Mostly Harmless (7 page)

“I assume from the manner of your entrance that you do not have new material for the, er,
Guide
, at the moment,” said the smooth-faced 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.

“No. Me Harl. You Prefect. You do restaurant column. Me editor. Me sit here tell you you do restaurant column. You get?”

“
Restaurant
column?” said Ford, too bewildered to be really angry yet.

“Siddown, Prefect,” said Harl. He swung around in his
swivel chair, got to his feet and stood staring out at the tiny specks enjoying the carnival twenty-three stories below.

“Time to get this business on its feet, Prefect,” he snapped. “We at InfiniDim Enterprises are …”

“You at
what
?”

“InfiniDim Enterprises. We have bought out the
Guide
.”

“
InfiniDim
?”

“We spent millions on that name, Prefect. Start liking it or start packing.”

Ford shrugged. He had nothing to pack.

“The Galaxy is changing,” said Harl. “We’ve got to change with it. Go with the market. The market is moving up. New aspirations. New technology. The future is …”

“Don’t tell me about the future,” said Ford. “I’ve been all over the future. Spend half my time there. It’s the same as anywhere else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air.”

“That’s
one
future,” said Harl. “That’s
your
future, if you accept it. You’ve got to learn to think multidimensionally. There are limitless futures stretching out in every direction from this moment — and from this moment and from this. Billions of them, bifurcating every instant! Every possible position of every possible electron balloons out into billions of probabilities! Billions and billions of shining, gleaming futures! You know what that means?”

“You’re dribbling down your chin.”

“Billions and billions of markets!”

“I see,” said Ford. “So you sell billions and billions of
Guides
.”

“No,” said Harl, reaching for his handkerchief and not finding one. “Excuse me,” he said, “but this gets me so excited.” Ford handed him his towel.

“The reason we don’t sell billions and billions of
Guides
,” continued Harl, after wiping his mouth, “is the expense. What we do is we sell one
Guide
billions and billions of times. We exploit the multidimensional nature of the Universe to cut down on manufacturing costs. And we don’t sell to penniless hitchhikers. What a stupid notion that was! Find the one section of the market that, more or less by definition, doesn’t have any money, and try to sell to it. No. We sell to the affluent business traveler and his vacationing wife in a billion, billion different futures. This is the most radical, dynamic and thrusting business venture in the entire multidimensional infinity of space-time-probability ever.”

“And you want me to be its restaurant critic,” said Ford.

“We would value your input.”

“Kill!” shouted Ford. He shouted it at his towel.

The towel leapt up out of Harl’s hands.

This was not because it had any motive force of its own, but because Harl was so startled at the idea that it might. The next thing that startled him was the sight of Ford Prefect hurtling across the desk at him fists first. In fact Ford was just lunging for the credit card, but you don’t get to occupy the sort of position that Harl occupied in the sort of organization in which Harl occupied it without developing a healthily paranoid view of life. He took the sensible precaution of hurling himself backward, and striking his head a sharp blow on the
rocket-proof glass, then subsided into a series of worrying and highly personal dreams.

Ford lay on the desk, surprised at how swimmingly everything had gone. He glanced quickly at the piece of plastic he now held in his hand — it was a Dine-O-Charge credit card with his name already embossed on it, and an expiration date two years from now, and was possibly the single most exciting thing Ford had ever seen in his life — then he clambered over the desk to see to Harl.

He was breathing fairly easily. It occurred to Ford that he might breathe more easily yet without the weight of his wallet bearing down on his chest, so he slipped it out of Harl’s breast pocket and flipped through it. Fair amount of cash. Credit tokens. Ultragolf club membership. Other club memberships. Photos of someone’s wife and family — presumably Harl’s, but it was hard to be sure these days. Busy executives often didn’t have time for a full-time wife and family and would just rent them for weekends.

Ha!

He couldn’t believe what he’d just found.

He slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling among a bunch of receipts.

It wasn’t insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semitransparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudoinches deep beneath its surface.

It was an Ident-I-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant — a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn’t even remember they had and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colors. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill, things could get really trying.

Hence the Ident-I-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and it therefore represented technology’s greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

Ford pocketed it. A remarkably good idea had just occurred to him. He wondered how long Harl would remain unconscious.

“Hey!” he shouted to the little melon-sized robot still slobbering
with euphoria up on the ceiling. “You want to stay happy?”

The robot gurgled that it did.

“Then stick with me and do everything I tell you without fail.”

