Mostly Harmless (11 page)

“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.

F
ord 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 office 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 sluglike 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.

“I …” he started again, and then on a sudden impulse decided to duck.

There was a deafening roar as flames leapt from the back of the rocket launcher and a rocket leapt from its front.

The rocket hurtled past Ford and hit the large plate-glass window, which billowed outward in a shower of a million shards under the force of the explosion. Huge shock waves of noise and air pressure reverberated around the room, sweeping a couple of chairs, a filing cabinet and Colin the security robot out of the window.

Ah! So they’re not totally rocket-proof after all, thought Ford Prefect to himself. Someone should have a word with somebody about that. He disentangled himself from Harl and tried to work out which way to run.

He was surrounded.

The big guy with the rocket launcher was moving it up into position again for another shot.

Ford was completely at a loss for what to do next.

“Look,” he said in a stern voice. But he wasn’t certain how far saying things like “Look” in a stern voice was necessarily going to get him, and time was not on his side. What the hell, he thought, you’re only young once, and threw himself out of the window. That would at least keep the element of surprise on his side.

T
he first thing Arthur Dent had to do, he realized resignedly, was to get himself a life. This meant he had to find a planet he could have one on. It had to be a planet he could breathe on, where he could stand up and sit down without experiencing gravitational discomfort. It had to be somewhere where the acid levels were low and the plants didn’t actually attack you.

“I hate to be anthropic about this,” he said to the strange thing behind the desk at the Resettlement Advice Center on Pintleton Alpha, “but I’d quite like to live somewhere where the people look vaguely like me as well. You know. Sort of human.”

The strange thing behind the desk waved some of its stranger bits around and seemed rather taken aback by this. It oozed and glopped off its seat, thrashed its way slowly across
the floor, ingested the old metal filing cabinet and then, with a great belch, excreted the appropriate drawer. It popped out a couple of glistening tentacles from its ear, removed some files from the drawer, sucked the drawer back in and vomited up the cabinet again. It thrashed its way back across the floor, slimed its way back up onto the seat and slapped the files on the table.

“See anything you fancy?” it asked.

Arthur looked nervously through some grubby and damp pieces of paper. He was definitely in some backwater part of the Galaxy here, and somewhere off to the left as far as the universe he knew and recognized was concerned. In the space where his own home should have been there was a rotten hick planet, drowned with rain and inhabited by thugs and boghogs. Even
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
seemed to work only fitfully here, which was why he was reduced to making these sorts of inquiries in these sorts of places. One place he always asked after was Stavromula Beta, but no one had ever heard of such a planet.

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn’t, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn’t do it. Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was not a lot of demand for his services.

Arthur’s heart sank. This surprised him, because he thought it was already about as low as it could possibly be. He closed
his eyes for a moment. He so much wanted to be home. He so much wanted his own home world, the actual Earth he had grown up on, not to have been demolished. He so much wanted none of this to have happened. He so much wanted that when he opened his eyes again he would be standing on the doorstep of his little cottage in the West Country of England, that the sun would be shining over the green hills, the post van would be going up the lane, the daffodils would be blooming in his garden and in the distance the pub would be opening for lunch. He so much wanted to take the newspaper down to the pub and read it over a pint of bitter. He so much wanted to do the crossword. He so much wanted to be able to get completely stuck on 17 across.