Текст книги "The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Автор книги: Douglas Noel Adams

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Текущая страница: 52 (всего у книги 62 страниц)

Chapter 8

Ford had his own code of ethics. It wasn’t much of one, but it was his and he stuck by it, more or less. One rule he made was never to buy his own drinks. He wasn’t sure if that counted as an ethic, but you have to go with what you’ve got. He was also firmly and utterly opposed to all and any forms of cruelty to any animals whatsoever except geese. And furthermore he would never steal from his employers.

Well, not exactly steal.

If his accounts supervisor didn’t start to hyperventilate and put out a seal-all-exits security alert when Ford handed in his expenses claim, then Ford felt he wasn’t doing his job properly. But actually stealing was another thing. That was biting the hand that feeds you. Sucking very hard on it, even nibbling it in an affectionate kind of a way was okay, but you didn’t actually bite it. Not when that hand was the Guide. The Guide was something sacred and special.

But that, thought Ford as he ducked and weaved his way down through the building, was about to change. And they had only themselves to blame. Look at all this stuff. Lines of neat gray office cubicles and executive workstation pods. The whole place was dreary with the hum of memos and minutes of meetings flitting through its electronic networks. Out in the street they were playing Hunt the Wocket, for Zark’s sake, but here in the very heart of the Guide offices no one was even recklessly kicking a ball around the corridors or wearing inappropriately colored beachware.

“InfiniDim Enterprises,” Ford snarled to himself as he stalked rapidly down one corridor after another. Door after door magically opened to him without question. Elevators took him happily to places they should not. Ford was trying to pursue the most tangled and complicated route he could, heading generally downward through the building. His happy little robot took care of everything, spreading waves of acquiescent joy through all the security circuits it encountered.

Ford thought it needed a name and decided to call it Emily Saunders, after a girl he had very fond memories of. Then he thought that Emily Saunders was an absurd name for a security robot, and decided to call it Colin instead, after Emily’s dog.

He was moving deep into the bowels of the building now, into areas he had never entered before, areas of higher and higher security. He was beginning to encounter puzzled looks from the operatives he passed. At this level of security you didn’t even call them people anymore. And they were probably doing stuff that only operatives would do. When they went home to their families in the evening they became people again, and when their little children looked up to them with their sweet shining eyes and said, “Daddy, what did you do all day today?” they just said, “I performed my duties as an operative,” and left it at that.

The truth of the matter was that all sorts of highly dodgy stuff went on behind the cheery, happy-go-lucky front that the Guide liked to put up – or used to like to put up before this new InfiniDim Enterprises bunch marched in and started to make the whole thing highly dodgy. There were all kinds of tax scams and rackets and graft and shady deals supporting the shining edifice, and down in the secure research and data processing levels of the building was where it all went on.

Every few years the Guide would set up its business, and indeed its building, on a new world, and all would be sunshine and laughter for a while as the Guide would put down its roots in the local culture and economy, provide employment, a sense of glamour and adventure and, in the end, not quite as much actual revenue as the locals had expected.

When the Guide moved on, taking its building with it, it left a little like a thief in the night. Exactly like a thief in the night in fact. It usually left in the very early hours of the morning, and the following day there always turned out to be a very great deal of stuff missing. Whole cultures and economies would collapse in its wake, often within a week, leaving once-thriving planets desolate and shell-shocked but still somehow feeling they had been part of some great adventure.

The “operatives” who shot puzzled glances at Ford as he marched on into the depths of the building’s most sensitive areas were reassured by the presence of Colin, who was flying along with him in a buzz of emotional fulfillment and easing his path for him at every stage.

Alarms were starting to go off in other parts of the building. Perhaps that meant that Vann Harl had already been discovered, which might be a problem. Ford had been hoping he would be able to slip the Ident-I-Eeze back into his pocket before he came around. Well, that was a problem for later, and he didn’t for the moment have the faintest idea how he was going to solve it. For the moment he wasn’t going to worry. Wherever he went with little Colin, he was surrounded by a cocoon of sweetness and light and, most important, 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, gray and resolutely closed with a sign on it saying:

NO ADMITTANCE.

NOT EVEN TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.

YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.

GO AWAY.

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 gray hessian wall-weave had given way to brutal gray 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, gray and humming.

This was the nerve center of the entire Guide.

The computer terminals that lined the gray walls were windows onto 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-editors’ 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 halfway 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 anemic 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 upper 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:

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.

B. Don’t imagine you know what a computer terminal is.

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 mountain peaks, heart-stopping ravines, of moons shattering off into seahorses, 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 behaviors, but his instinct told him to look for the most outstanding feature he could detect and make toward 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 aigrettes3, agglomerates4, and archimandrites5.

He weltered toward 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 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 inward 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, counterintuitively, upward. And upward.

He threw his shoulders back, let his arms drop, gazed upward 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 onto which he could clamber.

He rose; he gripped; he clambered.

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

He held tightly onto 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 onto as he surveyed the world in which he found himself.

