Mostly Harmless (9 page)

So this was where accountants spent their time. There was clearly more to them than met the eye. He looked around carefully, trying not to let it all swell and swim and overwhelm him.

He didn’t know his way around this universe. He didn’t even know the physical laws that determined its dimensional extents or behaviors, but his instinct told him to look for the most outstanding feature he could detect and make toward it.

Way off in some indistinguishable distance — was it a mile or a million or a mote in his eye? — was a stunning peak that overarched the sky, climbed and climbed and spread out in flowering aigrettes,
¹
agglomerates,
²
and archimandrites.
³
He weltered toward it, hooling and thurling, and at last reached it in a meaninglessly long umthingth of time.

He clung to it, arms outspread, gripping tightly on to its roughly gnarled and pitted surface. Once he was certain that he was secure, he made the hideous mistake of looking down.

While he had been weltering, hooling and thurling, the distance beneath him had not bothered him unduly, but now that he was gripping, the distance made his heart wilt and his brain bend. His fingers were white with pain and tension. His teeth were grinding and twisting against each other beyond his control. His eyes turned inward with waves from the willowing extremities of nausea.

With an immense effort of will and faith he simply let go and pushed.

He felt himself float. Away. And then, counterintuitively, upward. And upward.

He threw his shoulders back, let his arms drop, gazed upward and let himself be drawn loosely, higher and higher.

Before long, insofar as such terms had any meaning in this virtual universe, a ledge loomed up ahead of him on which he could grip and onto which he could clamber.

He rose; he gripped; he clambered.

He panted a little. This was all a little stressful.

He held tightly onto the ledge as he sat. He wasn’t certain if this was to prevent himself from falling down off it or rising up from it, but he needed something to grip onto as he surveyed the world in which he found himself.

The whirling, turning height spun him and twisted his
brain in upon itself till he found himself, eyes closed, whimpering and hugging the hideous wall of towering rock.

He slowly brought his breathing back under control again. He told himself repeatedly that he was just in a graphic representation of a world. A virtual universe. A simulated reality. He could snap back out of it at any moment.

He snapped back out of it.

He was sitting in a blue leatherette foam-filled, swivelseated office chair in front of a computer terminal.

He relaxed.

He was clinging to the face of an impossibly high peak perched on a narrow ledge above a drop of brain-swiveling dimensions.

It wasn’t just the landscape being so far beneath him — he wished it would stop undulating and waving.

He had to get a grip. Not on the rock wall — that was an illusion. He had to get a grip on the situation, be able to look at the physical world he was in while drawing himself out of it emotionally.

He clenched inwardly and then, just as he had let go of the rock face itself, he let go of the idea of the rock face and let himself just sit there clearly and freely. He looked out at the world. He was breathing well. He was cool. He was in charge again.

He was in a four-dimensional topological model of the
Guide
’s financial systems, and somebody or something would very shortly want to know why.

And here they came.

Swooping through virtual space toward him came a small flock of mean and steely-eyed creatures with pointy little heads, pencil moustaches and querulous demands as to who he was, what he was doing there, what his authorization was, what the authorization of his authorizing agent was, what his inside leg measurement was and so on. Laser light flickered all over him as if he were a packet of biscuits at a supermarket check-out. The heavier-duty laser guns were held, for the moment, in reserve. The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no difference. Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.

The laser readers were becoming very agitated as they flickered over his fingerprints, his retina and the follicle pattern where his hairline was receding. They didn’t like what they were finding at all. The chattering and screeching of highly personal and insolent questions was rising in pitch. A little surgical steel scraper was reaching out toward the skin at the nape of his neck when Ford, holding his breath and praying very slightly, pulled Vann Harl’s Indent-I-Eeze out of his pocket and waved it in front of them.

Instantly every laser was diverted to the little card and swept backward and forward over it and in it, examining and reading every molecule.

Then, just as suddenly, they stopped.

The entire flock of little virtual inspectors snapped to attention.

“Nice to see you, Mr. Harl,” they said in smarmy unison. “Is there anything we can do for you?”

Ford smiled a slow and vicious smile.

“Do you know,” he said, “I rather think there is?”

Five minutes later he was out of there.

About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred ownership of the entire organization into his own name, but he doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn’t want it anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights at the office, not to mention massive and time-consuming fraud investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted something that nobody other than the computer would notice: that was the bit that took thirty seconds.

The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything.

It had to
want
not to know about what Ford was up to, and then he could safely leave the computer to rationalize its own defenses against the information’s ever emerging. It was a programming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to high political office.

The other minute was spent discovering that the computer system already had a mental block. A big one.

He would never have discovered it if he hadn’t been busy engineering a mental block himself. He came across a whole slew of smooth and plausible denial procedures and diversionary subroutines exactly where he had been planning to install
his own. The computer denied all knowledge of them, of course, then blankly refused to accept that there was anything even to deny knowledge of and was generally so convincing that even Ford almost found himself thinking he must have made a mistake.

He was impressed.

He was so impressed, in fact, that he didn’t bother to install his own mental block procedures, he just set up calls to the ones that were already there, which then called themselves when questioned, and so on.

He quickly set about debugging the little bits of code he had installed himself, only to discover they weren’t there. Cursing, he searched all over for them, but could find no trace of them at all.

