The Salmon of Doubt

by Douglas Adams

  The official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration gave a dismissive shrug. “They’re perfectly safe,” he said. He glanced up at Zaphod and suddenly said with uncharacteristic frankness, “There’s worse than that on board. At least,” he added, tapping at one of the computer screens, “I hope it’s on board.”

  The other official rounded on him sharply.

  “What the hell do you think you’re saying?” he snapped.

  The first shrugged again. He said, “It doesn’t matter. He can say what he likes. No one would believe him. It’s why we chose to use him rather than do anything official, isn’t it? The more wild the story he tells, the more it’ll sound like he’s some hippy adventurer making it up. He can even say that we said this and it’ll make him sound like a paranoid.” He smiled pleasantly at Zaphod, who was seething in a suit full of sick. “You may accompany us,” he told him, “if you wish.”

  * * *

  “You see?” said the official, examining the ultra-titanium outer seals of the aorist rod hold. “Perfectly secure, perfectly safe.”

  He said the same thing as they passed holds containing chemical weapons so powerful that a teaspoonful could fatally infect an entire planet.

  He said the same thing as they passed holds containing zeta-active compounds so powerful that a teaspoonful could blow up a whole planet.

  He said the same thing as they passed holds containing theta-active compounds so powerful that a teaspoonful could irradiate a whole planet.

  “I’m glad I’m not a planet,” muttered Zaphod.

  “You’d have nothing to fear,” assured the official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration. “Planets are very safe. Provided,” he added—and paused. They were approaching the hold nearest to the point where the back of the starship Billion Year Bunker was broken. The corridor here was twisted and deformed, and the floor was damp and sticky in patches.

  “Ho-hum,” he said, “ho very much hum.”

  “What’s in this hold?” demanded Zaphod.

  “By-products,” said the official, clamming up again.

  “By-products . . .” insisted Zaphod, quietly, “of what?”

  Neither official answered. Instead they examined the hold door very carefully and saw that its seals were twisted apart by the forces that had deformed the whole corridor. One of them touched the door lightly. It swung open to his touch. There was darkness inside, with just a couple of dim yellow lights deep within it.

  “Of what?” hissed Zaphod.

  The leading official turned to the other.

  “There’s an escape capsule,” he said, “that the crew were to use to abandon ship before jettisoning it into the black hole,” he said. “I think it would be good to know that it’s still there.” The other official nodded and left without a word.

  The first official quietly beckoned Zaphod in. The large dim yellow lights glowed about twenty feet from them.

  “The reason,” he said quietly, “why everything else in this ship is, I maintain, safe, is that no one is really crazy enough to use them. No one. At least no one that crazy would ever get near them. Anyone that mad or dangerous rings very deep alarm bells. People may be stupid, but they’re not that stupid.”

  “By-products,” hissed Zaphod again—he had to hiss in order that his voice shouldn’t be heard to tremble—“of what?”

  “Er, Designer People.”

  “What?”

  “The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were awarded a huge research grant to design and produce synthetic personalities to order. The results were uniformly disastrous. All the ‘people’ and ‘personalities’ turned out to be amalgams of characteristics which simply could not coexist in naturally occurring life-forms. Most of them were just poor pathetic misfits, but some were deeply, deeply dangerous. Dangerous because they didn’t ring alarm bells in other people. They could walk through situations the way that ghosts walk through walls, because no one spotted the danger.

  “The most dangerous of all were three identical ones—they were put in this hold, to be blasted, with this ship, right out of this universe. They are not evil, in fact they are rather simple and charming. But they are the most dangerous creatures that ever lived because there is nothing they will not do if allowed, and nothing they will not be allowed to do . . .”

  Zaphod looked at the dim yellow lights, the two dim yellow lights. As his eyes became accustomed to the light, he saw that the two lights framed a third space where something was broken. Wet, sticky patches gleamed dully on the floor.

