ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless Read online

  little Colin, he was surrounded by a cocoon of sweetness and

  light and, most importantly, willing and acquiescent elevators

  and positively obsequious doors.

  Ford even began to whistle, which was probably his mistake.

  Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes

  our ends.

  The next door wouldn't open.

  And that was a pity, because it was the very one that Ford

  had been making for. It stood there before him, grey and

  resolutely closed with a sign on it saying:

  begin{center}

  NO ADMITTANCE.

  NOT EVEN TO AUTHORISED PERSONNEL.

  YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.

  GO AWAY.

  end{center}

  Colin reported that the doors had been getting generally a

  lot grimmer down in these lower reaches of the building.

  They were about ten stories below ground level now. The

  air was refrigerated and the tasteful grey hessian wall-weave

  had given way to brutal grey bolted steel walls. Colin's rampant

  euphoria had subsided into a kind of determined cheeriness. He

  said that he was beginning to tire a little. It was taking all his

  energy to pump the slightest bonhomie whatsoever into the doors

  down here.

  Ford kicked at the door. It opened.

  `Mixture of pleasure and pain,' he muttered. `Always does

  the trick.'

  He walked in and Colin flew in after him. Even with a

  wire stuck straight into his pleasure electrode his happiness

  was a nervous kind of happiness. He bobbed around a little.

  The room was small, grey and humming.

  This was the nerve centre of the entire Guide.

  The computer terminals that lined the grey walls were win-

  dows on to every aspect of the Guide's operations. Here, on the

  left-hand side of the room, reports were gathered over the Sub-

  Etha-Net from field researchers in every corner of the Galaxy,

  fed straight up into the network of sub-editor's offices where they

  had all the good bits cut out by secretaries because the sub-editors

  were out having lunch. The remaining copy would then be shot

  across to the other half of the building - the other leg of the `H'

  - which was the legal department. The legal department would

  cut out anything that was still even remotely good from what

  remained and fire it back to the offices of the executive editors,

  who were also out at lunch. So the editors' secretaries would read

  it and say it was stupid and cut most of what was left.

  When any of the editors finally staggered in from lunch they

  would exclaim `What is this feeble crap that X' - where X was

  the name of the field researcher in question - `has sent us from

  half-way across the bloody Galaxy? What's the point of having

  somebody spending three whole orbital periods out in the bloody

  Gagrakacka Mind Zones, with all that stuff going on out there,

  if this load of anaemic squitter is the best he can be bothered to

  send us. Disallow his expenses!'

  `What shall we do with the copy?' the secretary would ask.

  `Ah, put it out over the network. Got to have something

  going out there. I've got a headache, I'm going home.'

  So the edited copy would go for one last slash and burn

  through the legal department, and then be sent back down

  here where it would be broadcast out over the Sub-Etha-Net

  for instantaneous retrieval anywhere in the Galaxy. That was

  handled by equipment which was monitored and controlled by

  the terminals on the right-hand side of the room.

  Meanwhile the order to disallow the researcher's expenses

  was relayed down to the computer terminal stuck off in the

  right-hand corner, and it was to this terminal that Ford Prefect

  now swiftly made his way.

  (If you are reading this on planet Earth then:

  begin{description}

  item{}

  a) Good luck to you. There is an awful lot of stuff you

  don't know anything about, but you are not alone in this. It's

  just that in your case the consequences of not knowing any of

  this stuff are particularly terrible, but then, hey, that's just the

  way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated.

  item{}

  b) Don't imagine you know what a computer terminal is.

  end{description}

  A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with

  a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and

  body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.)

  Ford hurried over to the terminal, sat in front of it and

  quickly dipped himself into its universe.

  It wasn't the normal universe he knew. It was a universe of

  densely enfolded worlds, of wild topographies, towering moun-

  tain peaks, heart stopping ravines, of moons shattering off into

  sea horses, hurtful blurting crevices, silently heaving oceans and

  bottomless hurtling hooping funts.

  He held still to get his bearings. He controlled his breathing,

  closed his eyes and looked again.

  So this was where accountants spent their time. There was

  clearly more to them than met the eye. He looked around

  carefully, trying not to let it all swell and swim and overwhelm

  him.

