ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless Read online

  without any fear of making a fool of yourself.

  The first thing to realise about parallel universes, the Guide

  says, is that they are not parallel.

  It is also important to realise that they are not, strictly speaking,

  universes either, but it is easiest if you try and realise that a little

  later, after you've realised that everything you've realised up to

  that moment is not true.

  The reason they are not universes is that any given universe

  is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at

  what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of

  General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash

  doesn't actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the

  different ways there would be of looking at it if it did.

  The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the

  sea is not parallel. It doesn't mean anything. You can slice the

  Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will

  generally come up with something that someone will call home.

  Please feel free to blither now.

  The Earth with which we are here concerned, because of its

  particular orientation in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash,

  was hit by a neutrino that other Earths were not.

  A neutrino is not a big thing to be hit by.

  In fact it's hard to think of anything much smaller by which

  one could reasonably hope to be hit. And it's not as if being

  hit by neutrinos was in itself a particularly unusual event for

  something the size of the Earth. Far from it. It would be an

  unusual nanosecond in which the Earth was not hit by several

  billion passing neutrinos.

  It all depends on what you mean by `hit', of course, seeing as

  matter consists almost entirely of nothing at all. The chances of

  a neutrino actually hitting something as it travels through all this

  howling emptiness are roughly comparable to that of dropping a

  ball bearing at random from a cruising 747 and hitting, say, an

  egg sandwich.

  Anyway, this neutrino hit something. Nothing terribly impor-

  tant in the scale of things, you might say. But the problem with

  saying something like that is that you would be talking cross-

  eyed badger spit. Once something actually happens somewhere

  in something as wildly complicated as the Universe, Kevin knows

  where it will all end up - where `Kevin' is any random entity that

  doesn't know nothin' about nothin'.

  This neutrino struck an atom.

  The atom was part of a molecule. The molecule was part

  of a nucleic acid. The nucleic acid was part of a gene. The

  gene was part of a genetic recipe for growing... and so on.

  The upshot was that a plant ended up growing an extra leaf. In

  Essex. Or what would, after a lot of palaver and local difficulties

  of a geological nature, become Essex.

  The plant was a clover. It threw its weight, or rather its seed,

  around extremely effectively and rapidly became the world's

  dominant type of clover. The precise causal connection between

  this tiny biological happenstance, and a few other minor vari-

  ations that exist in that slice of the Whole Sort of General

  Mish Mash - such as Tricia McMillan failing to leave with

  Zaphod Beeblebrox, abnormally low sales of pecan-flavoured

  ice-cream and the fact that the Earth On which all this occurred

  did not get demolished by the Vogons to make way for a new

  hyperspace bypass - is currently sitting at number 4,763,984,132

  on the research project priority list at what was once the History

  Department of the University of MaxiMegalon, and no one cur-

  rently at the prayer meeting by the poolside appears to feel any

  sense of urgency about the problem.

  4

  Tricia began to feel that the world was conspiring against her.

  She knew that this was a perfectly normal way to feel after an

  overnight flight going east, when you suddenly have a whole

  other mysteriously threatening day to deal with for which you

  are not the least bit prepared. But still.

  There were marks on her lawn.

  She didn't really care about marks on her lawn very much.

  Marks on her lawn could go and take a running jump as far as

  she was concerned. It was Saturday morning. She had just got

  home from New York feeling tired, crabby and paranoid, and

  all she wanted to do was go to bed with the radio on quietly and

  gradually fall asleep to the sound of Ned Sherrin being terribly

  clever about something.

  But Eric Bartlett was not going to let her get away with not

  making a thorough inspection of the marks. Eric was the old

  gardener who came in from the village on Saturday mornings

  to poke around at her garden with a stick. He didn't believe

  in people coming in from New York first thing in the morning.

  Didn't hold with it. Went against nature. He believed in virtually

  everything else, though.

  `Probably them space aliens,' he said, bending over and prod-

  ding at the edges of the small indentations with his stick. `Hear

  a lot about space aliens these days. I expect it's them.'

  `Do you?' said Tricia, looking furtively at her watch. Ten

  minutes, she reckoned. Ten minutes she'd be able to stay

  standing up. Then she would simply keel over, whether she

  was in her bedroom or still out here in the garden. That was

  if she just had to stand. If she also had to nod intelligently and

  say `Do you?' from time to time, it might cut it down to five.

