Mostly Harmless (21 page)

“I don’t know. What do you usually do? Sit around and wait for a passing spacecraft, I suppose.”

“Oh, yes? And how many spacecraft have visited this zark-forsaken little flea-pit recently?”

“Well, a few years ago there was mine that crashed here by mistake. Then there was, er, Trillian, then the parcel delivery, and now you, and …”

“Yes, but
apart
from the usual suspects?”

“Well, er, I think pretty much none, so far as I know. Pretty quiet around here.”

As if deliberately to prove him wrong, there was a long, low distant roll of thunder.

Ford leapt to his feet fretfully and started pacing backward and forward in the feeble, painful light of the early dawn, which lay streaked against the sky as if someone had dragged a piece of liver across it.

“You don’t understand how important this is,” he said.

“What? You mean my daughter out there all alone in the Galaxy? You think I don’t …”

“Can we feel sorry for the Galaxy later?” said Ford. “This is very, very serious indeed. The
Guide
has been taken over. It’s been bought out.”

Arthur leapt up. “Oh, very serious,” he shouted. “Please fill me in straight away on some corporate publishing politics! I can’t tell you how much it’s been on my mind of late!”

“You don’t understand! There’s a whole new
Guide!
”

“Oh!” shouted Arthur again. “Oh! Oh! Oh! I’m incoherent with excitement! I can hardly wait for it to come out to find out which are the most exciting spaceports to get bored hanging about in some globular cluster I’ve never heard of. Please, can we rush to a store that’s got it right this very instant?”

Ford narrowed his eyes.

“This is that thing you call sarcasm, isn’t it?”

“Do you know,” bellowed Arthur, “I think it is? I really think it might just be a crazy little thing called sarcasm seeping in at the edges of my manner of speech! Ford, I have had a
fucking
bad night! Will you please try and take that into account while you consider what fascinating bits of
badger-sputumly
inconsequential trivia to assail me with next?”

“Try to rest,” said Ford. “I need to think.”

“Why do you need to
think
? Can’t we just sit and go budumbudumbudum with our lips for a bit? Couldn’t we just dribble gently and loll a little bit to the left for a few minutes? I can’t stand it, Ford! I can’t stand all this thinking and trying to work things out anymore. You may think that I am just standing here barking …”

“Hadn’t occurred to me in fact.”

“But I mean it! What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!”

“Which is exactly my point.”

“Thank you,” said Arthur, sitting down again. “What?”

“Temporal reverse engineering.”

Arthur put his head in his hands and shook it gently from side to side.

“Is there any humane way,” he moaned, “in which I can prevent you from telling me what temporary reverse bloody-whatsiting is?”

“No,” said Ford, “because your daughter is caught up in the middle of it and it is deadly, deadly serious.”

Thunder rolled in the pause.

“All right,” said Arthur. “Tell me.”

“I leapt out of a high-rise office window.”

This cheered Arthur up.

“Oh!” he said. “Why don’t you do it again?”

“I did.”

“Hmmm,” said Arthur, disappointed. “Obviously no good came of it.”

“The first time I managed to save myself by the most astonishing and — I say this in all modesty — fabulous piece of ingenious quick thinking, agility, fancy footwork and self-sacrifice.”

“What was the self-sacrifice?”

“I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes.”

“Why was that self-sacrifice?”

“Because they were mine!” said Ford, crossly.

“I think we have different value systems.”

“Well, mine’s better.”

“That’s according to your … oh, never mind. So having saved yourself very cleverly once, you very sensibly went and jumped again. Please don’t tell me why. Just tell me what happened if you must.”

“I fell straight into the open cockpit of a passing jet towncar whose pilot had just accidentally pushed the eject button when he meant only to change tracks on the stereo. Now, even I couldn’t think that that was particularly clever of me.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Arthur, wearily. “I expect you probably sneaked into his jetcar the previous night and set the pilot’s least favorite track to play or something.”

“No, I didn’t,” said Ford.

“Just checking.”

