ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless

by Mostly Harmless (lit)

  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...'

  `OK,' 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.

  7

  Arthur Dent had been in some hell-holes in his life, but he had

  never before seen a spaceport which had a sign saying, `Even

  travelling despondently is better than arriving here.' To welcome

  visitors the arrivals hall featured a picture of the President of

  NowWhat, 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 in crayon. No replacement

  had been found for the photograph because no replacement had

  been found for the President. There was only one ambition which

  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 open-

  ing words of the first settlers to arrive there after struggling across

  light years of space to reach the furthest 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 other 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 amongst the settlers. What was the boghog's

  secret of keeping warm? If anyone had ever learnt the language

  the boghogs spoke to each other 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 recognise 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 which 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

  co-ordinates in space/time. What co-ordinates it occupied in

  Probability was anybody's guess.

  He sighed.

  This, he realised, was about as close to home as he was

  likely to get. Which meant that he was about as far from home

  as he could possibly be. Glumly he slapped the brochure shut

  and wondered what on earth he was going to do next.

  He allowed himself a hollow laugh at what he had just

  thought. He looked at his old watch, and shook it a bit to wind it.

  It had taken him, according to his own time-scale, a year of hard

  travelling to get here. A year since the accident in hyperspace in

  which Fenchurch had completely vanished. One minute she had

  been sitting there next to him in the SlumpJet; the next minute

  the ship had done a perfectly normal hyperspace hop and when

  he had next looked she was not there. The seat wasn't even

  warm. Her name wasn't even on the passenger list.

  The spaceline had been wary of him when he had complained.

  A lot of awkward things happen in space travel, and a lot of them

  make a lot of money for lawyers. But when they had asked him

  what Galactic Sector he and Fenchurch had been from and he

  had said ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha they had relaxed completely in a

  way that Arthur wasn't at all sure he liked. They even laughed

  a little, though sympathetically, of
course. They pointed to the

  clause in the ticket contract which said that the entities whose

  lifespans had originated in any of the Plural zones were advised

  not to travel in hyperspace and did so at their own risk. Every-

  body, they said, knew that. They tittered slightly and shook their

  heads.

  As Arthur had left their offices he found he was trembling

  slightly. Not only had he lost Fenchurch in the most complete

  and utter way possible, but he felt that the more time he spent

  away out in the Galaxy the more it seemed that the number of

  things he didn't know anything about actually increased.

  Just as he was lost for a moment in these numb memories a

  knock came on the door of his motel room, which then opened

  immediately. A fat and dishevelled man came in carrying Arthur's

  one small case.

  He got as far as, `Where shall I put -' when there was

  a sudden violent flurry and he collapsed heavily against the

  door, trying to beat off a small and mangy creature that had

  leapt snarling out of the wet night and buried its teeth in his

  thigh, even through the thick layers of leather padding he wore

  there. There was a brief, ugly confusion of jabbering and thrash-

  ing. The man shouted frantically and pointed. Arthur grabbed a

  hefty stick that stood next to the door expressly for this purpose

  and beat at the boghog with it.

  The boghog suddenly disengaged and limped backwards, dazed

  and forlorn. It turned anxiously in the corner of the room, its tail

  tucked up right under its back legs, and stood looking nervously

  up at Arthur, jerking its head awkwardly and repeatedly to one

  side. Its jaw seemed to be dislocated. It cried a little and scraped

  its damp tail across the floor. By the door, the fat man with

  Arthur's suitcase was sitting and cursing, trying to staunch the

  flow of blood from his thigh. His clothes were already wet from

  the rain.

  Arthur stared at the boghog, not knowing what to do. The

  boghog looked at him questioningly. It tried to approach him,

  waking mournful little whimpering noises. It moved its jaw pain-

  fully. It made a sudden leap for Arthur's thigh, but its dislocated

  jaw was too weak to get a grip and it sank, whining sadly, down

  to the floor. The fat man jumped to his feet, grabbed the stick,

  beat the boghog's brains into a sticky, pulpy mess on the thin

  carpet, and then stood there breathing heavily as if daring the

  animal to move again, just once.

  A single boghog eyeball sat looking reproachfully at Arthur

  from out of the mashed ruins of its head.

  `What do you think it was trying to say?' asked Arthur

  in a small voice.

  `Ah, nothing much,' said the man `Just its way of trying

  to be friendly. This is just our way of being friendly back,'

  he added, gripping the stick.

  `When's the next flight out?' asked Arthur.

  `Thought you'd only just arrived,' said the man.

  `Yes,' said Arthur. `It was only going to be a brief visit.

  I just wanted to see if this was the right place or not. Sorry.'