  Zaphod and the official walked cautiously toward the lights. At that moment, four words came crashing into the helmet headsets from the other official.

  “The capsule has gone,” he said tersely.

  “Trace it,” snapped Zaphod’s companion. “Find exactly where it has gone. We must know where it has gone!”

  Zaphod approached the two remaining tanks. A quick glance showed him that each contained an identical floating body. He examined one more carefully. The body, that of an elderly man, was floating in a thick yellow liquid. The man was kindly looking, with lots of pleasant laugh lines round his face. His hair seemed unnaturally thick and dark for someone of his age, and his right hand seemed continually to be weaving forward and back, up and down, as if shaking hands with an endless succession of unseen ghosts. He smiled genially, babbled and burbled like a half-sleeping baby, and occasionally seemed to rock very slightly with little tremors of laughter, as if he had just told himself a joke he hadn’t heard before, or didn’t remember properly. Waving, smiling, chortling, with little yellow bubbles beading on his lips, he seemed to inhabit a distant world of simple dreams.

  Another terse message suddenly came through his helmet headset. The planet toward which the escape capsule had headed had already been identified. It was in Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.

  Zaphod found a small speaker by the tank, and turned it on. The man in the yellow liquid was babbling gently about a shining city on a hill.

  He also heard the Official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration issue instructions to the effect that the missing escape capsule contained a “Reagan” and that the planet in ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha must be made “perfectly safe.”

  From The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book, 1986

  Excerpts from an Interview

  conducted by Matt Newsome

  D.N.A. The thing with Dirk Gently was that I felt I had lost contact with that character, I couldn’t make that book viable, which is why I said, “Okay, let’s go off and do something else.” Then, looking back at all the ideas that were there in Salmon of Doubt, I looked at it again about a year later and suddenly realised what it was that I’d been getting wrong, which was that these are essentially much more like Hitchhiker ideas and not like Dirk Gently ideas.

  So, there will come a point I suspect at some point in the future where I will write a sixth Hitchhiker book. But I kind of want to do that in an odd kind of way because people have said, quite rightly, that Mostly Harmless is a very bleak book. And it was a bleak book. The reason for that is very simple—I was having a lousy year, for all sorts of personal reasons that I don’t want to go into, I just had a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book against that background. And, guess what, it was a rather bleak book!

  I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number. I think that a lot of the stuff which was originally in Salmon of Doubt, was planned into Salmon of Doubt, and really wasn’t working, I think could be yanked out and put together with some new thoughts.

  M.N. Yes, because certainly some people have heard that Salmon of Doubt was now going to be a new Hitchhiker book.

  D.N.A. Well, in a sense, because I shall be salvaging some of the ideas I couldn’t make work within a Dirk Gently framework and putting them in a Hitchhiker framework, undergoing necessary changes on the way. And
, for old time’s sake, I may call it Salmon of Doubt, I may call it—well, who knows!

  [Editor’s Note: The version of The Salmon of Doubt presented here has been assembled from various versions of this work-in-progress. Please read the Editor’s Note at the beginning of this book for a detailed description of how this was put together. On the next page I have placed Douglas’s fax to his longtime London editor, which describes his overall scheme for the novel, giving us some inkling as to where the story might have gone from here.]

  * * *

  Fax

  To: Sue Freestone

  From: Douglas Adams

  Re: The Salmon of Doubt description

  Dirk Gently, hired by someone he never meets, to do a job that is never specified, starts following people at random. His investigations lead him to Los Angeles, through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos. Jokes, lightly poached fish, and the emergent properties of complex systems form the background to Dirk Gently’s most baffling and incomprehensible case.

  Chapter 1

  EARLY MOST MORNINGS Dave climbed up to this isolated spot on the hill and brought small offerings to leave in the shrine of St. Clive, the patron saint of real-estate agents. Today what he’d brought was, so far as he could make out, part of a swimming-pool cleaning device, a sort of large, plastic, sucking lobsterish thing.