“Though oddly enough,
somebody else did
. And this is the
nub. You could trace the chain and branches of crucial events and coincidences back and back. Turned out the new
Guide
had done it. That bird.”

“What bird?”

“You haven’t seen it?”

“No.”

“Oh. It’s a lethal little thing. Looks pretty, talks big, collapses waveforms selectively at will.”

“What does that mean?”

“Temporal reverse engineering.”

“Oh,” said Arthur. “Oh yes.”

“The question is,
who is it really doing it for
?”

“I’ve actually got a sandwich in my pocket,” said Arthur, delving. “Would you like a bit?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“It’s a bit squished and sodden, I’m afraid.”

“Never mind.”

They munched for a bit.

“It’s quite good in fact,” said Ford. “What’s the meat in it?”

“Perfectly Normal Beast.”

“Not come across that one. So, the question is,” Ford continued, “who is the bird really doing it for? What’s the real game here?”

“Mmm,” ate Arthur.

“When I found the bird,” continued Ford, “which I did by a series of coincidences that are interesting in themselves, it put on the most fantastic multidimensional display of pyrotechnics I’ve ever seen. It then said that it would put its services
at my disposal in my universe. I said, thanks but no thanks. It said that it would anyway, whether I liked it or not. I said just try it, and it said it would and, indeed, already had done so. I said we’d see about that and it said that we would. That’s when I decided to pack the thing up and get it out of there. So I sent it to you for safety.”

“Oh yes? Whose?”

“Never you mind. Then, what with one thing and another, I thought it prudent to jump out of the window again, being fresh out of other options at the time. Luckily for me the jetcar was there, otherwise I would have had to fall back on ingenious quick thinking, agility, maybe another shoe or, failing all else, the ground. But it meant that, whether I liked it or not, the
Guide
was, well, working for me, and that was deeply worrying.”

“Why?”

“Because if you’ve got the
Guide
, you think that you are the one it’s working for. Everything went swimmingly smoothly for me from then on, up to the very moment that I came up against the totty with the rock, then, bang, I’m history. I’m out of the loop.”

“Are you referring to my daughter?”

“As politely as I can. She’s the next one in the chain who will think that everything is going fabulously for her. She can beat whoever she likes around the head with bits of the landscape, everything will just swim for her until she’s done whatever she’s supposed to do and then it will be all up for her too. It’s reverse temporal engineering, and clearly nobody understood what was being unleashed!”

“Like me, for instance.”

“What? Oh, wake up, Arthur. Look, let me try it again. The new
Guide
came out of the research labs. It made use of this new technology of Unfiltered Perception. Do you know what that means?”

“Look, I’ve been making sandwiches, for Bob’s sake!”

“Who’s Bob?”

“Never mind. Just carry on.”

“Unfiltered Perception means it perceives everything. Got that?
I
don’t perceive everything.
You
don’t perceive everything. We have filters. The New
Guide
doesn’t have any sense filters. It perceives
everything
. It wasn’t a complicated technological idea. It was just a question of leaving a bit out. Got it?”

“Why don’t I just say that I’ve got it, and then you can carry on regardless.”

“Right. Now because the bird can perceive every possible universe, it is present in every possible universe. Yes?”

“Y … e … e … s. Ish.”

“So what happens is, the bozos in the marketing and accounting departments say, ‘Oh, that sounds good, doesn’t that mean we only have to make one of them and then sell it an infinite number of times?’ Don’t squint at me like that, Arthur, this is how accountants
think
!”

“That’s quite clever, isn’t it?”

“No! It is fantastically
stupid
. Look. The machine’s only a little
Guide
. It’s got some quite clever cybertechnology in it, but because it has Unfiltered Perception, any smallest move it makes has the power of a virus. It can propagate throughout space, time and a million other dimensions. Anything can be
focused anywhere in any of the universes that you and I move in. Its power is recursive. Think of a computer program. Somewhere, there is one key instruction, and everything else is just functions calling themselves, or brackets billowing out endlessly through an infinite address space. What happens when the brackets collapse? Where’s the final ’end if? Is any of this making sense? Arthur?”