The robot said that it was quite happy where it was up on the ceiling thank you very much. It had never realized before how much sheer titillation there was to be got from a good ceiling and it wanted to explore its feelings about ceilings in greater depth.

“You stay there,” said Ford, “and you’ll soon be recaptured and have your conditional chip replaced. You want to stay happy, come now.”

The robot let out a long heartfelt sigh of impassioned tristesse and sank reluctantly away from the ceiling.

“Listen,” said Ford, “can you keep the rest of the security system happy for a few minutes?”

“One of the joys of true happiness,” trilled the robot, “is sharing. I brim, I froth, I overflow with …”

“Okay,” said Ford. “Just spread a little happiness around the security network. Don’t give it any information. Just make it feel good so it doesn’t feel the need to ask for any.”

He picked up his towel and ran cheerfully for the door. Life had been a little dull of late. It showed every sign now of becoming extremely froody.

A
rthur Dent had been in some hell holes in his life, but he had never before seen a spaceport that had a sign saying “Even traveling despondently is better than arriving here.” To welcome visitors the arrivals hall featured a picture of the president of Now-What, smiling. It was the only picture anybody could find of him, and it had been taken shortly after he had shot himself, so although the photo had been retouched as well as could be managed, the smile it wore was rather a ghastly one. The side of his head had been drawn back in crayon. No replacement had been found for the photograph because no replacement had been found for the president. There was only one ambition that anyone on the planet ever had, and that was to leave.

Arthur checked himself into a small motel on the outskirts of town and sat glumly on the bed, which was damp, and
flipped through the little information brochure, which was also damp. It said that the planet of NowWhat had been named after the opening words of the first settlers to arrive there after struggling across light years of space to reach the farthest unexplored outreaches of the Galaxy. The main town was called OhWell. There weren’t any other towns to speak of. Settlement on NowWhat had not been a success and the sort of people who actually wanted to live on NowWhat were not the sort of people you would want to spend time with.

Trading was mentioned in the brochure. The main trade that was carried out was in the skins of the NowWhattian boghog but it wasn’t a very successful one because no one in their right minds would want to buy a NowWhattian boghog skin. The trade only hung on by its fingernails because there was always a significant number of people in the Galaxy who were not in their right minds. Arthur had felt very uncomfortable looking around at some of the other occupants of the small passenger compartment of the ship.

The brochure described some of the history of the planet. Whoever had written it had obviously started out trying to drum up a little enthusiasm for the place by stressing that it wasn’t actually cold and wet
all
the time, but could find little positive to add to this, so the tone of the piece quickly degenerated into savage irony.

It talked about the early years of settlement. It said that the major activities pursued on NowWhat were those of catching, skinning and eating NowWhattian boghogs, which were the only extant form of animal life on NowWhat, all others having long ago died of despair. The boghogs were tiny, vicious creatures,
and the small margin by which they fell short of being completely inedible was the margin by which life on the planet subsisted. So what were the rewards, however small, that made life on NowWhat worth living? Well, there weren’t any. Not a one. Even making yourself some protective clothing out of boghog skins was an exercise in disappointment and futility, since the skins were unaccountably thin and leaky. This caused a lot of puzzled conjecture among the settlers. What was the boghog’s secret of keeping warm? If anyone had ever learned the language the boghogs spoke to one another, they would have discovered that there was no trick. The boghogs were as cold and wet as anyone else on the planet. No one had had the slightest desire to learn the language of the boghogs for the simple reason that these creatures communicated by biting each other very hard on the thigh. Life on NowWhat being what it was, most of what a boghog might have to say about it could easily be signified by these means.

Arthur flipped through the brochure till he found what he was looking for. At the back there were a few maps of the planet. They were fairly rough and ready because they weren’t likely to be of much interest to anyone, but they told him what he wanted to know.

He didn’t recognize it at first because the maps were the other way up from the way he would have expected and looked, therefore, thoroughly unfamiliar. Of course, up and down, north and south, are absolutely arbitrary designations, but we are used to seeing things the way we are used to seeing them, and Arthur had to turn the maps upside down to make sense of them.

There was one huge landmass off on the upper left-hand side of the page that tapered down to a tiny waist and then ballooned out again like a large comma. On the right-hand side was a collection of large shapes jumbled familiarly together. The outlines were not exactly the same, and Arthur didn’t know if this was because the map was so rough, or because the sea level was higher or because, well, things were just different here. But the evidence was inarguable.

This was definitely the Earth.

Or rather, it most definitely was not.

It merely looked a lot like the Earth and occupied the same coordinates in space-time. What coordinates it occupied in Probability was anybody’s guess.