Volume 5 - Mostly Harmless Read online

  Douglas Adams was born in 1952 and created all the various and contradictory manifestations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: radio, novels, TV, computer game, stage adaptation, comic book and bath towel.

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published thirty years ago on 12 October 1979 and its phenomenal success sent the book straight to number one in the UK bestseller list. In 1984 Douglas Adams became the youngest author to be awarded a Golden Pan. His series has sold over 15 million books in the UK, the US and Australia and was also a bestseller in German, Swedish and many other languages.

  The feature film starring Martin Freeman and Zooey Deschanel with Stephen Fry as the Guide was released in 2005 using much of Douglas’s original script and ideas.

  Douglas lived with his wife and daughter in California, where he died in 2001.

  BOOKS BY DOUGLAS ADAMS

  The Hitchhiker series

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

  Life, the Universe and Everything

  So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

  Mostly Harmless

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts: The Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Film Tie-in

  The Making of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’

  The Dirk Gently series

  Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

  The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul

  The Salmon of Doubt

  With John Lloyd

  The Meaning of Liff

  The Deeper Meaning of Liff

  With Mark Carwardine

  Last Chance to See . . .

  By Terry Jones, based on a story/computer game by Douglas Adams

  Starship Titanic

  First published 1992 by William Heinemann Ltd

  First published in paperback 1993 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2009 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-51322-7 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-330-51320-3 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-330-51323-4 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Serious Productions Ltd 1992

  Foreword copyright © Dirk Maggs 2009

  The right of Douglas Adams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

  The Macmillan Group has no responsibility for the information provided by any external websites whose address you obtain from this book. The inclusion of external website addresses in this book does not constitute an endorsement by or association with us of such sites or the content, products, advertising or other materials presented on such sites.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  For Ron

  Foreword

  by Dirk Maggs

  This is a wonderful, terrible book. Wonderful in that it contains more of Douglas’s unique humour and driving obsessions than many of his other works of fiction. Terrible in its grand and utter finality.

  Many other writers would have happily reunited the inhabitants of the Hitchhiker’s universe in such a way as to leave comfortable room for the next sequel. To send Arthur, Ford and company off on a series of diverting adventures and then return them safely home (wherever that might be) in time for tea (probably not dispensed by a Nutrimat appliance).

  Douglas was only too aware of the expectations surrounding a new Hitchhiker’s book, so much so that the business of writing it was almost as dramatic as its content. Yet he could not turn out work to fit a template, even one he might have devised himself. Of course he would recycle good ideas from defunct (or nearly defunct) projects – his unused Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen forming the core of Life, the Universe and Everything, for example, or Shada morphing into the labyrinthine world of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

  Mostly Harmless is a brave departure. Douglas was determined to challenge his characters and the reader in a maze of parallel plots. This was going to be a rollercoaster ride into the unknown, a tour of his passions and fears. No wonder he found it difficult to settle himself to writing it.

  The tales of Douglas being locked in a hotel room in order to meet his deadline aren’t all apocryphal, but there’s a serious point in amongst the dinner party anecdotes. To innovate non-stop is an exhausting process, and this Hitchhiker’s novel represents his predictive imagination at its most extraordinary. The Guide Mark II is a chilling and prescient warning about mixing Artificial Intelligence with Corporate Venality. We are only just waking up to the box-ticking, goal-driven, share-and-enjoy surveillance society Douglas anticipated.

  The book is also a snapshot of a creative mind struck by two complementary and equally chilling themes – Mortality and Extinction.

  In the years leading up to the writing of this book Douglas’s general interest in the collision of science and the arts had hardened into a deep and abiding interest in the fate of life upon his home planet. His Last Chance To See project – tracking down and observing the Earth’s most threatened species – wasn’t a casual diversion, but an issue that gripped his conscience and fired his imagination.

  In Mostly Harmless these themes are played out by characters we have grown to love. There is more than one threatened species in this book; as in the universe we experience every day of our lives, unconscious forces work blindly to react in entirely logical, unsentimental ways. Whether a butterfly flaps its wings or a meteorite strikes a lost intergalactic battleship, the first domino topples to create random – excuse me, Random – patterns. They intersect in a chillingly rational way.

  Douglas works well outside the comfort zone of his reader and yet we laugh at the interplay of characters, the unique observational style with which he turns the mundane into the surreal, and the outright slapstick of scenes involving boghogs and security robots.

  Then we arrive at the climax of this story and its sudden, shuddering halt. It’s hard not to feel a little bruised. But then we must remember that Conan Doyle tipped Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls, but eventually gave in to sentiment and his bank manager.