  `You mean you're on the wrong planet?' said the man lugu-

  briously. `Funny how many people say that. Specially the people

  who live here.' He eyed the remains of the boghog with a deep,

  ancestral resentment.

  `Oh no,' said Arthur, 'it's the right planet all right.' He

  picked up the damp brochure lying on the bed and put it in

  his pocket. `It's OK, thanks, I'll take that,' he said, taking his

  case from the man. He went to the door and looked out into

  the cold, wet night.

  `Yes, it's the right planet, all right,' he said again. `Right

  planet, wrong universe.'

  A single bird wheeled in the sky above him as he set off

  back for the spaceport.

  8

  Ford had his own code of ethics. It wasn't much of one, but it

  was his and he stuck by it, more or less. One rule he made was

  never to buy his own drinks. He wasn't sure if that counted as an

  ethic, but you have to go with what you've got. He was also firmly

  and utterly opposed to all and any forms of cruelty to any animals

  whatsoever except geese. And furthermore he would never steal

  from his employers.

  Well, not exactly steal.

  If his accounts supervisor didn't start to hyperventilate and

  put out a seal-all-exits security alert when Ford handed in his

  expenses claim then Ford felt he wasn't doing his job properly.

  But actually stealing was another thing. That was biting the hand

  that feeds you. Sucking very hard on it, even nibbling it in an

  affectionate kind of a way was OK, but you didn't actually bite

  it. Not when that hand was the Guide. The Guide was something

  sacred and special.

  But that, thought Ford as he ducked and weaved his way

  down through the building, was about to change. And they

  had only themselves to blame. Look at all this stuff. Lines of

  neat grey office cubicles and executive workstation pods. The

  whole place was dreary with the hum of memos and minutes of

  meetings flitting through its electronic networks. Out in the street

  they were playing Hunt the Wocket for Zark's sake, but here in

  the very heart of the Guide offices no one was even recklessly

  kicking a ball around the corridors or wearing inappropriately

  coloured beachware.

  `InfiniDim Enterprises,' Ford snarled to himself as he stalked

  rapidly down one corridor after another. Door after door magi-

  cally opened to him without question. Elevators took him happily

  to places they should not. Ford was trying to pursue the most

  tangled and complicated route he could, heading generally down-

  wards through the building. His happy little robot took care of

  everything, spreading waves of acquiescent joy through all the

  security circuits it encountered.

  Ford thought it needed a name and decided to call it Emily

  Saunders, after a girl he had very fond memories of. Then he

  thought that Emily Saunders was an absurd name for a security

  robot, and decided to call it Colin instead, after Emily's dog.

  He was moving deep into the bowels of the building now,

  into areas he had never entered before, areas of higher and

  higher security. He was beginning to encounter puzzled looks

  from the operatives he passed. At this level of security you

  didn't even call them people anymore. And they were probably

  doing stuff that only operatives would do. When they went home

  to their families in the evening they became people again, and

  when their little children looked up to them with their sweet

  shining eyes and said `Daddy, what did you do all day today?'

  they just said, `I performed my duties as an operative,' and left

  it at that.

  The truth of the matter was that all sorts of highly dodgy

  stuff went on behind the cheery, happy-go-lucky front that the

  Guide liked to put up - or used to like to put up before this new

  InfiniDim Enterprises bunch marched in and started to make the

  whole thing highly dodgy. There were all kinds of tax scam
s and

  rackets and graft and shady deals supporting the shining edifice,

  and down in the secure research and data-processing levels of

  the building was where it all went on.

  Every few years the Guide would set up its business, and

  indeed its building on a new world, and all would be sunshine

  and laughter for a while as the Guide would put down its roots

  in the local culture and economy, provide employment, a sense

  of glamour and adventure and, in the end, not quite as much

  actual revenue as the locals had expected.

  When the Guide moved on, taking its building with it, it

  left a little like a thief in the night. Exactly like a thief in

  the night in fact. It usually left in the very early hours of

  the morning, and the following day there always turned out

  to be a very great deal of stuff missing. Whole cultures and

  economies would collapse in its wake, often within a week,

  leaving once thriving planets desolate and shell-shocked but

  still somehow feeling they had been part of some great adven-

  ture.

  The `operatives' who shot puzzled glances at Ford as he

  marched on into the depths of the building's most sensitive

  areas were reassured by the presence of Colin, who was flying

  along with him in a buzz of emotional fulfilment and easing his

  path for him at every stage.

  Alarms were starting to go off in other parts of the building.

  Perhaps that meant that Vann Harl had already been discovered,

  which might be a problem. Ford had been hoping he would be

  able to slip the Ident-i-Eeze back into his pocket before he came

  round. Well, that was a problem for later, and he didn't for the

  moment have the faintest idea how he was going to solve it. For

  the moment he wasn't going to worry. Wherever he went with