  He laid the thing down carefully and stood back to admire the effect.

  The shrine was just a small heap of rocks, really, with a little array of things that had got dug up from time to time. There was a remote-control garage opener, something that was probably part of a juice extractor, and a small, illuminated Kermit the Frog. The pool-cleaning lobsterish thing was a pretty good addition, and he arranged it so that its two feet of broken ribbed plastic tubing hung down like an elephant’s trunk over Kermit.

  His morning trips up to the shrine were partly just to amuse himself, but also a chance to be alone and reflect on things. This whole place had started just as somewhere to fool around by himself, but it had rapidly turned into something kind of bigger than he meant, and he needed somewhere to get away from it all and think about things. Sometimes he’d even worry. When he was worried he would start to giggle slightly, and when he was really worried he would start to hum old Carpenters tunes till the worry went away.

  But today he wasn’t going to worry. Today he was going to have fun. He unslung the canvas bag he’d brought up with him and dropped it on the ground for a moment.

  From up here, the view was stupendous. Lush forest surrounded DaveLand in every direction, forest of extraordinary richness and diversity, teeming with life and colour. Through it wound the river Dave, which then meandered on through the hills till it met, five hundred miles away, the immense ocean, which, until recently, he had called the Dave Ocean, but which in a fit of modest embarrassment he had now renamed the Karen Ocean. He had always thought that Pacific was a really dumb name. He had been on it. It wasn’t Pacific at all. He’d fixed that.

  DaveLand itself was now a pretty impressive affair. Astonishing, really, when he thought about it. He brushed his hand through his lank hair and stared out at it, suppressing a very, very small giggle.

  DaveLand lightly covered about ninety acres of hillside, with new outcrops already beginning to appear on nearby hills. Beautiful homes. Much more beautiful than any of the ones that his imaginary St. Clive would have sold or even understood. None of your split-level ranch-style crap with stupid conversation pits that anyone with half a brain would probably kill themselves rather than converse in. Dave’s houses were of a different kind altogether.

  Apart from anything else, they were smart houses. Just simple stuff, like they faced the right way. They had glass in the right places, stone in the right places, water in the right places, plants in the right places, so the air moved through them properly and was warm where you wanted it and cool where you wanted it. It was just physics. Most architects didn’t know any physics, he decided. They just knew dumb stuff. In Dave’s houses, prisms and fibres moved sunlight where you wanted it. Heat exchangers took heat from the food in the fridge and gave it to the food in the oven. Simple. People went into Dave’s houses and would say, “Hey! This is really neat! How come other people don’t build houses like this?” Answer? Because they’re dumb.

  And telephones. Dave had given people here much neater, smarter, altogether more fabulous telephones than they’d ever had before. Now they wanted television as well, which Dave thought was pretty dumb in the first place, and monumentally dumb in the circumstances; but that in turn had been a pretty interesting problem and Dave, of course, had solved it. But Dave had solved so many problems that he had inadvertently created a new one. DaveLand was now a community of nearly a thousand people, which made him kind of responsible. He hadn’t expected to be responsible.

  He pulled up a bunch of long grass and swished it around fretfully. The early-morning sunlight glinted off Dave’s Place. Dave’s Place was easily the largest and most gracious of all the buildings in, well, in the world. It ringed the summit of the hill opposite with elegant sweeping white stone walls and seeming acres of glass. The summit itself was laid out as a Japanese garden. Streams ran down through the house from it.

  Just beneath Dave’s Place, on the same hillside and contained within the same security compound (he couldn’t believe he had to have stuff like security compounds now; and forty—forty—of the nine-hundred-plus inhabitants of DaveLand were now lawyers) was The Way of the Nostril.

  The Way of the Nostril was probably the single smartest thing that Dave had ever thought of. Even he, to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart. It was the single reason that all of this was here, and it had become the single thing that made Dave hum old Carpenters tunes most, except maybe the lawyers.