The whirling, turning height spun 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 representation 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-swiveling 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 toward 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 authorization was, what the authorization of his authorizing agent was, what his inside leg measurement was and so on. Laser light flickered all over him as if he were 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 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 hairline 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 toward the skin at the nape of his neck when Ford, holding his breath and praying very slightly, pulled Vann Harl’s Indent-I-Eeze out of his pocket and waved it in front of them.

Instantly every laser was diverted to the little card and swept backward and forward 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 organization 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 rationalize its own defenses against the information’s ever emerging. It was a programming 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 questioned, 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 realized 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 thirteen. 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 somehow had 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.

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 somehow, surreptitiously, had 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 twenty-three,” 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 upward. 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 to find. He would just have to busk it.

They were there.

The doors slid open.

Ominous quiet.

Empty corridor.

There was the door to Harl’s office, with a slight layer of dust around it. Ford knew that this dust consisted of billions of tiny molecular robots that had crawled out of the woodwork, built one another, rebuilt the door, disassembled one another and then crept back into the woodwork again and just waited for damage. Ford wondered what kind of life that was, but not for long because he was a lot more concerned about what his own life was like at that moment.

He took a deep breath and started his run.

Chapter 9

Arthur felt at a bit of a loss. There was a whole galaxy of stuff out there for him, and he wondered if it was churlish of him to complain to himself that it lacked just two things: the world he was born on and the woman he loved.

Damn it and blast it, he thought, and felt the need of some guidance and advice. He consulted The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He looked up “guidance” and it said, “See under ADVICE.” He looked up “advice” and it said, “See under GUIDANCE.” It had been doing a lot of that kind of stuff recently and he wondered if it was all it was cracked up to be.

He headed to the outer Eastern rim of the Galaxy, where, it was said, wisdom and truth were to be found, most particularly on the planet Hawalius, which was a planet of oracles and seers and soothsayers and also take-out pizza parlors, because most mystics were completely incapable of cooking for themselves.

However, it appeared that some sort of calamity had befallen this planet. As Arthur wandered the streets of the village where the major prophets lived, it had something of a crestfallen air. He came across one prophet who was clearly shutting up shop in a despondent kind of way and asked him what was happening.

“No call for us anymore,” he said gruffly as he started to bang a nail into the plank he was holding across the window of his hovel.

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Hold on to the other end of this and I’ll show you.”

Arthur held up the unnailed end of the plank and the old prophet scuttled into the recesses of his hovel, returning a moment or two later with a small Sub-Etha radio. He turned it on, fiddled with the dial for a moment and put the thing on the small wooden bench that he usually sat and prophesied on. He then took hold of the plank again and resumed hammering.

Arthur sat and listened to the radio.

“ … be confirmed,” said the radio.

“Tomorrow,” it continued, “the vice president of Poffla Vigus, Roopy Ga Stip, will announce that he intends to run for president. In a speech he will give tomorrow at …”

“Find another channel,” said the prophet. Arthur pushed the preset button.

“ … refused to comment,” said the radio. “Next week’s jobless totals in the Zabush sector,” it continued, “will be the worst since records began. A report published next month says …”

“Find another,” barked the prophet, crossly. Arthur pushed the button again.

“ … denied it categorically,” said the radio. “Next month’s royal wedding between Prince Gid of the Soofling dynasty and Princess Hooli of Raui Alpha will be the most spectacular ceremony the Bjanjy Territories has ever witnessed. Our reporter Trillian Astra is there and sends us this report.”

Arthur blinked.

The sound of cheering crowds and a hubbub of brass bands erupted from the radio. A very familiar voice said, “Well, Krart, the scene here in the middle of next month is absolutely incredible. Princess Hooli is looking radiant in a …”

The prophet swiped the radio off the bench and onto the dusty ground, where it squawked like a badly tuned chicken.

“See what we have to contend with?” grumbled the prophet. “Here, hold this. Not that, this. No, not like that. This way up. Other way ’round, you fool.”

“I was listening to that,” complained Arthur, grappling helplessly with the prophet’s hammer.

“So does everybody. That’s why this place is like a ghost town.” He spat into the dust.

“No, I mean, that sounded like someone I knew.”

“Princess Hooli? If I had to stand around saying hello to everybody who’s known Princess Hooli, I’d need a new set of lungs.”

“Not the Princess,” said Arthur. “The reporter. Her name’s Trillian. I don’t know where she got the Astra from. She’s from the same planet as me. I wondered where she’d got to.”

“Oh, she’s all over the continuum these days. We can’t get the tri-d TV stations out here of course, thank the Great Green Arkleseizure, but you hear her on the radio, gallivanting here and there through space-time. She wants to settle down and find herself a steady era, that young lady does. It’ll all end in tears. Probably already has.” He swung with his hammer and hit his thumb rather hard. He started to speak in tongues.

The village of oracles wasn’t much better.

He had been told that when looking for a good oracle it was best to find the oracle that other oracles went to, but he was shut. There was a sign by the entrance saying, “I just don’t know anymore. Try next door →, but that’s just a suggestion, not formal oracular advice.”

