The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (92 page)

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 recognize 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 that 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 coordinates in space-time. What coordinates it occupied in Probability was anybody’s guess.

He sighed.

This, he realized, 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 traveling 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 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 asked him what Galactic Sector he and Fenchurch were from and he said ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, they 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 that 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. Everybody, they said, knew that. They tittered slightly and shook their heads.

As Arthur 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 disheveled 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 into his thigh, even through the thick layers of leather padding he wore there. There was a brief, ugly confusion of jabbering and thrashing. 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 backward, dazed and forlorn. It turned anxiously in the corner of the room, its tail tucked up right under its back legs, and then 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, making mournful little whimpering noises. It moved its jaw painfully. 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, lugubriously. “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
okay, 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.

F
ord 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 okay, 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 gray 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 colored beachware.

“InfiniDim Enterprises,” Ford snarled to himself as he stalked rapidly down one corridor after another. Door after door magically 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 downward 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 scams 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 adventure.

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 fulfillment 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 around. 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 little Colin, he was surrounded by a cocoon of sweetness and light and, most important, willing and acquiescent elevators and positively obsequious doors.

Ford even began to whistle, which was probably his mistake. Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes our ends.

The next door wouldn’t open.

And that was a pity, because it was the very one that Ford had been making for. It stood there before him, gray and resolutely closed with a sign on it saying:

NO ADMITTANCE.
NOT EVEN TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.
YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.
GO AWAY.

Colin reported that the doors had been getting generally a lot grimmer down in these lower reaches of the building.

They were about ten stories below ground level now. The air was refrigerated and the tasteful gray hessian wall-weave had given way to brutal gray bolted steel walls. Colin’s rampant euphoria had subsided into a kind of determined cheeriness. He said that he was beginning to tire a little. It was taking all his energy to pump the slightest bonhomie whatsoever into the doors down here.

Ford kicked at the door. It opened.

“Mixture of pleasure and pain,” he muttered. “Always does the trick.”

He walked in and Colin flew in after him. Even with a wire stuck straight into his pleasure electrode, his happiness was a nervous kind of happiness. He bobbed around a little.

The room was small, gray and humming.

This was the nerve center of the entire
Guide.

The computer terminals that lined the gray walls were windows onto every aspect of the
Guide’s
operations. Here, on the left-hand side of the room, reports were gathered over the Sub-Etha-Net from field researchers in every corner of the Galaxy, fed straight up into the
network of sub-editors’ offices, where they had all the good bits cut out by secretaries because the sub-editors were out having lunch. The remaining copy would then be shot across to the other half of the building—the other leg of the H—which was the legal department. The legal department would cut out anything that was still even remotely good from what remained and fire it back to the offices of the executive editors, who were also out at lunch. So the editors’ secretaries would read it and say it was stupid and cut most of what was left.

When any of the editors finally staggered in from lunch they would exclaim, “What is this feeble crap that X”—where X was the name of the field researcher in question—“has sent us from halfway across the bloody Galaxy? What’s the point of having somebody spending three whole orbital periods out in the bloody Gagrakacka Mind Zones, with all that stuff going on out there, if this load of anemic squitter is the best he can be bothered to send us? Disallow his expenses!”

“What shall we do with the copy?” the secretary would ask.

“Ah, put it out over the network. Got to have something going out there. I’ve got a headache, I’m going home.”

So the edited copy would go for one last slash and burn through the legal department, and then be sent back down here, where it would be broadcast out over the Sub-Etha-Net for instantaneous retrieval anywhere in the Galaxy. That was handled by equipment which was monitored and controlled by the terminals on the right-hand side of the room.