  `Oh yes,' said Eric. `They come down here, land on your lawn,

  and then buzz off again, sometimes with your cat. Mrs Williams

  at the Post Office, her cat - you know the ginger. one? - it got

  abducted by space aliens. Course, they brought it back the next

  day but it were in a very odd mood. Kept prowling around all

  morning, and then falling asleep in the afternoon. Used to be

  the other way round, is the point. Sleep in the morning, prowl in

  the afternoon. Jet lag, you see, from being in an interplanetary

  craft.'

  `I see,' said Tricia.

  `They dyed it tabby, too, she says. These marks are exactly

  the sort of marks that their landing pods would probably make.'

  `You don't think it's the lawn mower?' asked Tricia.

  `If the marks were more round, I'd say, but these are just

  off-round, you see. Altogether more alien in shape.'

  `It's just that you mentioned the lawn mower was playing

  up and needed fixing or it might start gouging holes in the

  lawn.'

  `I did say that, Miss Tricia, and I stand by what I said.

  I'm not saying it's not the lawn mower for definite, I'm just

  saying what seems to me more likely given the shapes of the

  holes. They come in over these trees, you see, in their landing

  pods...'

  `Eric...,' said Tricia, patiently.

  `Tell you what, though, Miss Tricia,' said Eric, `I will take a

  look at the mower, like I meant to last week, and leave you to

  get on with whatever you' re wanting to.'

  `Thank you, Eric,' said Tricia. `I'm going to bed now, in

  fact. Help yo
urself to anything you want in the kitchen.'

  `Thank you, Miss Tricia, and good luck to you,' said Eric.

  He bent over and picked something from the lawn.

  `There,' he said. `Three-leaf clover. Good luck you see.'

  He peered at it closely to check that it was a real three-leaf

  clover and not just a regular four-leaf one that one of the leaves

  had fallen off. `If I were you, though, I'd watch for signs of alien

  activity in the area.' He scanned the horizon keenly. `Particularly

  from over there in the Henley direction.'

  `Thank you, Eric,' said Tricia again. `I will.'

  She went to bed and dreamt fitfully of parrots and other birds.

  In the afternoon she got up and prowled around restlessly, not

  certain what to do with the rest of the day, or indeed the rest of

  her life. She spent at least an hour dithering, trying to make up

  her mind whether to head up into town and go to Stavro's for the

  evening. This was the currently fashionable spot for high-flying

  media people, and seeing a few friends there might help her ease

  herself back into the swing of things. She decided at last she would

  go. It was good. It was fun there. She was very fond of Stavro

  himself, who was a Greek with a German father - a fairly odd

  combination. Tricia had been to the Alpha a couple of nights

  earlier, which was Stavro's original club in New York, now run

  by his brother Karl, who thought of himself as a German with a

  Greek mother. Stavro would be very happy to be told that Karl

  was making a bit of a pig's ear of running the New York club,

  so Tricia would go and make him happy. There was little love

  lost between Stavro and Karl Mueller.

  OK. That's what she would do.

  She then spent another hour dithering about what to wear.

  At last she settled on a smart little black dress she'd got in New

  York. She phoned a friend to see who was likely to be at the

  club that evening, and was told that it was closed this evening

  for a private wedding party.

  She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you

  actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from

  the supermarket. You get one of those trolleys which simply will

  not go in the direction you push it and end up just having to buy

  completely different stuff. What do you do with it? What do you

  do with the recipe? She didn't know.

  Anyway, that night an alien spacecraft landed on her lawn.

  5

  She watched it coming in from over the Henley direction with

  mild curiosity at first, wondering what those lights were. Living,

  as she did, not a million miles from Heathrow, she was used to

  seeing lights in the sky. Not usually so late in the evening, or so

  low, though, which was why she was mildly curious.

  When whatever it was began to come closer and closer her

  curiosity began to turn to bemusement.

  `Hmmm,' she thought, which was about as far as she could get

  with thinking. She was still feeling dopey and jet-lagged and the

  messages that one part of her brain was busy sending to another

  were not necessarily arriving on time or the right way up. She left

  the kitchen where she'd been fixing herself a coffee and went to

  open the back door which led out to the garden. She took a deep

  breath of cool evening air, stepped outside and looked up.

