Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set

by Douglas Adams

  Another word and the hammer flew back at him, missed his head by a hand’s width and punched straight down through the floor, shattering the wood and the plaster below.

  In the darker space beneath him the hammer spun and swung around in a slow heavy parabola as bits of plaster fell about it and rattled on the concrete floor below. Then it gathered a violent momentum and hurtled back up through the ceiling, smacking up a stack of startled splinters as it punched through another oak floorboard a hand’s width from the soles of the big man’s feet.

  It soared up into the air, hung there for a moment as if its weight had suddenly vanished, then, deftly flicking its short handle up above its head, it drove hard back down through the floor again—then up again, then down again, punching holes in a splintered ring around its master until, with a long heavy groan, the whole oval section of punctured floor gave way and plunged, twisting, through the air. It shattered itself against the floor below amidst a rain of plaster debris, from which the figure of the big man then emerged, staggering, flapping at the dusty air and coughing. His back, his arms and his legs were still covered with great splintered hunks of oak flooring, but at least he was able to move. He leaned the flat of his hands against the wall and violently coughed some of the dust from his lungs.

  As he turned back, his hammer danced out of the air toward him, then suddenly evaded his grasp and skidded joyfully off across the floor striking sparks from the concrete with its great head, flipped up and parked itself against a nearby pillar at a jaunty angle.

  In front of him the shape of a large Coca-Cola vending machine loomed through the settling cloud of dust. He regarded it with the gravest suspicion and worry. It stood there with a sort of glazed, blank look to it, and had a note from his father stuck on the front panel saying whatever he was doing, stop it. It was signed “You-know-who,” but this had been crossed out and first the word “Odin” and then in larger letters “Your Father” had been substituted. Odin never ceased to make absolutely clear his view of his son’s intellectual accomplishments. The big man tore the note off and stared at it in anger. A postscript added darkly, “Remember Wales. You don’t want to go through all that again.” He screwed the note up and hurled it out of the nearest window, where the wind whipped it up and away. For a moment he thought he heard an odd squeaking noise, but it was probably just the blustering of the wind as it whistled between the nearby derelict buildings.

  He turned and walked to the window and stared out of it in a belligerent sulk. Glued to the floor. At his age. What the devil was that supposed to mean? “Keep your head down,” was what he guessed. “If you don’t keep it down, I’ll have to keep it down for you.” That was what it meant. “Stick to the ground.”

  He remembered now the old man saying exactly that to him at the time of all the unpleasantness with the Phantom fighter jet. “Why can’t you just stick to the ground?” he had said. He could imagine the old man in his softheaded benign malice thinking it very funny to make the lesson so literal.

  Rage began to rumble menacingly inside him but he pushed it down hard. Very worrying things had recently begun happening when he got angry and he had a bad feeling, looking back at the Coca-Cola vending machine, that another of those very worrying things must have just happened. He stared at it and fretted.

  He felt ill.

  He had felt ill a lot of late, and he found it impossible to discharge what were left of his godly duties when he felt he was suffering from a sort of continual low-grade flu. He experienced headaches, dizzy spells, guilt and all the sorts of ailments that were featured so often in television advertisements. He even suffered terrifying blackouts whenever the great rage gripped him.

  He always used to have such a wonderful time getting angry. Great gusts of marvelous anger would hurl him through life. He felt huge. He felt flooded with power and light and energy. He had always been provided with such wonderful things to get angry about—immense acts of provocation or betrayal, people hiding the Atlantic ocean in his helmet, dropping continents on him or getting drunk and pretending to be trees. Stuff you could really work up a rage about and hit things. In short he had felt good about being a Thunder God. Now suddenly it was headaches, nervous tension, nameless anxieties and guilt. These were new experiences for a god, and not pleasant ones.

  “You look ridiculous!”

  The voice screeched out and affected Thor like fingernails scratched across a blackboard lodged in the back of his brain. It was a mean voice, a spiteful, jeering voice, a cheap white nylon shirt of a voice, a shiny-trousered pencil moustache of a voice, a voice, in short, which Thor did not like. He reacted very badly to it at the best of times, and was particularly provoked to have to hear it while standing naked in the middle of a decrepit warehouse with large sections of an oak floor still stuck to his back.

  He spun around angrily. He wanted to be able to turn around calmly and with crushing dignity, but no such strategy ever worked with this creature, and since he, Thor, would only end up feeling humiliated and ridiculous whatever posture he adopted, he might as well go with one he felt comfortable with.

  “Toe Rag!” he roared, yanked his hammer spinning into the air and hurled it with immense, stunning force at the small creature who was squatting complacently in the shadows on top of a small heap of rubble, leaning forward a little.

  Toe Rag caught the hammer and placed it neatly on top of the pile of Thor’s clothes that lay next to him. He grinned, and allowed a stray shaft of sunlight to glitter on one of his teeth. These things don’t happen by accident. Toe Rag had spent some time while Thor was unconscious working out how long it would take him to recover, then industriously moving the pile of rubble to exactly this spot, checking the height and then calculating the exact angle at which to lean. As a provocateur he regarded himself as a professional.

