A figure stood silhouetted in the light, then another, and another.
Wide eyes blinked slowly at her. Hands were slowly raised in greeting.
“McMillan?” a voice said at last, a strange, thin voice that managed the syllables with difficulty. “Tricia McMillan. Ms. Tricia McMillan?”
“Yes,” said Tricia, almost soundlessly.
“We have been monitoring you.”
“M … monitoring? Me?” “Yes.”
They looked at her for a while, their large eyes moving up and down her very slowly.
“You look smaller in real life,” one said at last.
“What?” said Tricia.
“Yes.”
“I … I don’t understand,” said Tricia. She hadn’t expected any of this, of course, but even for something she hadn’t expected to begin with, it wasn’t going the way she expected. At last she said, “Are you … are you from … Zaphod?”
This question seemed to cause a little consternation among the three figures. They conferred with one another in some skittering language of their own and then turned back to her.
“We don’t think so. Not as far as we know,” said one.
“Where is Zaphod?” said another, looking up into the night sky.
“I … I don’t know,” said Tricia, helplessly.
“It is far from here? Which direction? We don’t know.”
Tricia realized with a sinking heart that they had no idea who she was talking about. Or even what she was talking about. And she had no idea what they were talking about. She put her hopes tightly away again and snapped her brain back into gear. There was no point in being disappointed. She had to wake up to the fact that she had here the journalistic scoop of the century. What should she do? Go back into the house for a video camera? Wouldn’t they just be gone when she got back? She was thoroughly confused as to strategy. Keep ’em talking, she thought. Figure it out later.
“You’ve been monitoring … me?”
“All of you. Everything on your planet. TV. Radio. Telecommunications. Computers. Video circuitry. Warehouses.”
“What?”
“Car parks. Everything. We monitor everything.”
Tricia stared at them.
“That must be very boring, isn’t it?” she blurted out.
“Yes.”
“So why …”
“Except …”
“Yes? Except what?”
“Game shows. We quite like game shows.”
There was a terribly long silence as Tricia looked at the aliens and the aliens looked at her.
“There’s something I would just like to get from indoors,” said Tricia, very deliberately. “Tell you what. Would you, or one of you, like to come inside with me and have a look?”
“Very much,” they all said, enthusiastically.
All three of them stood, slightly awkwardly in her sitting room, as she hurried around picking up a video camera, a 35 mm camera, a tape recorder, every recording medium she could grab hold of. They were all thin and, under domestic lighting conditions, a sort of dim purplish green.
“I really won’t be a second, guys,” Tricia said, as she rummaged through some drawers for spare tapes and films.
The aliens were looking at the shelves that held her CDs and her old records. One of them nudged one of the others very slightly.
“Look,” he said. “Elvis.”
Tricia stopped, and stared at them all over again.
“You like Elvis?” she said.
“Yes,” they said.
“Elvis Presley?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head in bewilderment as she tried to stuff a new tape into her video camera.
“Some of your people,” said one of her visitors, hesitantly, “think that Elvis has been kidnapped by space aliens.”
“What?” said Tricia. “Has he?”
“It is possible.”
“Are you telling me that you have kidnapped Elvis?” gasped Tricia. She was trying to keep cool enough not to foul up her equipment, but this was all almost too much for her.
“No. Not us,” said her guests. “Aliens. It is a very interesting possibility. We talk of it often.”
“I must get this down,” Tricia muttered to herself. She checked that her video was properly loaded and working now. She pointed the camera at them. She didn’t put it up to her eye because she didn’t want to freak them out. But she was sufficiently experienced to be able to shoot accurately from the hip.
“Okay,” she said. “Now tell me slowly and carefully who you are. You first,” she said to the one on the left. “What’s your name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
“I see,” said Tricia. “And what about you other two?”
“We don’t know.”
“Good. Okay. Perhaps you can tell me where you are from?”
They shook their heads.
“You don’t know where you’re from?”
They shook their heads again.”
“So,” said Tricia. “What are you … er …”
She was floundering but, being a professional, kept the camera steady while she did it.
“We are on a mission,” said one of the aliens.
“A mission? A mission to do what?”
“We do not know.”
Still she kept the camera steady.
“So what are you doing here on Earth, then?”
“We have come to fetch you.”
Rock steady, rock steady. Could have been on a tripod. She wondered if she should be using a tripod, in fact. She wondered that because it gave her a moment or two to digest what they had just said. No, she thought, hand-held gave her more flexibility. She also thought, Help, what am I going to do?
“Why,” she asked, calmly, “have you come to fetch me?”
“Because we have lost our minds.”
“Excuse me,” said Tricia, “I’m going to have to get a tripod.”
They seemed happy enough to stand there doing nothing while Tricia quickly found a tripod and mounted the camera to it. Her face was completely immobile, but she did not have the faintest idea what was going on or what to think about it.
“Okay,” she said, when she was ready.
“Why …” “We liked your interview with the astrologer.”
“You saw it?”
“We see everything. We are very interested in astrology. We like it. It is very interesting. Not everything is interesting. Astrology is interesting. What the stars tell us. What the stars foretell. We could do with some information like that.”
“But …”
Tricia didn’t know where to start.
Own up, she thought. There’s no point in trying to second-guess any of this stuff.
So she said, “But I don’t know anything about astrology.”
“We do.”
“You do?”
“Yes. We follow our horoscopes. We are very avid. We see all your newspapers and your magazines and are very avid with them. But our leader says we have a problem.”
“You have a leader?”
“Yes.”
“What’s his name?”
“We do not know.”
“What does he say his name is, for Christ’s sake? Sorry, I’ll need to edit that. What does he say his name is?”
“He does not know.”
“So how do you all know he’s the leader?”
“He seized control. He said someone has to do something around here.”
“Ah!” said Tricia, seizing on a clue. “Where is ‘here’?”
“Rupert.”
“What?”
“Your people call it Rupert. The tenth planet from your sun. We have settled there for many years. It is highly cold and uninteresting there. But good for monitoring.”
“Why are you monitoring us?”
“It is all we know to do.”
“Okay,” said Tricia.
“Right. What is the problem that your leader says you have?”
“Triangulation.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Astrology is a very precise science. We know this.”
“Well …” said Tricia, then left it at that.
“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.”
Chapter 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 crawli
ng 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.
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Page 72
