Volume 5 - Mostly Harmless Page 2

  It clearly hadn’t got to its destination yet, it thought, fitfully, but since it no longer had the faintest idea where its destination was or how to reach it, there seemed to be little point in continuing. It consulted what tiny scraps of instructions it could reconstruct from the tatters of its central mission module.

  “Your!!!!! !!!!! !!!!! year mission is to!!!!! !!!!! !!!!!, !!!!!, !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!, land!!!!! !!!!! !!!!! a safe distance !!!!! !!!!! monitor it.!!!!! !!!!! !!!!!…”

  All the rest was complete garbage.

  Before it blanked out for good, the ship would have to pass on those instructions, such as they were, to its more primitive subsidiary systems.

  It must also revive all of its crew.

  There was another problem. While the crew was in hibernation, the minds of all its members, their memories, their identities and their understanding of what they had come to, had all been transferred into the ship’s central mission module for safe keeping. The crew would not have the faintest idea of who they were or what they were doing there. Oh well.

  Just before it blanked out for the final time, the ship realized that its engines were beginning to give out too.

  The ship and its revived and confused crew coasted on under the control of its subsidiary automatic systems, which simply looked to land wherever they could find to land and monitor whatever they could find to monitor.

  As far as finding something to land on was concerned, they didn’t do very well. The planet they found was desolately cold and lonely, so achingly far from the sun that should warm it, that it took all of the Envir-O-Form machinery and Life-Support-O-Systems they carried with them to render it—or at least parts of it—habitable. There were better planets nearer in, but the ship’s Strateej-O-Mat was obviously locked into Lurk mode and chose the most distant and unobtrusive planet and, furthermore, would not be gainsaid by anybody other than the ship’s Chief Strategic Officer. Since everybody on the ship had lost their minds, no one knew who the Chief Strategic Officer was or, even if he could have been identified, how he was supposed to go about gainsaying the ship’s Strateej-O-Mat.

  As far as finding something to monitor was concerned, though, they hit solid gold.

  2

  One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some kind of a grip, whether it’s the intoxicating seas of Santraginus V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra, where, they say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.

  It will even live in New York, though it’s hard to know why. In the wintertime the temperature falls well below the legal minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.

  In the summer it’s too darn hot. It’s one thing to be the sort of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do, that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very equable, but it’s quite another to be the sort of animal that has to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your planet’s orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin’s bubbling.

  Spring is overrated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they actually knew the first thing about the pleasures of spring they would know of at least 5,983 better places to spend it than New York, and that’s just on the same latitude.

  Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyway, so their opinion can and should be discounted. When it’s fall in New York, the air smells as if someone’s been frying goats in it, and if you are keen to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head in a building.

  Tricia McMillan loved New York. She kept on telling herself this over and over again. The Upper West Side. Yeah. Midtown. Hey, great retail. SoHo. The East Village. Clothes. Books. Sushi. Italian. Delis. Yo.

  Movies. Yo also. Tricia had just been to see Woody Allen’s new movie, which was all about the angst of being neurotic in New York. He had made one or two other movies that had explored the same theme, and Tricia wondered if he had ever considered moving, but heard that he had set his face against the idea. So: more movies, she guessed.

  Tricia loved New York because loving New York was a good career move. It was a good retail move, a good cuisine move, not a good taxi move or a great quality of pavement move, but definitely a career move that ranked among the highest and the best. Tricia was a TV anchor person, and New York was where most of the world’s TV was anchored. Tricia’s TV anchoring had been done exclusively in Britain up to that point: regional news, then breakfast news, early evening news. She would have been called, if the language allowed, a rapidly rising anchor, but … hey, this is television, what does it matter? She was a rapidly rising anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care. Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else in life becomes eerily easy.

  Tricia had only ever missed one opportunity. These days it didn’t even make her tremble quite so much as it used to to think about it. She guessed it was that bit of her that had gone dead.

  NBS needed a new anchor. Mo Minetti was leaving the “U.S./A.M.” breakfast show to have a baby. She had been offered a mind-bubbling amount of money to have it on the show, but she had declined, unexpectedly, on grounds of personal privacy and taste. Teams of NBS lawyers had sieved through her contract to see if these constituted legitimate grounds, but in the end, reluctantly, they had to let her go. This was, for them, particularly galling because normally, “reluctantly letting someone go” was an expression which had its boot on quite another foot.

  The word was out that maybe, just maybe, a British accent would fit. The hair, the skin tone and the bridgework would have to be up to American network standards, but there had been a lot of British accents up there thanking their mothers for their Oscars, a lot of British accents singing on Broadway, some unusually big audiences tuning in to British accents in wigs on “Masterpiece Theatre.” British accents were telling jokes on David Letterman and Jay Leno. Nobody understood the jokes but they were really responding to the accents, so maybe it was time, just maybe. A British accent on “U.S./A.M.” Well, hell.

  That was why Tricia was here. This was why loving New York was a great career move.

  It wasn’t, of course, the stated reason. Her TV company back in the U.K. would hardly have stumped up the airfare and hotel bill for her to go job hunting in Manhattan. Since she was chasing something like ten times her present salary, they might have felt that she could have forked out her own expenses, but she’d found a story, found a pretext, kept very quiet about anything ulterior, and they’d stumped up for the trip. A business-class ticket, of course, but her face was known and she’d smiled herself an upgrade. The right moves had got her a nice room at the Brentwood and here she was, wondering what to do next.

  The word on the street was one thing, making contact was another. She had a couple of names, a couple of numbers, but all it took was being put on indeterminate hold a couple of times and she was back at square one. She’d put out feelers, left messages, but so far, none had been returned. The actual job she had come to do she had done in a morning, the imagined job she was after was only shimmering tantalizingly on an unreachable horizon.

  Shit.

  She caught a cab from the movie theater back to the Brentwood. The ca
b couldn’t get close to the curb because a big stretch limo was hogging all the available space and she had to squeeze her way past it. She walked out of the fetid, goat-frying air and into the blessed cool of the lobby. The fine cotton of her blouse was sticking like grime to her skin. Her hair felt as if she’d bought it at a fairground, on a stick. At the front desk she asked if there were any messages, grimly expecting none. There was one.

  Oh …

  Good.

  It had worked. She had gone out to the movie specifically in order to make the phone ring. She couldn’t bear sitting in a hotel room waiting.

  She wondered. Should she open the message down here? Her clothes were itching and she longed to take them all off and just lie on the bed. She had turned the air-conditioning way down to its bottom temperature setting, way up to its top fan setting. What she wanted more than anything else in the world at the moment was goose pimples. Then a hot shower, then a cool one, then lying on a towel, on the bed again, drying in the air-conditioning. Then reading the message. Maybe more goose pimples. Maybe all sorts of things.

  No. What she wanted more than anything else in the world was a job in American television at ten times her current salary. More than anything else in the world. In the world. What she wanted more than anything else at all was no longer a live issue.

  She sat on a chair in the lobby, under a kentia palm, and opened the little cellophane-windowed envelope.

  “Please call,” it said. “Not happy,” and gave a number. The name was Gail Andrews.

  Gail Andrews.

  It wasn’t a name she was expecting. It caught her unawares. She recognized it, but couldn’t immediately say why. Was she Andy Martin’s secretary? Hilary Bass’s assistant? Martin and Bass were the two major contact calls she had made, or tried to make, at NBS. And what did “Not happy” mean?

  “Not happy”?

  She was completely bewildered. Was this Woody Allen trying to contact her under an assumed name? It was a 212 area code number. So it was someone in New York. Who was not happy. Well, that narrowed it down a bit, didn’t it?

  She went back to the receptionist at the desk.

  “I have a problem with this message you just gave me,” she said. “Someone I don’t know has tried to call me and says she’s not happy.”

  The receptionist peered at the note with a frown.

  “Do you know this person?” he said.

  “No,” Tricia said.

  “Hmmm,” said the receptionist. “Sounds like she’s not happy about something.”

  “Yes,” said Tricia.

  “Looks like there’s a name here,” said the receptionist. “Gail Andrews. Do you know anybody of that name?”

  “No,” said Tricia.

  “Any idea what she’s unhappy about?”

  “No,” said Tricia.

  “Have you called the number? There’s a number here.”

  “No,” said Tricia, “you only just gave me the note. I’m just trying to get some more information before I ring back. Perhaps I could talk to the person who took the call?”

  “Hmmm,” said the receptionist, scrutinizing the note carefully. “I don’t think we have anybody called Gail Andrews here.”

  “No, I realize that,” said Tricia. “I just—”

  “I’m Gail Andrews.”

  The voice came from behind Tricia. She turned around.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m Gail Andrews. You interviewed me this morning.”

  “Oh. Oh, good heavens, yes,” said Tricia, slightly flustered.

  “I left the message for you a few hours ago. I hadn’t heard so I came by. I didn’t want to miss you.”

  “Oh. No. Of course,” said Tricia, trying hard to get up to speed.

  “I don’t know about this,” said the receptionist, for whom speed was not an issue. “Would you like me to try this number for you now?”

  “No, that’ll be fine, thanks,” said Tricia. “I can handle it now.”

  “I can call this room number here for you if that’ll help,” said the receptionist, peering at the note again.

  “No, that won’t be necessary, thanks,” said Tricia. “That’s my own room number. I’m the one the message was for. I think we’ve sorted this out now.”

  “You have a nice day now,” said the receptionist.

