were thirsty, but if there wasn't one available, they

  would think no more about it. He had just read an entire book

  in which the main character had, over the course of a week, done

  some work in his garden, played a great deal of netball, helped

  mend a road, fathered a child on his wife and then unexpectedly

  died of thirst just before the last chapter. In exasperation Arthur

  had combed his way back through the book and in the end had

  found a passing reference to some problem with the plumbing in

  Chapter 2. And that was it. So the guy dies. It just happens.

  It wasn't even the climax of the book, because there wasn't

  one. The character died about a third of the way through the

  penultimate chapter of the book, and the rest of it was just more

  stuff about road-mending. The book just finished dead at the one

  hundred thousandth word, because that was how long books were

  on Bartledan.

  Arthur threw the book across the room, sold the room and

  left. He started to travel with wild abandon, trading in more

  and more spit, toenails, fingernails, blood, hair, anything that

  anybody wanted, for tickets. For semen, he discovered, he could

  travel first class. He settled nowhere, but only existed in the

  hermetic, twilight world of the cabins of hyperspatial starships,

  eating, drinking, sleeping, watching movies, only stopping at

  spaceports to donate more DNA and catch the next long-haul

  ship out. He waited and waited for another accident to happen.

  The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen

  is that it won't. That is not what `accident' means. The acci-

  dent that eventually occurred was not what he had planned

  at all. The ship he was on blipped in hyperspace, flickered

  horribly between ninety-seven different points in the Galaxy

  simultaneously, caught the unexpected gravitational pull of an

  uncharted planet in one of them, became ensnared in its outer

  atmosphere and began to fall, screaming and tearing, into it.

  The ship's systems protested all the way down that everything

  was perfectly normal and under control, but when it went into a

  final hectic spin, ripped wildly through half a mile of trees and

  finally exploded into a seething ball of flame it became clear that

  this was not the case.

  Fire engulfed the forest, boiled into the night, then neatly

  put itself out, as all unscheduled fires over a certain size are

  now required to do by law. For a short while afterwards, other

  small fires flared up here and there as odd pieces of scattered

  debris exploded quietly in their own time. Then they too died

  away.

  Arthur Dent, because of the sheer boredom of endless inter-

  stellar flight, was the only one on board who had actually

  familiarised himself with the ship's safety procedures in case

  of an unscheduled landing, and was therefore the sole survivor.

  He lay dazed, broken and bleeding in a sort of fluffy pink plastic

  cocoon with `Have a nice day' printed in over three thousand

  different languages all over it.

  Black, roaring silences swam sickeningly through his shattered

  mind. He knew with a kind of resigned certainty that he would

  survive, because he had not yet been to Stavromula Beta.

  After what seemed an eternity of pain and darkness, he

  became aware of quiet shapes moving around him.

  12

  Ford tumbled through the open air in a cloud of glass splinters

  and chair parts. Again, he hadn't really thought things through,

  really, and was just playing it by ear, buying time. At times of

  major crisis he found it was often quite helpful to have his life

  flash before his eyes. It gave him a chance to reflect on things,

  see things in some sort of perspective, and it sometimes furnished

  him with a vital clue as to what to do next.

  There was the ground rushing up to meet him at 30 feet

  per second per second, but he would, he thought, deal with

  that problem when he got to it. First things first.

  Ah, here it came. His childhood. Hum drum stuff, he'd

  been through it all before. Images flashed by. Boring times on

  Betelgeuse Five. Zaphod Beeblebrox as a kid. Yes he knew all

  that. He wished he had some kind of fast forward in his brain.

  His seventh birthday party, being given his first towel. Come on,

  come on.

  He was twisting and turning downwards, the outside air at

  this height a cold shock to his lungs. Trying not to inhale glass.

  Early voyages to other planets. Oh for Zark's sake, this

  was like some sort of bloody travelogue documentary before

  the main feature. First beginning to work for the Guide.

  Ah!

  Those were the days. They worked out of a hut on the

  Bwenelli Atoll on Fanalla before the Riktanarqals and the

  Danqueds vertled it. Half a dozen guys, some towels, a handful

  of highly sophisticated digital devices, and most importantly a

  lot of dreams. No. Most importantly a lot of Fanallan rum. To

  be completely accurate, that Ol' Janx Spirit was the absolute

  most important thing, then the Fanallan rum, and also some of

  the beaches on the Atoll where the local girls would hang out,

  but the dreams were important as well. Whatever happened to

  those?

  He couldn't quite remember what the dreams were in fact,

  but they had seemed immensely important at the time. They

  had certainly not involved this huge towering office block he was

  now falling down the side of. All of that had come when some of

  the original team had started to settle down and get greedy, while

  he and others had stayed out in the field, researching and hitch

  hiking, and gradually becoming more and more isolated from the

  corporate nightmare the Guide had inexorably turned into, and

  the architectural monstrosity it had come to occupy. Where were

  the dreams in that? He thought of all the corporate
lawyers who

  occupied half of the building, all the `operatives' who occupied the

  lower levels, and all the sub-editors and their secretaries and their

  secretaries' lawyers and their secretaries' lawyers' secretaries, and

  worst of all the accountants and the marketing department.

  He had half a mind just to keep on falling. Two fingers

  to the lot of them.

  He was just passing the seventeenth floor now, where the

  marketing department hung out. Load of tosspots all arguing

  about what colour the Guide should be and exercising their

  infinitely infallible skills of being wise after the event. If any of

  them had chosen to look out of the window at that moment they

  would have been startled by the sight of Ford Prefect dropping

  past them to his certain death and flicking V-signs at them.

  Sixteenth floor. Sub-editors. Bastards. What about all that

  copy of his they'd cut? Fifteen years of research he'd filed

  from one planet alone and they'd cut it to two words. `Mostly

  Harmless.' V-signs to them as well.

  Fifteenth floor. Logistical Administration, whatever that was

  about. They all had big cars. That, he thought, was what that

  was about.

  Fourteenth floor. Personnel. He had a very shrewd suspicion

  that it was they who had engineered his fifteen-year exile while

  the Guide metamorphosed into the corporate monolith (or

  rather, duolith - mustn't forget the lawyers) it had become.

  Thirteenth floor. Research and development.

  Hang about.

  Thirteenth floor.

  He was having to think rather fast at the moment because