He was just about to start installing them all over again when he realized that the reason he couldn’t find them was that they were working already.

He grinned with satisfaction.

He tried to discover what the computer’s other mental block was all about, but it seemed, not unnaturally, to have a mental block about it. He could no longer find any trace of it at all, in fact; it was that good. He wondered if he had been imagining it. He wondered if he had been imagining that it was something to do with something in the building, and something to do with the number thirteen. He ran a few tests. Yes, he had obviously been imagining it.

No time for fancy routes now, there was obviously a major security alert in progress. Ford took the elevator up to the
ground floor to change to the express elevators. He somehow had to get the Ident-I-Eeze back into Harl’s pocket before it was missed. How, he didn’t know.

The doors of the elevator slid open to reveal a large posse of security guards and robots poised waiting for it and brandishing filthy-looking weapons.

They ordered him out.

With a shrug he stepped forward. They all pushed rudely past him into the elevator, which took them down to continue their search for him on the lower levels.

This was fun, thought Ford, giving Colin a friendly pat. Colin was about the first genuinely useful robot Ford had ever encountered. Colin bobbed along in the air in front of him in a lather of cheerful ecstasy. Ford was glad he’d named him after a dog.

He was highly tempted just to leave at that point and hope for the best, but he knew that the best had a far greater chance of actually occurring if Harl did not discover that his Ident-I-Eeze was missing. He somehow, surreptitiously, had to return it.

They went to the express elevators.

“Hi,” said the elevator they got into.

“Hi,” said Ford.

“Where can I take you folks today?” said the elevator.

“Floor twenty-three,” said Ford.

“Seems to be a popular floor today,” said the elevator.

Hmm, thought Ford, not liking the sound of that at all. The elevator lit up the twenty-third floor on its floor display and started to zoom upward. Something about the floor display
tweaked at Ford’s mind but he couldn’t catch what it was and forgot about it. He was more worried about the idea of the floor he was going to being a popular one. He hadn’t really thought through how he was going to deal with whatever it was that was happening up there because he had no idea what he was going to find. He would just have to busk it.

They were there.

The doors slid open.

Ominous quiet.

Empty corridor.

There was the door to Harl’s office, with a slight layer of dust around it. Ford knew that this dust consisted of billions of tiny molecular robots that had crawled out of the woodwork, built one another, rebuilt the door, disassembled one another and then crept back into the woodwork again and just waited for damage. Ford wondered what kind of life that was, but not for long because he was a lot more concerned about what his own life was like at that moment.

He took a deep breath and started his run.

A
rthur felt at a bit of a loss. There was a whole galaxy of stuff out there for him, and he wondered if it was churlish of him to complain to himself that it lacked just two things: the world he was born on and the woman he loved.

Damn it and blast it, he thought, and felt the need of some guidance and advice. He consulted
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. He looked up “guidance” and it said, “See under
ADVICE
.” He looked up “advice” and it said, “See under
GUIDANCE
.” It had been doing a lot of that kind of stuff recently and he wondered if it was all it was cracked up to be.

He headed to the outer Eastern rim of the Galaxy, where, it was said, wisdom and truth were to be found, most particularly on the planet Hawalius, which was a planet of oracles and seers and soothsayers and also take-out pizza parlors, because
most mystics were completely incapable of cooking for themselves.

However, it appeared that some sort of calamity had befallen this planet. As Arthur wandered the streets of the village where the major prophets lived, it had something of a crestfallen air. He came across one prophet who was clearly shutting up shop in a despondent kind of way and asked him what was happening.

“No call for us anymore,” he said gruffly as he started to bang a nail into the plank he was holding across the window of his hovel.

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Hold on to the other end of this and I’ll show you.”

Arthur held up the unnailed end of the plank and the old prophet scuttled into the recesses of his hovel, returning a moment or two later with a small Sub-Etha radio. He turned it on, fiddled with the dial for a moment and put the thing on the small wooden bench that he usually sat and prophesied on. He then took hold of the plank again and resumed hammering.

Arthur sat and listened to the radio.

“… be confirmed,” said the radio.

“Tomorrow,” it continued, “the vice president of Poffla Vigus, Roopy Ga Stip, will announce that he intends to run for president. In a speech he will give tomorrow at …”

“Find another channel,” said the prophet. Arthur pushed the preset button.

“… refused to comment,” said the radio. “Next week’s jobless totals in the Zabush sector,” it continued, “will be the
worst since records began. A report published next month says …”

“Find another,” barked the prophet, crossly. Arthur pushed the button again.

“… denied it categorically,” said the radio. “Next month’s royal wedding between Prince Gid of the Soofling dynasty and Princess Hooli of Raui Alpha will be the most spectacular ceremony the Bjanjy Territories has ever witnessed. Our reporter Trillian Astra is there and sends us this report.”

Arthur blinked.

The sound of cheering crowds and a hubbub of brass bands erupted from the radio. A very familiar voice said, “Well, Krart, the scene here in the middle of next month is absolutely incredible. Princess Hooli is looking radiant in a …”

The prophet swiped the radio off the bench and onto the dusty ground, where it squawked like a badly tuned chicken.

“See what we have to contend with?” grumbled the prophet. “Here, hold this. Not that, this. No, not like that. This way up. Other way ’round, you fool.”

“I was listening to that,” complained Arthur, grappling helplessly with the prophet’s hammer.