  When Douglas first proposed that we bring Hitchhiker’s full circle and complete the saga on radio – where it all began – I was thrilled to be his choice to finish the job, and intensely curious as to what his ideas were for its ending. With three novels to plan, starting with the epic sweep of Life, the Universe and Everything
– which he christened ‘The Tertiary Phase’ – we did not discuss Mostly Harmless in much detail but he admitted that he would like to write another Hitchhiker book ‘with a happier ending’.

  In fact, the brave twist in the tail of this story can be seen as ironic, not cataclysmic. Douglas is quietly waiting for us to work out for ourselves that something bigger is going on than the intrigues of Men, Mice and Vogons. Because the premise governing the operation of the Guide Mark II leaves him considerable wiggle room for a further book about Arthur, Ford and Co. The fact that he did not find time to write it is the tragic part.

  Because Douglas hinted that he might have yet more adventures for Arthur, and to provide closure in his absence, the final episode of our radio version of Mostly Harmless – ‘The Quintessential Phase’ – concluded with a coda consisting of several possible happier endings, some of which looped back to previous iterations of Arthur’s life. This provided a less disturbing resolution if listeners chose to listen on; but the end of the tale as Douglas left it was still there to stop at if they’d rather not.

  But here’s the thing: regardless of any thoughts upon a future for the Hitchhiker’s characters by the rest of us, the ending of this book is Douglas’s final published word on the subject and, taken on its own terms, is as brave an act by an author with his own creation as can be imagined.

  DIRK MAGGS

  Director, Dramatizer & Co-Producer

  BBC Radio 4’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

  Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases

  MOSTLY

  HARMLESS

  Anything that happens, happens.

  Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.

  Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.

  It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

  1

  The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway. One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can’t. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn’t work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn’t really any point in being there.

  So, by and large, the peoples of the Galaxy tended to languish in their own local muddles and the history of the Galaxy itself was, for a long time, largely cosmological.

  Which is not to say that people weren’t trying. They tried sending off fleets of spaceships to do battle or business in distant parts, but these usually took thousands of years to get anywhere. By the time they eventually arrived, other forms of travel had been discovered which made use of hyperspace to circumvent the speed of light, so that whatever battles it was that the slower-than-light fleets had been sent to fight had already been taken care of centuries earlier by the time they actually got there.

  This didn’t, of course, deter their crews from wanting to fight the battles anyway. They were trained, they were ready, they’d had a couple of thousand years’ sleep, they’d come a long way to do a tough job and, by Zarquon, they were going to do it.

  This was when the first major Muddles of Galactic history set in, with battles continually reerupting centuries after the issues they had been fought over had supposedly been settled. However, these muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had to try and unravel once time-travel was discovered and battles started preerupting hundreds of years before the issues even arose. When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole planets started unexpectedly turning into banana fruitcake, the great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which had been after them for years.

  Which is all very well, of course, but it almost certainly means that no one will ever know for sure where, for instance, the Grebulons came from, or exactly what it was they wanted. And this is a pity because, if anybody had known anything about them, it is just possible that a most terrible catastrophe would have been averted—or, at least, would have had to find a different way to happen.

  Click, hum.

  The huge gray Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black void. It was traveling at fabulous, breathtaking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.

  On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia, deeply dark and silent.

  Click, hum.

  At least, almost everything.

  Click, click, hum.

  Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.

  Click, click, click, click, click, hum.

  Hmmm.

  A low-level supervising program woke up a slightly higher-level supervising program deep in the ship’s semisomnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.

  The higher-level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low-level supervising program said that it couldn’t remember what it was meant to get, exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn’t it? It didn’t know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.

  The higher-level supervising program considered this and didn’t like it. It asked the low-level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low-level supervising program said it couldn’t remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn’t find it, which was why it had alerted the higher-level supervising program of the problem.

  The higher-level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low-level supervising program was meant to be supervising.

  It couldn’t find the look-up table.

  Odd.

  It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn’t find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.

  The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent, which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.

  Small modules of software—agents—surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, regrouping. They quickly established that the ship’s memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.

  This made the whole problem very simple to deal with, in fact. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.

  Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded stro
ng room, where they guarded it, to the ship’s logic chamber for installation.

  This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.

  This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.

  Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship’s processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite.

  The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned out to be impossible, because the ship’s sensors couldn’t see that there was a hole, and the supervisors, which should have said that the sensors weren’t working properly, weren’t working properly and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain—which would have enabled it to see the hole—with them.

  The ship tried to think intelligently about this, failed and then blanked out completely for a bit. It didn’t realize it had blanked out, of course, because it had blanked out. It was merely surprised to see the stars jump. After the third time the stars jumped, the ship finally realized that it must be blanking out, and that it was time to take some serious decisions.

  It relaxed.

  Then it realized it hadn’t actually taken the serious decisions yet and panicked. It blanked out again for a bit. When it awoke again it sealed all the bulkheads around where it knew the unseen hole must be.