  “Did you do this to me?” roared Thor. “Did you—”

  Thor searched for any way of saying “glue me to the floor” that didn’t sound like “glue me to floor,” but eventually the pause got too long and he had to give up.

  “—glue me to the floor?” he demanded at last. He wished he hadn’t asked such a stupid question.

  “Don’t even answer that!” he added angrily and wished he hadn’t said that either. He stamped his foot and shook the foundations of the building a little just to make the point. He wasn’t certain what the point was, but he felt that it had to be made. Some dust settled gently around him.

  Toe Rag watched him with his dancing, glittering eyes.

  “I merely carry out the instructions given to me by your father,” he said in a grotesque parody of obsequiousness.

  “It seems to me,” said Thor, “that the instructions my father has been giving since you entered his service have been very odd. I think you have some kind of evil grip on him. I don’t know what kind of evil grip it is, but it’s definitely a grip, and it’s definitely—” synonyms failed him— “evil,” he concluded.

  Toe Rag reacted like an iguana to whom someone had just complained about the wine.

  “Me?” he protested. “How can I possibly have a grip on your father? Odin is the greatest of the Gods of Asgard, and I am his devoted servant in all things. Odin says, ‘Do this,’ and I do it. Odin says, ‘Go there,’ and I go there. Odin says, ‘Go and get my big stupid son out of the hospital before he causes any more trouble, and then, I don’t know, glue him to the floor or something,’ and I do exactly as he asks. I am merely the most humble of functionaries. However small or menial the task, Odin’s bidding is what I am there to perform.”

  Thor was not sufficiently subtle a student of human nature or, for that matter, divine or goblin nature, to be able to argue that this was in fact a very powerful grip to hold over anybody, particularly a fallible and pampered old god. He just knew that it was all wrong.

  “Well then,” he shouted, “take this message back to my father, Odin. Tell him that I, Thor, the God of Thunder, demand to meet him. And not in his damned hospital e
ither! I’m not going to hang about reading magazines and looking at fruit while he has his bed changed! Tell him that Thor, the God of Thunder, will meet Odin, the Father of the Gods of Asgard, tonight, at the Challenging Hour, in the Halls of Asgard!”

  “Again?” said Toe Rag, with a sly glance sideways at the Coca-Cola vending machine.

  “Er, yes,” said Thor. “Yes!” he repeated in a rage. “Again!”

  Toe Rag gave a tiny sigh, such as one who felt resigned to carrying out the bidding of a temperamental simpleton might give, and said, “Well, I’ll tell him. I don’t suppose he will be best pleased.”

  “It is no matter of yours whether he is pleased or not!” shouted Thor, disturbing the foundations of the building once more. “This is between my father and myself! You may think yourself very clever, Toe Rag, and you may think that I am not—”

  Toe Rag arched an eyebrow. He had prepared for this moment. He stayed silent and merely let the stray beam of sunlight glint on his dancing eyes. It was a silence of the most profound eloquence.

  “I may not know what you’re up to, Toe Rag, I may not know a lot of things, but I do know one thing. I know that I am Thor, the God of Thunder, and that I will not be made a fool of by a goblin!”

  “Well,” said Toe Rag with a light grin, “when you know two things I expect you’ll be twice as clever. Remember to put your clothes on before you go out.” He gestured casually at the pile beside him and departed.

  10

  THE TROUBLE WITH the sort of shop that sells things like magnifying glasses and penknives is that they tend also to sell all kinds of other fascinating things, like the quite extraordinary device with which Dirk eventually emerged after having been hopelessly unable to decide between the knife with the built-in Phillips screwdriver, toothpick and ballpoint pen and the one with the 13-tooth gristle saw and the tig-welded rivets.

  The magnifying glasses had held him in thrall for a short while, particularly the 25-diopter, high-index, vacuum-deposited, gold-coated glass model with the integral handle and mount and the notchless seal glazing, but then Dirk had happened to catch sight of a small electronic I Ching calculator and he was lost.

  He had never before even guessed at the existence of such a thing. And to be able to move from total ignorance of something to total desire for it, and then actually to own the thing all within the space of about forty seconds was, for Dirk, something of an epiphany.

  The electronic I Ching calculator was badly made. It had probably been manufactured in whichever of the Southeast Asian countries was busy tooling up to do to South Korea what South Korea was busy doing to Japan. Glue technology had obviously not progressed in that country to the point where things could be successfully held together with it. Already the back had half fallen off and needed to be stuck back on with Sellotape.

  It was much like an ordinary pocket calculator, except that the LCD screen was a little larger than usual in order to accommodate the abridged judgements of King Wen on each of the sixty-four hexagrams, and also the commentaries of his son, the Duke of Chou, on each of the lines of each hexagram. These were unusual texts to see marching across the display of a pocket calculator, particularly as they had been translated from the Chinese via the Japanese and seemed to have enjoyed many adventures on the way.

  The device also functioned as an ordinary calculator, but only to a limited degree. It could handle any calculation which returned an answer of anything up to 4.