  Tricia didn’t particularly want to have a nice day. She was busy.

  She also didn’t want to talk to Gail Andrews. She had a very strict cut-off point as far as fraternizing with the Christians was concerned. Her colleagues called her interview subjects Christians and would often cross themselves when they saw one walking innocently into the studio to face Tricia, particularly if Tricia was smiling warmly and showing her teeth.

  She turned and smiled frostily, wondering what to do.

  Gail Andrews was a well-groomed woman in her mid-forties. Her clothes fell within the boundaries defined by expensive good taste, but were definitely huddled up at the floatier end of those boundaries. She was an astrologer—a famous and, if rumor were true, influential astrologer, having allegedly influenced a number of decisions made by the late President Hudson, including everything from which flavor of Cool Whip to have on which day of the week to whether or not to bomb Damascus.

  Tricia had savaged her more than somewhat. Not on the grounds of whether or not the stories about the president were true, that was old hat now. At the time Ms. Andrews had emphatically denied advising President Hudson on anything other than personal, spiritual or dietary matters, which did not, apparently, include the bombing of Damascus, (NOTHING PERSONAL, DAMASCUS! the tabloids had hooted at the time.)

  No, this was a neat topical little angle that Tricia had come up with about the whole issue of astrology itself. Ms. Andrews had not been entirely ready for it. Tricia, on the other hand, was not entirely ready for a rematch in the hotel lobby. What to do?

  “I can wait for you in the bar, if you need a few minutes,” said Gail Andrews. “But I would like to talk to you, and I’m leaving the city tonight.”

  She seemed to be slightly anxious about something rather than aggrieved or irate.

  “Okay,” said Tricia. “Give me ten minutes.”

  She went up to her room. Apart from anything else, she had so little faith in the ability of the guy on the message desk at reception to deal with anything so complicated as a message that she wanted to be doubly certain that there wasn’t a note under the door. It wouldn’t be the first time that messages at the desk and messages under the door had been completely at odds with each other.

  There wasn’t one.

  The message light on the phone was flashing, though.

  She hit the message button and got the hotel operator.

  “You have a message from Gary Andress,” said the operator.

  “Yes?” said Tricia. An unfamiliar name. “What does it say.”

  “Not hippy,” said the operator.

  “Not what?” said Tricia.

  “Hippy. What it says. Guy says he’s not a hippy. I guess he wanted you to know that. You want the number?”

  As she started to dictate the number Tricia suddenly realized that this was just a garbled version of the message she had already had.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “Are there any other messages for me?”

  “Room number?”

  Tricia couldn’t work out why the operator should suddenly ask for her number this late in the conversation, but gave it to her anyway.

  “Name?”

  “McMillan, Tricia McMillan.” Tricia spelled it, patiently.

  “Not Mr. MacManus?”

  “No.”

  “No more messages for you.” Click.

  Tricia sighed and dialed again. This time she gave her name and room number all over again, up front. The operator showed not the slightest glimmer of recognition that they had been speaking less than ten seconds ago.

  “I’m going to be in the bar,” Tricia explained. “In the bar. If a phone
call comes through for me, please would you put it through to me in the bar?”

  “Name?”

  They went through it all a couple more times till Tricia was certain that everything that possibly could be clear was as clear as it possibly could be.

  She showered, put on fresh clothes and retouched her makeup with the speed of a professional and, looking at her bed with a sigh, left the room again.

  She had half a mind just to sneak off and hide.

  No. Not really.

  She had a look at herself in the mirror in the elevator lobby while she was waiting. She looked cool and in charge, and if she could fool herself she could fool anybody.

  She was just going to have to tough it out with Gail Andrews. Okay, she had given her a hard time. Sorry, but that’s the game we’re all in—that sort of thing. Ms. Andrews had agreed to do the interview because she had a new book out and TV exposure was free publicity. But there’s no such thing as a free launch. No, she edited that line out again.

  What had happened was this:

  Last week astronomers had announced that they had at last discovered a tenth planet, out beyond the orbit of Pluto. They had been searching for it for years, guided by certain orbital anomalies in the outer planets, and now they’d found it and they were all terribly pleased, and everyone was terribly happy for them and so on. The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer’s parrot—there was some tediously heartwarming story attached to this—and that was all very wonderful and lovely.

  Tricia had followed the story with, for various reasons, considerable interest.

  Then, while she had been casting around for a good excuse to go to New York at her TV company’s expense, she had happened to notice a press release about Gail Andrews and her new book, You and Your Planets.

  Gail Andrews was not exactly a household name, but the moment you mentioned President Hudson, Cool Whip and the amputation of Damascus (the world had moved on from surgical strikes—the official term had in fact been “Damascectomy,” meaning the “taking out” of Damascus), everyone remembered who you meant.