Volume 5 - Mostly Harmless, page 10
He preferred not to think about it. He preferred just to sit and read—or at least he would prefer it if there was anything worth reading. But nobody in Bartledanian stories ever wanted anything. Not even a glass of water. Certainly, they would fetch one if they were thirsty, but if there wasn’t one available, they would think no more about it. He had just read an entire book in which the main character had, over the course of a week, done some work in his garden, played a great deal of netball, helped mend a road, fathered a child on his wife and then unexpectedly died of thirst just before the last chapter. In exasperation Arthur had combed his way back through the book and in the end had found a passing reference to some problem with the plumbing in chapter two. And that was it. So the guy dies. It just happens.
It wasn’t even the climax of the book, because there wasn’t one. The character died about a third of the way through the penultimate chapter of the book, and the rest of it was just more stuff about road-mending. The book just finished dead at the one hundred thousandth word, because that was how long books were on Bartledan.
Arthur threw the book across the room, sold the room and left. He started to travel with wild abandon, trading in more and more spit, toenails, fingernails, blood, hair, anything that anybody wanted, for tickets. For semen, he discovered, he could travel first class. He settled nowhere, but only existed in the hermetic, twilight world of the cabins of hyperspatial starships, eating, drinking, sleeping, watching movies, only stopping at spaceports to donate more DNA and catch the next long-haul ship out. He waited and waited for another accident to happen.
The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen is that it won’t. That is not what “accident” means. The accident that eventually occurred was not what he had planned at all. The ship he was on blipped in hyperspace, flickered horribly between ninety-seven different points in the Galaxy simultaneously, caught the unexpected gravitational pull of an uncharted planet in one of them, became ensnared in its outer atmosphere and began to fall, screaming and tearing, into it.
The ship’s systems protested all the way down that everything was perfectly normal and under control, but when it went into a final hectic spin, ripped wildly through half a mile of trees and finally exploded into a seething ball of flame, it became clear that this was not the case.
Fire engulfed the forest, boiled into the night, then neatly put itself out, as all unscheduled fires over a certain size are now required to do by law. For a short while afterward, other small fires flared up here and there as odd pieces of scattered debris exploded quietly in their own time. Then they too died away.
Arthur Dent, because of the sheer boredom of endless interstellar flight was the only one on board who actually had familiarized himself with the ship’s safety procedures in case of an unscheduled landing, was the sole survivor. He lay dazed, broken and bleeding in a sort of fluffy pink plastic cocoon with “Have a nice day” printed in more than three thousand different languages all over it.
Black, roaring silences swam sickeningly through his shattered mind. He knew with a kind of resigned certainty that he would survive, because he had not yet been to Stavromula Beta.
After what seemed an eternity of pain and darkness, he became aware of quiet shapes moving around him.
12
Ford tumbled through the open air in a cloud of glass splinters and chair parts. Again, he hadn’t really thought things through, really, and was just playing it by ear, buying time. At times of major crisis he found it was often quite helpful to have his life flash before his eyes. It gave him a chance to reflect on things, see things in some sort of perspective, and it sometimes furnished him with a vital clue as to what to do next.
There was the ground rushing up to meet him at thirty feet per second, but he would, he thought, deal with that problem when he got to it. First things first.
Ah, here it came. His childhood. Humdrum stuff, he’d been through it all before. Images flashed by. Boring times on Betelgeuse Five. Zaphod Beeblebrox as a kid. Yes, he knew all that. He wished he had some kind of fast forward in his brain. His seventh birthday party, being given his first towel. Come on, come on.
He was twisting and turning downward, the outside air at this height a cold shock to his lungs. Trying not to inhale glass.
Early voyages to other planets. Oh, for Zark’s sake, this was like some sort of bloody travelog documentary before the main feature. First beginning to work for the Guide.
Ah!