  1 + 1 it could manage (2) and 1 + 2 (3) and 2 + 2 (4) or tan 74 (3.4874145), but anything above 4 it represented merely as “A Suffusion of Yellow.” Dirk was not certain if this was a programming error or an insight beyond his ability to fathom, but he was crazy about it anyway, enough to hand over twenty pounds of ready cash for the thing.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the proprietor. “It’s a nice piece, that. I think you’ll be happy with it.”

  “I ab,” said Dirk.

  “Glad to hear it, sir,” replied the proprietor. “Do you know you’ve broken your nose?”

  Dirk looked up from fawning on his new possession.

  “Yedth,” he said testily, “obf courth I dknow.”

  The man nodded, satisfied.

  “Just that a lot of my customers wouldn’t always know about a thing like that,” he explained.

  Dirk thanked him tersely and hurried out with his purchase. A few minutes later he took up residence at the small corner table of an Islington café, ordered a small but incredibly strong cup of coffee, and attempted to take stock of his day. A moment’s reflection told him that he was almost certainly going to need a small but incredibly strong beer as well, and he attempted to add this to his order.

  “A wha?” said the waiter. His hair was very black and filled with brilliantine. He was tall, incredibly fit, and too cool to listen to customers or say consonants.

  Dirk repeated his order, but what with having the cafe’s music system, a broken nose, and the waiter’s insuperable cool to contend with, he eventually found it simpler to write out the order on a napkin with a stub of pencil. The waiter peered at it in an offended manner, and left.

  Dirk exchanged a friendly nod with the girl sitting half-reading a book at the next table, who had watched this exchange with sympathy. Then he set about laying out his morning’s acquisitions on the table in front of him—the newspaper, the electronic I Ching calculator and the envelope which he had retrieved from behind the gold disc on Geoffrey Anstey’s bathroom wall. He then spent a minute or two dabbing at his nose with a handkerchief and prodding it tenderly to see how much it hurt, which turned out to be quite a lot. He sighed and stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket.

  A few seconds later the waiter returned bearing a herb omelet and a single breadstick. Dirk explained that this wasn’t what he had ordered. The waiter shrugged and said that it wasn’t his fault.

  Dirk had no idea what to say to this, and said so. He was still having a great deal of difficulty speaking. The waiter asked Dirk if he knew that he had broken his nose and Dirk said that yedth, dthagg you berry budge, he did. The waiter said that his friend Neil had once broken his nose and Dirk said that he hobed it hurd like hell, which seemed to draw the conversation to a close. The waiter took the omelet and left, vowing never to return.

  When the girl sitting at the next table looked away for a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened. He sat sipping at the lukewarm cup and casting his mind back over the day.

  He knew that before consulting the I Ching, even an electronic one, he should try and compose his thoughts and allow them to settle calmly.

  This was a tough one.

  However much he tried to clear his mind and think in a calm and collected way, he was unable to stop Geoffrey Anstey’s head revolving incessantly in his mind. It revolved disapprovingly, as if pointing an accusing finger at Dirk. The fact that it did not have an accusing finger with which to point only served to drive the point it was trying to make home all the harder.

  Dirk screwed up his eyes and attempted to concentrate instead on the problem of the mysteriously vanished Miss Pearce, but was unable to get much of a grip on it. When she had used to work for him she would often disappear mysteriously for two or three days at a time, but the papers didn’t make any kind of fuss about it then. Admittedly, there weren’t things exploding around her at the time—at least, not that he was aware of. She had never mentioned anything exploding particularly.

  Furthermore, whenever he thought of her face, which he had last seen on the television set in Geoffrey Anstey’s house, his thoughts tended instantly to sink toward the head which was busy revolving thirty-three and a third times a minute three floors beneath it. This was not conducive to the calm and contemplative mood he was seeking. Nor was the very loud music on the café’s music system.

  He sighed and stared at the electronic I Ching calculator.

  If
he wanted to get his thoughts into some kind of order, then maybe chronological order would be as good a one as any. He decided to cast his mind back to the beginning of the day, before any of these appalling things had happened, or at least before they’d happened to him.

  First there had been the fridge.

  It seemed to him that by comparison with everything else, the problem of what to do about his fridge had now shrunk to fairly manageable proportions. It still provoked a discernible twinge of fear and guilt, but here, he thought, was a problem which he could face up to with relative calm.

  The little book of instructions suggested that he should simply concentrate “soulfully” on the question which was “besieging” him, write it down, ponder on it, enjoy the silence, and then once he had achieved inner harmony and tranquility he should push the red button.

  There wasn’t a red button, but there was a blue button marked “Red,” and this Dirk took to be the one.

  He concentrated for a while on the question, then looked through his pockets for a piece of paper, but was unable to find one. In the end he wrote his question, “Should I buy a new fridge?” on a corner of his napkin. Then he took the view that if he was going to wait until he had achieved inner harmony and tranquility he could be there all night, so he went ahead and pushed the blue button marked “Red” anyway. A symbol flashed up in a corner of the screen, a hexagram which looked like this:

  3 : CHUN

  The I Ching calculator then scrolled this text across its tiny LCD display: