Volume 5 - Mostly Harmless Read online

“But it is precise for you here on Earth.”

  “Ye … e … s …” She had a horrible feeling she was getting a vague glimmering of something.

  “So when Venus is rising in Capricorn, for instance, that is from Earth. How does that work if we are out on Rupert? What if the Earth is rising in Capricorn? It is hard for us to know. Among the things we have forgotten, which we think are many and profound, is trigonometry.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Tricia. “You want me to come with you to … Rupert …”

  “Yes.”

  “To recalculate your horoscopes for you to take account of the relative positions of Earth and Rupert?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do I get an exclusive?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m your girl,” said Tricia, thinking that at the very least she could sell it to the National Enquirer.

  As she boarded the craft that would take her off to the farthest limits of the solar system, the first thing that met her eyes was a bank of video monitors across which thousands of images were sweeping. A fourth alien was sitting watching them, but was focused on one particular screen that held a steady image. It was a replay of the impromptu interview which Tricia had just conducted with his three colleagues. He looked up when he saw her apprehensively climbing in.

  “Good evening, Ms. McMillan,” he said. “Nice camera work.”

  6

  Ford Prefect hit the ground running. The ground was about three inches farther from the ventilation shaft than he remembered it, so he misjudged the point at which he would hit the ground, started running too soon, stumbled awkwardly and twisted his ankle. Damn! He ran off down the corridor anyway, hobbling slightly.

  All over the building, alarms were erupting into their usual frenzy of excitement. He dove for cover behind the usual storage cabinets, glanced around to check that he was unseen and started rapidly to fish around inside his satchel for the usual things he needed.

  His ankle, unusually, was hurting like hell.

  The ground was not only three inches farther from the ventilation shaft than he remembered, it was also on a different planet than he remembered, but it was the three inches that had caught him by surprise. The offices of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were quite often shifted at very short notice to another planet, for reasons of local climate, local hostility, power bills or taxes, but they were always reconstructed exactly the same way, almost to the very molecule. For many of the company’s employees, the layout of their offices represented the only constant they knew in a severely distorted personal universe.

  Something, though, was odd.

  This was not in itself surprising, thought Ford as he pulled out his lightweight throwing towel. Virtually everything in his life was, to a greater or lesser extent, odd. It was just that this was odd in a slightly different way than he was used to things being odd, which was, well, strange. He couldn’t quite get it into focus immediately.

  He got out his no. 3-gauge prising tool.

  The alarms were going in the same old way that he knew well. There was a kind of music to them that he could almost hum along to. That was all very familiar. The world outside had been a new one to Ford. He had not been to Saquo-Pilia Hensha before, and he liked it. It had a kind of carnival atmosphere to it.

  He took from his satchel a toy bow and arrow, which he had bought in a street market.

  He had discovered that the reason for the carnival atmosphere on Saquo-Pilia Hensha was that the local people were celebrating the annual feast of the Assumption of St. Antwelm. St. Antwelm had been, during his lifetime, a great and popular king who had made a great and popular assumption. What King Antwelm had assumed was that what everybody wanted, all other things being equal, was to be happy and enjoy themselves and have the best possible time together. On his death he had willed his entire personal fortune to financing an annual festival to remind everyone of this, with lots of good food and dancing and very silly games like Hunt the Wocket. His Assumption had been such a brilliantly good one that he was made into a saint for it. Not only that, but all the people who had previously been made saints for doing things like being stoned to death in a thoroughly miserable way or living upside down in barrels of dung were instantly demoted and were now thought to be rather embarrassing.

  The familiar H-shaped building of the Hitchhiker’s Guide offices rose above the outskirts of the city, and Ford Prefect, on arriving at it, had broken into it in the familiar way. He always entered via the ventilation system rather than the main lobby because the main lobby was patrolled by robots whose job it was to quiz incoming employees about their expense accounts. Ford Prefect’s expense accounts were notoriously complex and difficult affairs and he had found, on the whole, that the lobby robots were ill-equipped to understand the arguments he wished to put forward in relation to them, and he preferred, therefore, to make his entrance by another route.

  This meant setting off nearly every alarm in the building, but not the one in the accounts department, which was the way that Ford preferred it.

  He hunkered down behind the storage cabinet, licked the rubber suction cup of the toy arrow and then fitted it to the string of the bow.

  Within about thirty seconds a security robot the size of a small melon came flying down the corridor at about waist height, scanning left and right for anything unusual as it did so.

  With impeccable timing Ford shot the toy arrow across its path. The arrow flew across the corridor and stuck, wobbling, on the opposite wall. As it flew, the robot’s sensors locked onto it instantly and the robot twisted through ninety degrees to follow it, see what the hell it was and where it was going.

  This bought Ford one precious second, during which the robot was looking in the opposite direction from him. He hurled the towel over the flying robot and caught it.

  Because of the various sensory protuberances with which the robot was festooned, it couldn’t maneuver inside the towel, and it just twitched back and forth without being able to turn and face its captor.

  Ford hauled it quickly toward him and pinned it down to the ground. It was beginning to whine pitifully. With one swift and practiced movement, Ford reached under the towel with his no. 3-gauge prising tool and flipped off the small plastic panel on top of the robot, which gave access to its logic circuits.

  Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.

  Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (the MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).

  A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.

  It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, Ah! A herring sandwich …, etc, and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot.

  The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticized as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realized that what they had actually discovered was “boredom,” or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions like “irritability,” “depression,” “reluctance,” “ickiness” and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as “relief,” “joy,” “friskiness,” “appetite,” “satisfaction,” and most important of all, the desire for “happiness.”

  This was the biggest breakthrough of all.

  Vast wodges of complex computer codes governing robot behavior in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.

  The robot that Ford had got trapped under his towel was not, at the moment, a happy robot. It was happy when it could move about. It was happy when it could see other things. It was particularly happy when it could see other things moving about, particularly if the other things were moving about doing things they shouldn’t do because then it could, with considerable delight, report them.

  Ford would soon fix that.

  He squatted over the robot and held it between his knees. The towel was still covering all of its sensory mechanisms, but Ford had now got its logic circuits exposed. The robot was whirring grungily and pettishly, but it could only fidget, it couldn’t actually move. Using the prising tool, Ford eased a small chip out from its socket. As soon as it came out, the robot suddenly went quiet and just sat there in a coma.

  The chip Ford had taken out was the one that contained the instructions for all the conditions that had to be fulfilled in order for the robot to feel happy. The robot would be happy when a tiny electrical charge from a point just to the left of the chip reached another point just to the right of the chip. The chip determined whether the charge got there or not.

  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 Ford.