The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  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.

  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, and 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 recognized 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 remodeled. 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 throughout the civilized and postcivilized 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.

  “Okay, okay,” 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, bubblingly, frothingly, burstingly true. What a truly ecstasy-inducingly correct observation.”

  “What’s happened?” insisted Ford. “Who is this new management? When did they take over? I … oh, never mind,” he added, as the little robot started to gibber 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 expensive 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 toward 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, spun, hit the window, which fortunately was built to withstand rocket attacks, rebounded and fell in a bruised and winded heap behind a smart gray 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 starding 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 smoothfaced 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 offense.

  “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 around 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 organization. His drinks trolley is, I imagine, helping to console him for this fact.”

  “Organization?” yelled Ford. “Organization? What a bloody stupid word for a set-up like this!”

  “Precisely our sentiments. Understructured, overresourced, undermanaged, overinebriated. 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 onto the desk in front of him. Ford did not move to pick it up. “You what?” said F
ord.

  “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 around 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 multidimensionally. 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! Billions 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 hitchhikers. 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 to sell to it. No. We sell to the affluent business traveler 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 organization in which Harl occupied it without developing a healthily paranoid view of life. He took the sensible precaution of hurling himself backward, 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 everything 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 expiration 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 among 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 semitransparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudoinches 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 identity 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 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 colors. 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 it 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 realized 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 happy, come now.”

  The robot let out a long heartfelt sigh of impassioned tristesse and sank reluctantly away from the ceiling.

  “Listen,” said Ford, “can you keep the rest of the security system happy for a few minutes?”

  “One of the joys of true happiness,” trilled the robot, “is sharing. I brim, I froth, I overflow with …”

  “Okay,” said Ford. “Just spread a little happiness around the security network. Don’t give it any information. Just make it feel good so it doesn’t feel the need to ask for any.”

  He picked up his towel and ran cheerfully for the door. Life had been a little dull of late. It showed every sign now of becoming extremely froody.

  Chapter 7

  Arthur Dent had been in some hell holes in his life, but he had never before seen a spaceport that had a sign saying “Even traveling despondently is better than arriving here.” To welcome visitors the arrivals hall featured a picture of the president of NowWhat, smiling. It was the only picture anybody could find of him, and it had been taken shortly after he had shot himself, so although the photo had been retouched as well as could be managed, the s
mile it wore was rather a ghastly one. The side of his head had been drawn back in crayon. No replacement had been found for the photograph because no replacement had been found for the president. There was only one ambition that anyone on the planet ever had, and that was to leave.

  Arthur checked himself into a small motel on the outskirts of town and sat glumly on the bed, which was damp, and flipped through the little information brochure, which was also damp. It said that the planet of NowWhat had been named after the opening words of the first settlers to arrive there after struggling across light years of space to reach the farthest unexplored outreaches of the Galaxy. The main town was called OhWell. There weren’t any other towns to speak of. Settlement on NowWhat had not been a success and the sort of people who actually wanted to live on NowWhat were not the sort of people you would want to spend time with.

  Trading was mentioned in the brochure. The main trade that was carried out was in the skins of the Now Whattian boghog but it wasn’t a very successful one because no one in their right minds would want to buy a NowWhattian boghog skin. The trade only hung on by its fingernails because there was always a significant number of people in the Galaxy who were not in their right minds. Arthur had felt very uncomfortable looking around at some of the other occupants of the small passenger compartment of the ship.

  The brochure described some of the history of the planet. Whoever had written it had obviously started out trying to drum up a little enthusiasm for the place by stressing that it wasn’t actually cold and wet all the time, but could find little positive to add to this, so the tone of the piece quickly degenerated into savage irony.

  It talked about the early years of settlement. It said that the major activities pursued on NowWhat were those of catching, skinning and eating Now Whattian boghogs, which were the only extant form of animal life on NowWhat, all others having long ago died of despair. The boghogs were tiny, vicious creatures, and the small margin by which they fell short of being completely inedible was the margin by which life on the planet subsisted. So what were the rewards, however small, that made life on NowWhat worth living? Well, there weren’t any. Not a one. Even making yourself some protective clothing out of boghog skins was an exercise in disappointment and futility, since the skins were unaccountably thin and leaky. This caused a lot of puzzled conjecture among the settlers. What was the boghog’s secret of keeping warm? If anyone had ever learned the language the boghogs spoke to one another, they would have discovered that there was no trick. The boghogs were as cold and wet as anyone else on the planet. No one had had the slightest desire to learn the language of the boghogs for the simple reason that these creatures communicated by biting each other very hard on the thigh. Life on NowWhat being what it was, most of what a boghog might have to say about it could easily be signified by these means.