  He didn't know his way around this universe. He didn't

  even know the physical laws that determined its dimensional

  extents or behaviours, but his instinct told him to look for the

  most outstanding feature he could detect and make towards it.

  Way off in some indistinguishable distance - was it a mile

  or a million or a mote in his eye? - was a stunning peak that

  overarched the sky, climbed and climbed and spread out in

  flowering aigrettes 1, agglomerates 2, and arch imandrites 3.

  He weltered towards it, hooling and thurling, and at last

  reached it in a meaninglessly long umthingth of time.

  He clung to it, arms outspread, gripping tightly on to its

  roughly gnarled and pitted surface. Once he was certain that

  he was secure he made the hideous mistake of looking down.

  While he had been weltering, hooling and thurling, the distance

  beneath him had not bothered him unduly, but now that he was

  begin{enumerate}

  item An ornamental tuft of plumes.

  item A jumbled mass.

  item A cleric ranking below a bishop.

  end{enumerate}

  gripping, the distance made his heart wilt and his brain bend.

  His fingers were white with pain and tension. His teeth were

  grinding and twisting against each other beyond his control. His

  eyes turned inwards with waves from the willowing extremities

  of nausea.

  With an immense effort of will and faith he simply let go

  and pushed.

  He felt himself float. Away. And then, counter-intuitively,

  upwards. And upwards.

  He threw his shoulders back, let his arms drop, gazed upwards

  and let himself be drawn loosely, higher and higher.

  Before long, insofar as such terms had any meaning in this

  virtual universe, a ledge loomed up ahead of him on which he

  could grip and on to which he could clamber.

  He
rose, he gripped, he clambered.

  He panted a little. This was all a little stressful.

  He held tightly on to the ledge as he sat. He wasn't certain if

  this was to prevent himself from falling down off it or rising up

  from it, but he needed something to grip on to as he surveyed

  the world in which he found himself.

  The whirling, turning height span him and twisted his brain

  in upon itself till he found himself, eyes closed, whimpering and

  hugging the hideous wall of towering rock.

  He slowly brought his breathing back under control again.

  He told himself repeatedly that he was just in a graphic rep-

  resentation of a world. A virtual universe. A simulated reality.

  He could snap back out of it at any moment.

  He snapped back out of it.

  He was sitting in a blue leatherette foam filled swivel-seated

  office chair in front of a computer terminal.

  He relaxed.

  He was clinging to the face of an impossibly high peak perched

  on a narrow ledge above a drop of brain-swivelling dimensions.

  It wasn't just the landscape being so far beneath him -

  he wished it would stop undulating and waving.

  He had to get a grip. Not on the rock wall - that was an

  illusion. He had to get a grip on the situation, be able to look

  at the physical world he was in while drawing himself out of it

  emotionally.

  He clenched inwardly and then, just as he had let go of the

  rock face itself, he let go of the idea of the rock face and let

  himself just sit there clearly and freely. He looked out at the

  world. He was breathing well. He was cool. He was in charge

  again.

  He was in a four-dimensional topological model of the Guide's

  financial systems, and somebody or something would very shortly

  want to know why.

  And here they came.

  Swooping through virtual space towards him came a small

  flock of mean and steely-eyed creatures with pointy little heads,

  pencil moustaches and querulous demands as to who he was,

  what he was doing there, what his authorisation was, what the

  authorisation of his authorising agent was, what his inside leg

  measurement was and so on. Laser light flickered all over him

  as if he was a packet of biscuits at a supermarket check-out. The

  heavier duty laser guns were held, for the moment, in reserve.

  The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no

  difference. Being virtually killed by a virtual laser in virtual space

  is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as

  you think you are.

  The laser readers were becoming very agitated as they flickered

  over his fingerprints, his retina and the follicle pattern where his

  hair line was receding. They didn't like what they were finding at

  all. The chattering and screeching of highly personal and insolent

  questions was rising in pitch. A little surgical steel scraper was

  reaching out towards the skin at the nape of his neck when

  Ford, holding his breath and praying very slightly, pulled Vann

  Harl's Ident-i-Eeze out of his pocket and waved it in front of

  them.

