The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  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.

  “Advice, eh?” said the old woman again. “Just sort of general advice, you say. On what? What to do with your life, that sort of thing?”

  “Yes,” said Arthur. “That sort of thing. Bit of a problem I sometimes find if I’m being perfectly honest.” He was trying desperately, with tiny darting movements, to stay upwind of her. She surprised him by suddenly turning sharply away from him and heading off toward her cave.

  “You’ll have to help me with the photocopier, then,” she said.

  “What?” said Arthur.

  “The photocopier,” she repeated, patiently. “You’ll have to help me drag it out. It’s solar-powered. I have to keep it in the cave, though, so the birds don’t shit on it.”

  “I see,” said Arthur.

  “I’d take a few deep breaths if I were you,” muttered the old woman, as she stomped into the gloom of the cave mouth.

  Arthur did as she advised. He almost hyperventilated in fact. When he felt he was ready, he held his breath and followed her in.

  The photocopier was a big old thing on a rickety trolley. It stood just inside the dim shadows of the cave. The wheels were stuck obstinately in different directions and the ground was rough and stony.

  “Go ahead and take a breath outside,” said the old woman. Arthur was going red in the face trying to help her move the thing.

  He nodded in relief. If she wasn’t going to be embarrassed about it, then neither, he was determined, would he. He stepped outside and took a few breaths, then came back in to do more heaving and pushing. He had to do this quite a few times till at last the machine was outside.

  The sun beat down on it. The old woman disappeared back into her cave again and brought with her some mottled metal panels, which she connected to the machine to collect the sun’s energy.

  She squinted up into the sky. The sun was quite bright, but the day was hazy and vague.

  “It’ll take a while,” she said.

  Arthur said he was happy to wait.

  The old woman shrugged and stomped across to the fire. Above it, the contents of the tin can were bubbling away. She poked about at them with a stick.

  “You won’t be wanting any lunch?” she inquired of Arthur.

  “I’ve eaten, thanks,” said Arthur. “No, really. I’ve eaten.”

  “I’m sure you have,” said the old lady. She stirred with the stick. After a few minutes she fished a lump of something out, blew on it to cool it a little and then put it in her mouth.

  She chewed on it thoughtfully for a bit.

  Then she hobbled slowly across to the pile of dead goatlike things. She spat the lump out onto the pile. She hobbled slowly back to the can. She tried to unhook it from the sort of tripodlike thing that it was hanging from.

  “Can I help you?” said Arthur, jumping up politely. He hurried over.

  Together they disengaged the tin from the tripod and carried it awkwardly down the slight slope that led downward from her cave and toward a line of scrubby and gnarled trees, which marked the edge of a steep but quite shallow gully, from which a whole new range of offensive smells was emanating.

  “Ready?” said the old lady.

  “Yes …” said Arthur, though he didn’t know for what.

  “One,” said the old lady.

  “Two,” she said.

  “Three,” she added.

  Arthur realized just in time what she intended. Together they tossed the contents of the tin into the gully.

  After an hour or two of uncommunicative silence, the old woman decided that the solar panels had absorbed enough sunlight to run the photocopier now and she disappeared to rummage inside her cave. She emerged at last with a few sheaves of paper and fed them through the machine.

  She handed the copies to Arthur.

  “This is, er, this is your advice then, is it?” said Arthur, leafing through them uncertainly.

  “No,” said the old lady. “It’s the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you’ll see that I’ve underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make them stand out. They’re all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I’ve taken, then maybe you won’t finish up at the end of your life”—she paused, and filled her lungs for a good shout—“in a smelly old cave like this!”

  She grabbed up her table tennis bat, rolled up her sleeve, stomped off to her pile of dead goatlike things and started to set about the flies with vim and vigor.

  The last village Arthur visited consisted entirely of extremely high poles. They were so high that it wasn’t possible to tell, from the ground, what was on top of them, and Arthur had to climb three before he found one that had anything on top of it at all other than a platform covered with bird droppings.

  Not an easy task. You went up the poles by climbing on the short wooden pegs that had been hammered into them in slowly ascending spirals. Anybody who was a less diligent tourist than Arthur would have taken a couple of snapshots and sloped right off to the nearest bar & grill, where you also could buy a range of particularly sweet and gooey chocolate cakes to eat in front of the ascetics. But, largely as a result of this, most of the ascetics had gone now. In fact they had mostly gone and set up lucrative therapy centers on some of the more affluent worlds in the Northwest ripple of the Galaxy, where the living was easier by a factor of about 17 million, and the chocolate was just fabulous. Most of the ascetics, it turned out, had not known about chocolate before they took up asceticism. Most of the clients who came to their therapy centers knew about it all too well.