“Sorry, I was nodding off for a moment. Something about the Universe, yes?”

“Something about the Universe, yes,” said Ford, wearily. He sat down again.

“All right,” he said. “Think about this. You know who I think I saw at the
Guide
offices? Vogons. Ah. I see I’ve said a word you understand at last.”

Arthur leapt to his feet.

“That noise,” he said.

“What noise?”

“The thunder.”

“What about it?”

“It isn’t thunder. It’s the spring migration of the Perfectly Normal Beasts. It’s started.”

“What are these animals you keep on about?”

“I don’t keep on about them. I just put bits of them in sandwiches.”

“Why are they called Perfectly Normal Beasts?”

Arthur told him.

It wasn’t often that Arthur had the pleasure of seeing Ford’s eyes open wide with astonishment.

I
t was a sight that Arthur never quite got used to, or tired of. He and Ford had tracked their way swiftly along the side of the small river that flowed down along the bed of the valley, and when at last they reached the margin of the plains, they pulled themselves up into the branches of a large tree, to get a better view of one of the stranger and more wonderful visions that the Galaxy has to offer.

The great thunderous herd of thousand upon thousand of Perfectly Normal Beasts was sweeping in magnificent array across the Anhondo Plain. In the early pale light of the morning, as the great animals charged through the fine steam of the sweat of their bodies mingled with the muddy mist churned up by their pounding hooves, their appearance seemed a little unreal and ghostly anyway, but what was
heart-stopping about them was where they came from and where they went to, which appeared to be, simply, nowhere.

They formed a solid, charging phalanx roughly a hundred yards wide and half a mile long. The phalanx never moved, except that it exhibited a slight gradual drift sideways and backward for the eight or nine days that it regularly appeared for. But though the phalanx stayed more or less constant, the great beasts of which it was composed charged steadily at upward of twenty miles an hour, appearing suddenly from thin air at one end of the plain, and disappearing equally abruptly at the other end.

No one knew where they came from, no one knew where they went. They were so important to the lives of the Lamuellans, it was almost as if nobody liked to ask. Old Thrashbarg had said on one occasion that sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away. Some of the villagers had privately said that this was the only properly wise thing that they’d ever heard Thrashbarg say, and after a short debate on the matter, had put it down to chance.

The noise of the pounding of the hooves was so intense that it was hard to hear anything else above it.

“What did you say?” shouted Arthur.

“I said,” shouted Ford, “this looks like it might be some kind of evidence of dimensional drift.”

“Which is what?” shouted Arthur back.

“Well, a lot of people are beginning to worry that space-time is showing signs of cracking up with everything that’s happening to it. There are quite a lot of worlds where you can see how the landmasses have cracked up and moved around just
from the weirdly long or meandering routes that migrating animals take. This might be something like that. We live in twisted times. Still, in the absence of a decent spaceport …”

Arthur looked at him in a kind of frozen way.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” shouted Ford. “You know perfectly well what I mean. We’re going to ride our way out of here.”

“Are you seriously suggesting we try to ride a Perfectly Normal Beast?”

“Yeah. See where it goes to.”

“We’ll be killed! No,” said Arthur, suddenly. “We won’t be killed. At least I won’t. Ford, have you ever heard of a planet called Stavromula Beta?”

Ford frowned. “Don’t think so,” he said. He pulled out his own battered old copy of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and accessed it. “Any funny spelling?” he said.

“Don’t know. I’ve only ever heard it said, and that was by someone who had a mouthful of other people’s teeth. You remember I told you about Agrajag?”

Ford thought for a moment. “You mean the guy who was convinced you were getting him killed over and over again?”

“Yes. One of the places he claimed I’d got him killed was Stavromula Beta. Someone tries to shoot me, it seems. I duck and Agrajag, or at least one of his many reincarnations, gets hit. It seems that this has definitely happened at some point in time, so, I suppose, I can’t get killed at least until after I’ve ducked on Stavromula Beta. Only no one’s ever heard of it.”