  Instantly every laser was diverted to the little card and Swept

  backwards and forwards over it and in it, examining and reading

  every molecule.

  Then, just as suddenly, they stopped.

  The entire flock of little virtual inspectors snapped to attention.

  `Nice to see you, Mr Harl,' they said in smarmy unison.

  `Is there anything we can do for you?'

  Ford smiled a slow and vicious smile.

  `

  Do you know,' he said, `I rather think there is?'

  Five minutes later he was out of there.

  About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty

  to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in

  the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred

  ownership of the entire organisation into his own name, but he

  doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn't want it

  anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights

  at the office, not to mention massive and time-consuming fraud

  investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted

  something that nobody other than the computer would notice:

  that was the bit that took thirty seconds.

  The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming

  the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything.

  It had to want not to know about what Ford was up to, and

  then he could safely leave the computer to rationalise its own

  defences against the information ever emerging. It was a pro-

  gramming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the

  sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal

  people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to

  high political office.

  The other minute was spent discovering that the computer

  system already had a mental block. A big one.

  He would never have discovered it if he hadn't been busy

  engineering a mental block himself. He came across a whole

  slew of smooth and plausible denial procedures and diversionary

  subroutines exactly where he had been planning to install his

  own. The computer denied all knowledge of them, of course,

  then blankly refused to accept that there was anything even to

  deny knowledge of, and was generally so convincing that even

  Ford almost found himself thinking he must have made a mistake.

  He was impressed.

  He was so impressed, in fact, that he didn't bother to install

  his own mental block procedures, he just set up calls to the ones

  that were already there, which then called themselves when ques-

  tioned, and so on.

  He quickly set about debugging the little bits of code he had

  installed himself, only to discover they weren't there. Cursing,

  he searched all over for them, but could find no trace of them

  at all.

  He was just about to start installing them all over again when

  he realised that the reason he couldn't find them was that they

  were working already.

  He grinned with satisfaction.

  He tried to discover what the computer's other mental block

  was all about, but it seemed, not unnaturally, to have a mental

  block about it. He could no longer find any trace of it at all, in

  fact; it was that good. He wondered if he had been imagining

  it. He wondered if he had been imagining that it was something

  to do with something in the building, and something to do with

  the number 13. He ran a few tests. Yes, he had obviously been

  imagining it.

  No time for fancy routes now, there was obviously a major

  security alert in progress. Ford took the elevator up to the ground

  floor to change to the express elevators. He had somehow to get

  the Ident-i-Eeze back into Harl's pocket before it was missed.

  How, he didn't know.

  The doors of the elevator slid open to reveal a large posse of

  security guards and robots poised waiting for it and brandishing

  filthy looking weapons.

  They ordered him out.
<
br />   With a shrug he stepped forward. They all pushed rudely

  past him into the elevator which took them down to continue

  their search for him on the lower levels.

  This was fun, thought Ford, giving Colin a friendly pat.

  Colin was about the first genuinely useful robot Ford had ever

  encountered. Colin bobbed along in the air in front of him in a

  lather of cheerful ecstasy. Ford was glad he'd named him after

  a dog.

  He was highly tempted just to leave at that point and hope

  for the best, but he knew that the best had a far greater chance

  of actually occurring if Harl did not discover that his Ident-i-Eeze

  was missing. He had somehow, surreptitiously, to return it.

  They went to the express elevators.

  `Hi,' said the elevator they got into.

  `Hi,' said Ford.

  `Where can I take you folks today?' said the elevator.

  `Floor 23,' said Ford.

  `Seems to be a popular floor today,' said the elevator.

  `Hmm,' thought Ford, not liking the sound of that at all.

  The elevator lit up the twenty-third floor on its floor display

  and started to zoom upwards. Something about the floor display

  tweaked at Ford's mind but he couldn't catch what it was and

  forgot about it. He was more worried about the idea of the floor

  he was going to being a popular one. He hadn't really thought

  through how he was going to deal with whatever it was that was

  happening up there because he had no idea what he was going