  At the top of the third pole Arthur stopped for a breather. He was very hot and out of breath, since each pole was about fifty or sixty feet high. The world seemed to swing vertiginously around him, but it didn’t worry Arthur too much. He knew that, logically, he could not die until he had been to Stavromula Beta,4 and had therefore managed to cultivate a merry attitude toward extreme personal danger. He felt a little giddy perched fifty feet up in the air on top of a pole, but he dealt with it by eating a sandwich. He was just about to embark on reading the photocopied life history of the oracle, when he was rather startled to hear a slight cough behind him.

  He turned so abruptly that he dropped his sandwich, which turned downward through the air and was rather small by the time it was stopped by the ground.

  About thirty feet behind Arthur was another pole, and, alone among the sparse forest of about three dozen poles, the top of it was occupied. It was occupied by an old man who, in turn, seemed to be occupied by profound thoughts that were making him scowl.

  “Excuse me,” said Arthur. The man ignored him. Perhaps he couldn’t hear him. The breeze was moving about a bit. It was only by chance that Arthur had heard the slight cough.

  “Hello?” called Arthur. “Hello!”

  The man at last glanced around at him. He seemed surprised to see him. Arthur couldn’t tell if he was surprised and pleased to see him or just surprised.

  “Are you open?” called Arthur.

  The man frowned in incomprehension. Arthur couldn’t tell if he couldn’t understand or couldn’t hear.
>
  “I’ll pop over,” called Arthur. “Don’t go away.”

  He clambered off the small platform and climbed quickly down the spiraling pegs, arriving at the bottom quite dizzy.

  He started to make his way over to the pole on which the old man was sitting, and then suddenly realized that he had disoriented himself on the way down and didn’t know for certain which one it was.

  He looked around for landmarks and worked out which was the right one.

  He climbed it. It wasn’t.

  “Damn,” he said. “Excuse me!” he called out to the old man again, who was now straight in front of him and forty feet away. “Got lost. Be with you in a minute.” Down he went again, getting very hot and bothered.

  When he arrived, panting and sweating, at the top of the pole that he knew for certain was the right one, he realized that the man was, somehow or other, mucking him about.

  “What do you want?” shouted the old man crossly at him. He was now sitting on top of the pole that Arthur recognized was the one that he had been on himself when eating his sandwich.

  “How did you get over there?” called Arthur in bewilderment.

  “You think I’m going to tell you just like that what it took me forty springs, summers and autumns of sitting on top of a pole to work out?”

  “What about winter?”

  “What about winter?”

  “Don’t you sit on the pole in the winter?”

  “Just because I sit up a pole for most of my life,” said the man, “doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. I go south in the winter. Got a beach house. Sit on the chimney stack.”

  “Do you have any advice for a traveler?”

  “Yes. Get a beach house.”

  “I see.”

  The man stared out over the hot, dry, scrubby landscape. From here Arthur could just see the old woman, a tiny speck in the distance, dancing up and down swatting flies.

  “You see her?” called the old man, suddenly.

  “Yes,” said Arthur. “I consulted her in fact.”

  “Fat lot she knows. I got the beach house because she turned it down. What advice did she give you?”

  “Do exactly the opposite of everything she’s done.”

  “In other words, get a beach house.”

  “I suppose so,” said Arthur. “Well, maybe I’ll get one.”

  “Hmmm.”

  The horizon was swimming in a fetid heat haze.

  “Any other advice?” asked Arthur. “Other than to do with real estate?”

  “A beach house isn’t just real estate. It’s a state of mind,” said the man. He turned and looked at Arthur.

  Oddly, the man’s face was now only a couple of feet away. He seemed in one way to be a perfectly normal shape, but his body was sitting cross-legged on a pole forty feet away while his face was only two feet from Arthur’s. Without moving his head, and without seeming to do anything odd at all, he stood up and stepped onto the top of another pole. Either it was just the heat, thought Arthur, or space was a different shape for him.

  “A beach house,” he said, “doesn’t even have to be on the beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate,” he went on, “at boundary conditions.”

  “Really?” said Arthur.

  “Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other.”

  Arthur got terribly excited. This was exactly the sort of thing he’d been promised in the brochure. Here was a man who seemed to be moving through some kind of Escher space saying really profound things about all sorts of stuff.

  It was unnerving, though. The man was now stepping from pole to ground, from ground to pole, from pole to pole, from pole to horizon and back: he was making complete nonsense of Arthur’s spatial universe. “Please stop!” Arthur said, suddenly.

