ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless Read online

  `It is possible.'

  `Are you telling me that you have kidnapped Elvis?' gasped

  Tricia. She was trying to keep cool enough not to foul up her

  equipment, but this was all almost too much for her.

  `No. Not us,' said her guests. `Aliens. It is a very interesting

  possibility. We talk of it often.'

  `I must get this down,' Tricia muttered to herself. She checked

  her video was properly loaded and working now. She pointed the

  camera at them. She didn't put it up to her eye because she didn't

  want to freak them out. But she was sufficiently experienced to

  be able to shoot accurately from the hip.

  `OK,' she said. `Now tell me slowly and carefully who you

  are. You first,' she said to the one on the left. `What's your

  name?'

  `I don't know.'

  `You don't know.'

  `No.'

  `I see,' said Tricia. `And what about you other two?'

  `We don't know.'

  `Good. OK. Perhaps you can tell me where you are from?'

  They shook their heads.

  `You don't know where you're from?'

  They shook their heads again.

  `So,' said Tricia. `What are you... er...'

  She was floundering but, being a professional, kept the camera

  steady while she did it.

  `We are on a mission,' said one of the aliens.

  `A mission? A mission to do what?'

  `We do not know.'

  Still she kept the camera steady.

  `So what are you doing here on Earth, then?'

  `We have come to fetch you.'

  Rock steady, rock steady. Could have been on a tripod. She

  wondered if she should be using a tripod, in fact. She wondered

  that because it gave her a moment or two to digest what they had

  just said. No, she thought, hand-held gave her more flexibility.

  She also thought, help, what am I going to do?

  `Why,' she asked, calmly, `have you come to fetch me?'

  `Because we have lost our minds.'

  `Excuse me,' said Tricia, `I'm going to have to get a tripod.'

  They seemed happy enough to stand there doing nothing

  while Tricia quickly found a tripod and mounted the camera on

  it. Her face was completely immobile, but she did not have the

  faintest idea what was going on or what to think about it.

  `OK,' she said, when she was ready. `Why...'

  `We liked your interview with the astrologer.'

  `You saw it?'

  `We see everything. We are very interested in astrology.

  We like it. It is very interesting. Not everything is interesting.

  Astrology is interesting. What the stars tell us. What the stars

  foretell. We could do with some information like that.'

  `But...'

  Tricia didn't know where to start.

  Own up, she thought. There's no point in trying to second

  guess any of this stuff.

  So she said, `But I don't know anything about astrology.'

  `We do.'

  `You do?'

  `Yes. We follow our horoscopes. We are very avid. We see

  all your newspapers and your magazines and are very avid with

  them. But our leader says we have a problem.'

  `You have a leader?'

  `Yes.'

  `What's his name?'

  `We do not know.'

  `What does he say his name is, for Christ's sake? Sorry

  I'll need to edit that. What does he say his name is?'

  `He does not know.'

  `So how do you all know he's the leader?'

  `He seized control. He said someone has to do something

  round here.'

  `Ah! , said Tricia, seizing on a clue. `Where is ``here''?'

  `Rupert.'

  `What?'

  `Your people call it Rupert. The tenth planet from your

  sun. We have settled there for many years. It is highly cold

  and uninteresting there. But good for monitoring.'

  `Why are you monitoring us?'

  `It is all we know to do.'

  `OK,' said Tricia. `Right. What is the problem that your

  leader says you have?'

  `Triangulation.'

  `I beg your pardon?'

  `Astrology is a very precise science. We know this.'

  `Well...' said Tricia, then left it at that.

  `But it is precise for you here on Earth.'

  `Ye... e... s...' She had a horrible feeling she was

  getting a vague glimmering of something.

  `So when Venus is rising in Capricorn, for instance, that

  is from Earth. How does that work if we are out on Rupert?

  What if the Earth is rising in Capricorn? It is hard for us to

  know. Amongst the things we have forgotten, which we think

  are many and profound, is trigonometry.'

  `Let me get this straight,' said Tricia. `You want me to

  come with you to... Rupert...'

  `Yes.'

  `To recalculate your horoscopes for you to take account of

  the relative positions of Earth and Rupert?'

  `Yes.'

  `Do I get an exclusive?'

  `Yes.'

  `I'm your girl,' said Tricia, thinking that at the very least

  she could sell it to the National Enquirer.

  As she boarded the craft that would take her off to the furthest

  limits of the Solar System, the first thing that met her eyes was

  a bank of video monitors across which thousands of images were

  sweeping. A fourth alien was sitting watching them, but was

  focused on one particular screen that held a steady image. It

  was a replay of the impromptu interview which Tricia had just

  conducted with his three colleagues. He looked up when he saw

  her apprehensively climbing in.

  `Good evening, Ms McMillan,' he said. `Nice camera work.'

  6

  Ford Prefect hit the ground running. The ground was about three

  inches further from the ventilation shaft than he remembered it

  so he misjudged the point at which he would hit the ground,

  started running too soon, stumbled awkwardly and twisted his

  ankle. Damn! He ran off down the corridor anyway, hobbling

  slightly.

  All over the building, alarms were erupting into their usual

  frenzy of excitement. He dived for cover behind the usual storage

  cabinets, glanced around to check that he was unseen, and started

  rapidly to fish around inside his satchel for the usual things he

  needed.