  The sun was now gleaming brilliantly over all of DaveLand. It was pretty neat, Dave had to admit, but he also had to admit that he had kind of liked DaveLand when it was just his own funny stupid place to come to because only he was smart enough to get there. But one thing had led to another, and now all this. Here he was, only twenty-five and already beginning to feel like he was almost thirty.

  Well, screw all that. Today he was going to have some fun. He picked up the large canvas bag and slung it back over his shoulders. Sam would have a fit. The lawyers would go nuts. Good. He turned and climbed farther on up the hill. The hill was called Top of the World, and was named after the tune by the Carpenters. One of the great things about having your own world was that you could just go ahead and like the Carpenters on it.

  The hill got pretty rocky and craggy higher up, and Dave had to do a bit of rock-scrambling to get to where he was going.

  Within about twenty minutes he was pretty hot and a bit sweaty, but he’d made it to the top, or at least the last significant flat bit, a solid slab of deeply rutted rock on which he sat, and dumped the bag. He gathered his breath for a few moments and then started to unpack it. He pulled out aluminium struts, he pulled out orange strings, he pulled out little purple sheets of Kevlar.

  After about ten minutes of assembly the thing was ready, a large, gossamer-winged insect of a contraption. The scraps of Kevlar strung between the struts of the frame were surprisingly small and oddly shaped. Dave had worked out that most of the cloth used in conventional hang gliders was redundant, and had got rid of it.

  He examined the assembled frame systematically and satisfied himself that it was all as it should be, that it was Daveworthy.

  He looked out nervously, but only just for a moment. He was going to do it anyway, so it was dumb to be nervous. Carefully picking up the hang glider, he carried it out to the edge of the rock, till he was standing on a ledge looking out over the whole extent of DaveLand. He noticed with satisfaction that although his glider looked like nothing more than a kind of drying frame for silk bikinis, it was very stiff and he
had to pull it forcefully through the air to move it.

  From here to Dave’s Place was about a mile horizontally and a couple of hundred feet vertically. He could just see, glinting in the sun, his large blue swimming pool, neatly secluded within the Japanese garden on the top of Dave’s Hill. The distance and the direction of the sun made details a little difficult, but he was confident that Sam would be waiting for him there beside the pool. He reckoned he could drop himself pretty neatly into that. He glanced at his watch. It was just after eight o’clock, and he’d scheduled the meeting for eight. Sam would be there.

  Sam’s view was that a lot of Dave’s plans and schemes were reckless, crazy, irresponsible, occasionally bordering on the just plain dumb. Dropping into the pool would be something better than dumb guys could do. How tough could it be to do it if you were Dave?

  He checked the wind direction, stepped into a lightweight harness belt, tightened it, clipped the belt to the glider, passed his hands through two loops, gripped the main struts, and he was ready.

  All he had to do now was throw himself off into space.

  Wow. Okay. Go.

  No fuss, no dumb stuff. With a light heart he threw himself out forward, and sailed into empty space. The air supported him immediately, with a little rough buffeting. He braced himself against the frame, then tried to relax a little, then relaxed a little more, trying to find a good balance that was easy but responsive. He got it. He was out there. He was flying. He was just some kind of a bird.

  Hey, this was good. The empty air was kind of a shock, but a good shock, like a swimming pool in the morning. And the air wasn’t empty. It was like falling into enormous invisible pillows, with fingers that came out and tugged and pulled at you, ruffling your hair, rattling your T-shirt. As his brain got to grips with the huge openness around him, he felt like a little toy hanging from the end of an immense mobile slowly turning over DaveWorld. He was turning in a big, easy arc, a little bit to the right and then, in response to a small shift in his weight, a little bit to the left, but still, it seemed, moving as an arc within an arc, a wheel within a wheel. The world, his world, turned slowly around beneath him, green, rich, lush and vivid.