  “Can’t take it, huh?” said the man. Without the slightest movement he was now back, sitting cross-legged, on top of the pole forty feet in front of Arthur. “You come to me for advice, but you can’t cope with anything you don’t recognize. Hmmm. So we’ll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual, I suppose.” He sighed and squinted mournfully into the distance.

  “Where you from, boy?” he then asked.

  Arthur decided to be clever. He was fed up with being mistaken for a complete idiot by everyone he ever met. “Tell you what,” he said. “You’re a seer. Why don’t you tell me?”

  The old man sighed again. “I was just,” he said, passing his hand around behind his head, “making conversation.” When he brought his hand around to the front again, he had a globe of the Earth spinning on his up-pointed forefinger. It was unmistakable. He put it away again. Arthur was stunned.

  “How did you—”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not? I’ve come all this way.”

  “You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.”

  “Hang on, can I write this down?” said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.

  “You can pick up a copy at the spaceport,” said the old man. “They’ve got racks of the stuff.”

  “Oh,” said Arthur, disappointed. “Well, isn’t there anything that’s perhaps a bit more specific to me?”

  “Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.”

  Arthur looked at him doubtfully. “Can I get that at the spaceport, too?” he said.

  “Check it out,” said the old man.

  “It says in the brochure,” said Arthur, pulling it out of his pocket and looking at it again, “that I can have a special prayer, individually tailored to me and my special needs.”

  “Oh, all right,” said the old man. “Here’s a prayer for you. Got a pencil?”

  “Yes,” said Arthur.

  “It goes like this. Let’s see now: ‘Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.’ That’s it. It’s what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.”

  “Hmmm,” said Arthur. “Well, thank you—”

  “There’s another prayer that goes with it that’s very important,” continued the old man, “so you’d better jot this down, too.”

  “Okay.”

  “It goes, ‘Lord, lord, lord …’ It’s best to put that bit in, just in case. You can never be too sure. ‘Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen.’ And that’s it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from leaving out that last part.”

  “Ever heard of a place called Stavromula Beta?” asked Arthur.

  “No.”

  “Well, thank you for your help,” said Arthur.

  “Don’t mention it,” said the man on the pole, and vanished.

  4 See Life, the Universe and Everything, chapter 18.

  Chapter 10

  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 once again, rolled rapidly across the floor to where the smart gray crushed-leather sofa was and set up his strategic operational base behind it.

  That, at least, was the plan.

  Unfortunately the smart gray crushed-leather sofa wasn’t there.

  Why, thought Ford, as he twisted himself around in midair, lurched, dove and scuttled for cover behind Harl’s desk, did people have this stupid obsession with rearranging their offic
e furniture every five minutes?

  Why, for instance, replace a perfectly serviceable if rather muted gray crushed-leather sofa with what appeared to be a small tank?

  And who was the big guy with the mobile rocket launcher on his shoulder? Someone from head office? Couldn’t be. This was head office. At least it was the head office of the Guide. Where these InfiniDim Enterprises guys came from Zarquon knew. Nowhere very sunny, judging from the slug-like color and texture of their skins. This was all wrong, thought Ford. People connected with the Guide should come from sunny places.

  There were several of them, in fact, and all of them seemed to be more heavily armed and armored than you normally expected corporate executives to be, even in today’s rough-and-tumble business world.

  He was making a lot of assumptions here, of course. He was assuming that the big, bull-necked, sluglike guys were in some way connected with InfiniDim Enterprises, but it was a reasonable assumption and he felt happy about it because they had logos on their armor-plating which said “InfiniDim Enterprises” on them. He had a nagging suspicion that this was not a business meeting, though. He also had a nagging feeling that these sluglike creatures were familiar to him in some way. Familiar, but in an unfamiliar guise.

  Well, he had been in the room for a good two and a half seconds now and thought that it was probably about time to start doing something constructive. He could take a hostage. That would be good.

  Vann Harl was in his swivel chair, looking alarmed, pale and shaken. Had probably had some bad news as well as a nasty bang to the back of his head. Ford leapt to his feet and made a running grab of him.

  Under the pretext of getting him into a good solid double underpinned elbow lock, Ford managed surreptitiously to slip the Ident-I-Eeze back into Harl’s inner pocket.

  Bingo!

  He’d done what he came to do. Now he just had to talk his way out of here.

  “Okay,” he said. “I …” He paused.

  The big guy with the rocket launcher was turning toward Ford Prefect and pointing it at him, which Ford couldn’t help feeling was wildly irresponsible behavior.