“Next door” was a cave a few hundred yards away and Arthur walked toward it. Smoke and steam were rising from, respectively, a small fire and a battered tin pot that was hanging over it. There was also a very nasty smell coming from the pot. At least, Arthur thought it was coming from the pot. The distended bladders of some of the local goatlike things were hanging from a propped-up line drying in the sun, and the smell could have been coming from them. There was also, a worryingly small distance away, a pile of discarded bodies of the local goatlike things and the smell could have been coming from them.

But the smell could just as easily have been coming from the old lady who was busy beating flies away from the pile of bodies. It was a hopeless task because each of the flies was about the size of a winged bottle top and all she had was a table tennis bat. Also she seemed half-blind. Every now and then, by chance, her wild thrashing would connect with one of the flies with a richly satisfying thunk, and the fly would hurtle through the air and smack itself open against the rock face a few yards from the entrance to her cave.

She gave every impression, by her demeanor, that these were the moments she lived for.

Arthur watched this exotic performance for a while from a polite distance, and then at last tried giving a gentle cough to attract her attention. The gentle cough, courteously meant, unfortunately involved first inhaling rather more of the local atmosphere than he had so far been doing and, as a result, he erupted into a fit of raucous expectoration and collapsed against the rock face, choking and streaming with tears. He struggled for breath, but each new breath made things worse. He vomited, half-choked again, rolled over his vomit, kept rolling for a few yards and eventually made it up on to his hands and knees and crawled, panting, into slightly fresher air.

“Excuse me,” he said. He got some breath back. “I really am most dreadfully sorry. I feel a complete idiot and …” He gestured helplessly toward the small pile of his own vomit lying spread around the entrance to her cave.

“What can I say?” he said. “What can I possibly say?”

This at least had gained her attention. She looked around at him suspiciously, but, being half-blind, had difficulty finding him in the blurred and rocky landscape.

He waved, helpfully. “Hello!” he called.

At last she spotted him, grunted to herself and turned back to whacking flies.

It was horribly apparent from the way that currents of air moved when she did, that the major source of the smell was in fact her. The drying bladders, the festering bodies and the noxious potage may all have been making valiant contributions to the atmosphere, but the major olfactory presence was the woman herself.

She got another good thwack at a fly. It smacked against the rock and dribbled its insides down it in what she clearly regarded, if she could see that far, as a satisfactory manner.

Unsteadily, Arthur got to his feet and brushed himself down with a fistful of dried grass. He didn’t know what else to do by way of announcing himself. He had half a mind just to wander off again, but felt awkward about leaving a pile of his vomit in front of the entrance to the woman’s home. He wondered what to do about it. He started to pluck up more handfuls of the scrubby dried grass that was to be found here and there. He was worried, though, that if he ventured nearer to the vomit he might simply add to it rather than clear it up.

Just as he was debating with himself as to what the right course of action was, he began to realize that she was at last saying something to him.

“I beg your pardon?” he called out.

“I said, can I help you?” she said, in a thin, scratchy voice that he could only just hear.

“Er, I came to ask your advice,” he called back, feeling a bit ridiculous.

She turned to peer at him, myopically, then turned back, swiped at a fly and missed.

“What about?” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” he said.

“I said, what about?” she almost screeched.

“Well,” said Arthur. “Just sort of general advice, really. It said in the brochure—”

“Ha! Brochure!” spat the old woman. She seemed to be waving her bat more or less at random now.

Arthur fished the crumpled-up brochure from his pocket. He wasn’t quite certain why. He had already read it and she, he expected, wouldn’t want to. He unfolded it anyway in order to have something to frown thoughtfully at for a moment or two. The copy in the brochure twittered on about the ancient mystical arts of the seers and sages of Hawalius, and wildly overrepresented the level of accommodation available in Hawalion. Arthur still carried a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with him but found, when he consulted it, that the entries were becoming more abstruse and paranoid and had lots of xs and js and [s in them. Something was wrong somewhere. Whether it was in his own personal unit, or whether it was something or someone going terribly amiss, or perhaps just hallucinating, at the heart of the Guide organization itself, he didn’t know. But one way or another he was even less inclined to trust it than usual, which meant that he trusted it not one bit, and mostly used it for eating his sandwiches off of when he was sitting on a rock staring at something.

The woman had turned and was walking slowly toward him now. Arthur tried, without making it too obvious, to judge the wind direction, and bobbed about a bit as she approached.

“Advice,” she said. “Advice, eh?”

“Er, yes,” said Arthur. “Yes. That is—”

He frowned again at the brochure, as if to be certain that he hadn’t misread it and stupidly turned up on the wrong planet or something. The brochure said, “The friendly local inhabitants will be glad to share with you the knowledge and wisdom of the ancients. Peer with them into the swirling mysteries of past and future time!” There were some coupons as well, but Arthur had been far too embarrassed actually to cut them out or try to present them to anybody.