Those were the days. They worked out of a hut on the Bwenelli Atoll on Fanalla before the Riktanarqals and the Donqueds vertled it. Half a dozen guys, some towels, a handful of highly sophisticated digital devices and most important a lot of dreams. No. Most important a lot of Fanallan rum. To be absolutely accurate, that Ol’ Janx Spirit was the absolute most important thing, then the Fanallan rum and also some of the beaches on the Atoll where the local girls would hang out, but the dreams were important as well. Whatever happened to those?
He couldn’t quite remember what the dreams were in fact, but they had seemed immensely important at the time. They had certainly not involved this huge towering office block he was now falling down the side of. All of that had come when some of the original team had started to settle down and get greedy, while he and others had stayed out in the field, researching and hitchhiking and gradually becoming more and more isolated from the corporate nightmare the Guide had inexorably turned into, and the architectural monstrosity it had come to occupy. Where were the dreams in that? He thought of all the corporate lawyers who occupied half of the building, all the “operatives” who occupied the lower levels, and all the sub-editors and their secretaries and their secretaries’ lawyers and their secretaries, lawyers’ secretaries and, worst of all, the accountants and the marketing department.
He had half a mind just to keep on falling. The finger to the lot of them.
He was just passing the seventeenth floor now, where the marketing department hung out. Load of tosspots all arguing about what color the Guide should be and exercising their infinitely infallible skills of being wise after the event. If any of them had chosen to look out of the window at that moment, they would have been startled by the sight of Ford Prefect dropping past them to his certain death and flipping the finger at them.
Sixteenth floor. Sub-editors. Bastards. What about all that copy of his they’d cut? Fifteen years of research he’d filed from one planet alone and they’d cut it to two words. “Mostly harmless.” The finger to them as well.
Fifteenth floor. Logistical Administration, whatever that was about. They all had big cars. That, he thought, was what that was about.
Fourteenth floor. Personnel. He had a very shrewd suspicion that it was they who had engineered his fifteen-year exile while the Guide metamorphosed into the corporate monolith (or rather, duolith—mustn’t forget the lawyers) it had become.
Thirteenth floor. Research and Development.
Hang about.
Thirteenth floor.
He was having to think rather fast at the moment because the situation was becoming a little urgent.
He suddenly remembered the floor-display panel in the elevator. It hadn’t had a thirteenth floor. He’d thought no more about it because, having spent fifteen years on the rather backward planet Earth, where they were superstitious about the number thirteen, he was used to being in buildings that numbered their floors without it. No reason for that here, though.
The windows of the thirteenth floor, he could not help noticing as he flashed swiftly by them, were darkened.
What was going on in there? He started to remember all the stuff that Harl had been talking about. One new, multidimensional Guide spread across an infinite number of universes. It had sounded, the way Harl had put it, like wild meaninglessness dreamed up by the marketing department with the backing of the accountants. If it was any more real than that, then it was a very weird and dangerous idea. Was it real? What was going on behind the darkened windows of the sealed-off thirteenth floor?
Ford felt a rising sense of curiosity, and then a rising sense of panic. That was the complete list of rising feelings he had. In every other respect he was falling very rapidly. He really ought to turn his mind to wondering how he was going to get out of this situation alive.
He glanced down. A hundred feet or so below him people were milling around, some of them beginning to look up expectantly. Clearing a space for him. Even temporarily calling off the wonderful and completely fatuous hunt for Wockets.
He would hate to disappoint them, but about two feet below him, he hadn’t realized before, was Colin. Colin had obviously been happily dancing attendance and waiting for him to decide what he wanted to do.
“Colin!” Ford bawled.
Colin didn’t respond. Ford went cold. Then he suddenly realized that he hadn’t told Colin his name was Colin.
“Come up here!” Ford bawled.
Colin bobbed up beside him. Colin was enjoying the ride down immensely and hoped that Ford was, too.