  His ankle, unusually, was hurting like hell.

  The ground was not only three inches further from the ven-

  tilation shaft than he remembered, it was also on a different

  planet than he remembered, but it was the three inches that

  had caught him by surprise. The offices of the Hitch Hiker's

  Guide to the Galaxy were quite often shifted at very short

  notice to another planet, for reasons of local climate, local

  hostility, power bills or tax, but they were always reconstructed

  exactly the same way, almost to the very molecule. For many of

  the company's employees, the layout of their offices represented

  the only constant they knew in a severely distorted personal uni-

  verse.

  Something, though, was odd.

  This was not in itself surprising, thought Ford as he pulled

  out his lightweight throwing towel. Virtually everything in his

  life was, to a greater or lesser extent, odd. It was just that this

&n
bsp; was odd in a slightly different way than he was used to things

  being odd, which was, well, strange. He couldn't quite get it into

  focus immediately.

  He got out his No.3 gauge prising tool.

  The alarms were going in the same old way that he knew

  well. There was a kind of music to them that he could almost

  hum along to. That was all very familiar. The world outside had

  been a new one on Ford. He had not been to Saquo-Pilia Hensha

  before, and he had liked it. It had a kind of carnival atmosphere

  to it.

  He took from his satchel a toy bow and arrow which he

  had bought in a street market.

  He had discovered that the reason for the carnival atmosphere

  on Saquo-Pilia Hensha was that the local people were celebrating

  the annual feast of the Assumption of St Antwelm. St Antwelm

  had been, during his lifetime, a great and popular king who had

  made a great and popular assumption. What King Antwelm had

  assumed was that what everybody wanted, all other things being

  equal, was to be happy and enjoy themselves and have the best

  possible time together. On his death he had willed his entire per-

  sonal fortune to financing an annual festival to remind everyone

  of this, with lots of good food and dancing and very silly games

  like Hunt the Wocket. His Assumption had been such a brilliantly

  good one that he was made into a saint for it. Not only that, but all

  the people who had previously been made saints for doing things

  like being stoned to death in a thoroughly miserable way or living

  upside down in barrels of dung were instantly demoted and were

  now thought to be rather embarrassing.

  The familiar H-shaped building of the Hitch Hiker's Guide

  offices rose above the outskirts of the city, and Ford Prefect

  had broken into it in the familiar way. He always entered via the

  ventilation system rather than the main lobby because the main

  lobby was patrolled by robots whose job it was to quiz incoming

  employees about their expense accounts. Ford Prefect's expense

  accounts were notoriously complex and difficult affairs and he had

  found, on the whole, that the lobby robots were ill-equipped to

  understand the arguments he wished to put forward in relation to

  them. He preferred, therefore, to make his entrance by another

  route.

  This meant setting off nearly every alarm in the building, but

  not the one in the accounts department, which was the way that

  Ford preferred it.

  He hunkered down behind the storage cabinet, he licked

  the rubber suction cup of the toy arrow, and then fitted it

  to the string of the bow.

  Within about thirty seconds a security robot the size of a

  small melon came flying down the corridor at about waist height,

  scanning left and right for anything unusual as it did so.

  With impeccable timing Ford shot the toy arrow across its

  path. The arrow flew across the corridor and stuck, wobbling,

  on the opposite wall. As it flew, the robot's sensors locked on

  to it instantly and the robot twisted through ninety degrees to

  follow it, see what the hell it was and where it was going.

  This bought Ford one precious second, during which the

  robot was looking in the opposite direction from him. He

  hurled the towel over the flying robot and caught it.

  Because of the various sensory protuberances with which the

  robot was festooned, it couldn't manoeuvre inside the towel, and

  it just twitched back and forth without being able to turn and face

  its captor.

  Ford hauled it quickly towards him and pinned it down to

  the ground. It was beginning to whine pitifully. With one swift

  and practised movement, Ford reached under the towel with his

  No.3 gauge prising tool and flipped off the small plastic panel on

  top of the robot which gave access to its logic circuits.

  Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes

  of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.

  Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something

  else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest

  way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same

  stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a

  loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sand-

  wich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (The

  MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the

  Surprisingly Obvious).

  A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring

  sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the

  whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to

  believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was

  placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah!

  A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.'

  It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich

  in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again.

  Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that

  the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip

  straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor

  in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah!

  A herring sandwich..., etc., and repeated the same action over

  and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the her-

  ring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business

  and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was

  that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between

  a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was

  going on than was the robot.

  The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving

  force behind all change, development and innovation in life,

  which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper

  to this effect, which was widely criticised as being extremely

  stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what they

  had actually discovered was `boredom', or rather, the practical

  function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went

  on to discover other emotions, Like `irritability', `depression',

  `reluctance', `ickiness' and so on. The next big breakthrough came

  when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole

  welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for

  study, such as `relief', `joy', `friskiness', `appetite', `satisfaction',

  and most important of all, the desire for `happiness'.

  This was the biggest breakthrough of all.

  Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behav-

  iour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply.

  All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or

  happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order

  to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out

  for themselves.

  The robot which Ford had got trapped under his towel was

  not, at the moment a happy robot. It was happy when it could

  move about. It was happy when it could see other things. It was

  pa
rticularly 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.