  There was something roughly the size of a large camper

  van parked about a hundred feet above her lawn.

  It was really there. Hanging there. Almost silent.

  Something moved deep inside her.

  Her arms dropped slowly down to her side. She didn't notice

  the scalding coffee slopping over her foot. She was hardly

  breathing as slowly, inch by inch, foot by foot, the craft came

  downwards. Its lights were playing softly over the ground as if

  probing and feeling it. They played over her.

  It seemed beyond all hope that she should be given her

  chance again. Had he found her? Had he come back?

  The craft dropped down and down until at last it had settled

  quietly on her lawn. It didn't look exactly like the one she had

  seen departing all those years ago, she thought, but flashing lights

  in the night sky are hard to resolve into clear shapes.

  Silence.

  Then a click and a hum.

  Then another click and another hum. Click hum, click hum.

  A doorway slid open, spilling light towards her across the

  lawn.

  She waited, tingling.

  A figure stood silhouetted in the light, then another, and

  another.

  Wide eyes blinked slowly at her. Hands were slowly raised

  in greeting.

  `McMillan?' a voice said at last, a strange, thin voice that

  managed the syllables with difficulty. `Tricia McMillan. Ms Tricia

  McMillan?'

  `Yes,' said Tricia, almost soundlessly.

  `We have been monitoring you.'

  `M... monitoring? Me?'

  `Yes.'

  They looked at her for a while, their large eyes moving

  up and down her very slowly.

  `You look smaller in real life,' one said at last.

  `What?' said Tricia.

  `Yes.'

  `I... I don't understand,' said Tricia. She hadn't expected any

  of this, of course, but even for something she hadn't expected to

  begin with it wasn't going the way she expected. At last she said,

  `Are you... are you from... Zaphod?'

  This question seemed to cause a little consternation among the

  three figures. They conferred with each other in some skittering

  language of their own and then turned back to her.

  `We don't think so. Not as far as we know,' said one.

  `Where is Zaphod?' said another, looking up into the night sky.

  `I... I don't know, said Tricia, helplessly.

  `Is it far from here? Which direction? We don't know.'

  Tricia realised with a sinking heart that they had no idea

  who she was talking about. Or even what she was talking about.

  And she had no idea what they were talking about. She put her

  hopes tightly away again and snapped her brain back into gear.

  There was no point in being disappointed. She had to wake up

  to the fact that she had here the journalistic scoop of the cen-

  tury. What should she do? Go back into the house for a video

  camera? Wouldn't they just be gone when she got back? She

  was thoroughly confused as to strategy. Keep'em talking, she

  thought. Figure it out later.

  `You've been monitoring... me?'

  `All of you. Everything on your planet. TV. Radio. Tele-

  communications. Computers. Video circuitry. Warehouses.'

  `What?'

  `Car parks. Everything. We monitor everything.'

  Tricia stared at them.

  `That must be very boring, isn't it?' she blurted out.

  `Yes.'

  `So why...'

  `Except...'

  `Yes? Except what?'

  `Game shows. We quite like game shows.'

  There was a terribly long silence as Tricia looked at the

  aliens and the aliens looked at her.

  `There's something I would just like to get from indoors,'

  said Tricia very deliberately. `Tell you what. Would you,
or

  one of you, like to come inside with me and have a look?'

  `Very much,' they all said, enthusiastically.

  All three of them stood, slightly awkwardly in her sitting room,

  as she hurried around picking up a video camera, a 35mm camera,

  a tape recorder, every recording medium she could grab hold of.

  They were all thin and, under domestic lighting conditions, a sort

  of dim purplish green.

  `I really won't be a second, guys,' Tricia said, as she rummaged

  through some drawers for spare tapes and films.

  The aliens were looking at the shelves that held her CDs

  and her old records. One of them nudged one of the others

  very slightly.

  `Look,' he said. `Elvis.'

  Tricia stopped, and stared at them all over again.

  `You like Elvis?' she said.

  `Yes,' they said.

  `Elvis Presley?'

  `Yes.'

  She shook her head in bewilderment as she tried to stuff

  a new tape into her video camera.

  `Some of your people,' said one of her visitors, hesitantly,

  `think that Elvis has been kidnapped by space aliens.'

  `What?' said Tricia. `Has he?'