Colin’s world went unexpectedly dark as Ford’s towel suddenly enveloped him. Colin immediately felt himself get much, much heavier. He was thrilled and delighted by the challenge that Ford had presented him with. Just not sure if he could handle it, that was all.
The towel was slung over Colin. Ford was hanging from the towel, gripping to its seams. Other hitchhikers had seen fit to modify their towels in exotic ways, weaving all kinds of esoteric tools and utilities and even computer equipment into their fabric. Ford was a purist. He liked to keep things simple. He carried a regular towel from a regular domestic soft-furnishings shop. It even had a kind of blue and pink floral pattern despite his repeated attempts to bleach and stonewash it. It had a couple of pieces of wire threaded into it, a bit of flexible writing stick, and also some nutrients soaked into one of the corners of the fabric so he could suck on it in an emergency, but otherwise it was a simple towel you could dry your face on.
The only actual modification he had been persuaded by a friend to make to it was to reinforce the seams.
Ford gripped the seams like a maniac.
They were still descending, but the rate had slowed.
“Up, Colin!” he shouted.
Nothing.
“Your name,” shouted Ford, “is Colin. So when I shout, ‘Up, Colin!’ I want you, Colin, to go up. Okay? Up, Colin!”
Nothing. Or rather a sort of muffled groaning sound from Colin. Ford was very anxious. They were descending very slowly now, but Ford was very anxious about the sort of people he could see assembling on the ground beneath him. Friendly, local, Wocket-hunting types were dispersing, and thick, heavy, bull-necked, sluglike creatures with rocket launchers were, it seemed, sliding out of what was usually called thin air. Thin air, as all experienced Galactic travelers well know, is in fact extremely thick with multidimensional complexities.
“Up,” bellowed Ford again. “Up! Colin, go up!”
Colin was straining and groaning. They were now more or less stationary in the air. Ford felt as if his fingers were breaking.
“Up!”
They stayed put.
“Up, up, up!”
A slug was preparing to launch a rocket at him. Ford couldn’t believe it. He was hanging from a towel in midair and a slug was preparing to fire rockets at him. He was running out of anything he could think of doing and was beginning to get seriously alarmed.
This was the sort of predicament that he usually relied on having the Guide available for to give advice, however infuriating or glib, but this was not a moment for reaching into his pocket. And the Guide seemed to be no longer a friend and ally but was now itself a source of danger. These were the Guide offices he was hanging outside, for Zark’s sake, in danger of his life from the people who now appeared to own the thing. What had become of all the dreams he vaguely remembered having on the Bwenelli Atoll? They should have let it all be. They should have stayed there. Stayed on the beach. Loved good women. Lived on fish. He should have known it was all wrong the moment they started hanging grand pianos over the sea-monster pool in the atrium. He began to feel thoroughly wasted and miserable. His fingers were on fire with clenched pain. And his ankle was still hurting.
Oh, thank you, ankle, he thought to himself bitterly. Thank you for bringing up your problems at this time. I expect you’d like a nice warm footbath to make you feel better, wouldn’t you? Or at least you’d like me to …
He had an idea.
The armored slug had hoisted the rocket launcher up onto its shoulder. The rocket was presumably designed to hit anything in its path that moved.
Ford tried not to sweat because he could feel his grip on the seams of his towel slipping.
With the toe of his good foot he nudged and pried at the heel of the shoe on his hurting foot.
“Go up, damn you!” Ford muttered hopelessly to Colin, who was cheerily straining away but unable to rise. Ford worked away at the heel of his shoe.
He was trying to judge the timing, but there was no point. Just go for it. He only had one shot and that was it. He had now eased the back of his shoe down off his heel. His twisted ankle felt a little better. Well, that was good, wasn’t it?
With his other foot he kicked at the heel of the shoe. It slipped off his foot and fell through the air. About half a second later a rocket erupted up from the muzzle of its launcher, encountered the shoe falling through its path, went straight for it, hit it and exploded with a great sense of satisfaction and achievement.
