ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless Read online

  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, bub-

  blingly, frothingly, burstingly true. What a truly ecstasy-induc-

  ingly correct observation.'

  `What's happened?' insisted Ford. `Who is this new man-

  agement? 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 expen-

  sive 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, over-resourced,

  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 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! Bil-

  lions 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 hitch hikers.

  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 iden-

  tity 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