This happened about fifteen feet from the ground.
The main force of the explosion was directed downward. Where, a second earlier, there had been a squad of InfiniDim Enterprises executives with a rocket launcher standing on an elegant terraced plaza paved with large slabs of lustrous stone cut from the ancient alabastrum quarries of Zentalquabula, there was now, instead, a bit of a pit with nasty bits in it.
A great wump of hot air welled up from the explosion, throwing Ford and Colin violently up into the sky. Ford fought desperately and blindly to hold on and failed. He turned helplessly upward through the sky, reached the peak of a parabola, paused and then started to fall again. He fell and fell and fell and suddenly winded himself badly on Colin, who was still rising.
He clasped himself desperately onto the small spherical robot. Colin slewed wildly through the air toward the tower of the Guide offices, trying delightedly to control himself and slow down.
The world spun sickeningly around Ford’s head as they spun and twisted around each other and then, equally sickeningly, everything suddenly stopped.
Ford found himself deposited dizzily on a window ledge.
His towel fell past and he grabbed at it and caught it.
Colin bobbed in the air inches away from him.
Ford looked around himself in a bruised, bleeding and breathless daze. The ledge was only about a foot wide and he was perched precariously on it, thirteen stories up.
Thirteen.
He knew they were thirteen stories up because the windows were dark. He was bitterly upset. He had bought those shoes for some absurd price in a store on the Lower East Side in New York. He had, as a result, written an entire essay on the joys of great footwear, all of which had been jettisoned in the “Mostly harmless” debacle. Damn everything.
And now one of the shoes was gone. He threw his head back and stared at the sky.
It wouldn’t be such a grim tragedy if the planet in question hadn’t been demolished, which meant that he wouldn’t even be able to get another pair.
Yes, given the infinite sideways extension of probability, there was, of course, an almost infinite multiplicity of planets Earth, but, when you come down to it, a major pair of shoes wasn’t something you could just replace by mucking about in multidimensional space-time.
He sighed.
Oh well, he’d better make the best of it. At least it had saved his life. For the time being.
He was perched on a foot-wide ledge thirteen stories up the side of a building and he wasn’t at all sure that that was worth a good shoe.
He stared in woozily through the darkened glass.
It was as dark and silent as a tomb.
No. That was a ridiculous thing to think. He’d been to some great parties in tombs.
Could he detect some movement? He wasn’t quite sure. It seemed that he could see some kind of weird, flapping shadow. Perhaps it was just blood dribbling over his eyelashes. He wiped it away. Boy, he’d love to have a farm somewhere, keep some sheep. He peered into the window again, trying to make out what the shape was, but he had the feeling, so common in today’s universe, that he was looking into some kind of optical illusion and that his eyes were just playing silly buggers with him.
Was there a bird of some kind in there? Was that what they had hidden away up here on a concealed floor behind darkened, rocket-proof glass? Someone’s aviary? There was certainly something flapping about in there, but it seemed like not so much a bird, more a kind of bird-shaped hole in space.
He closed his eyes, which he’d been wanting to do for a bit anyway. He wondered what the hell to do next. Jump? Climb? He didn’t think there was going to be any way of breaking in. Okay, the supposedly rocket-proof glass hadn’t stood up, when it came to it, to an actual rocket, but then that had been a rocket that had been fired at very short range from inside, which probably wasn’t what the engineers who designed it had had in mind. It didn’t mean he was going to be able to break the window here by wrapping his fist in his towel and punching. What the hell, he tried it anyway and hurt his fist. It was just as well he couldn’t get a good swing from where he was sitting or he might have hurt it quite badly. The building had been sturdily reinforced when it was completely rebuilt after the Frogstar attack and was probably the most heavily armored publishing company in the business, but there was always, he thought, some weakness in any system designed by a corporate committee. He had already found one of them. The engineers who designed the windows had not expected them to be hit by a rocket from short range from the inside, so the window had failed.
