ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless
Page 8
little Colin, he was surrounded by a cocoon of sweetness and
light and, most importantly, 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, grey and
resolutely closed with a sign on it saying:
begin{center}
NO ADMITTANCE.
NOT EVEN TO AUTHORISED PERSONNEL.
YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.
GO AWAY.
end{center}
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 grey hessian wall-weave
had given way to brutal grey 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, grey and humming.
This was the nerve centre of the entire Guide.
The computer terminals that lined the grey walls were win-
dows on to 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-editor's 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
half-way 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 anaemic 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.
Meanwhile the order to disallow the researcher's expenses
was relayed down to the computer terminal stuck off in the
right-hand corner, and it was to this terminal that Ford Prefect
now swiftly made his way.
(If you are reading this on planet Earth then:
begin{description}
item{}
a) Good luck to you. There is an awful lot of stuff you
don't know anything about, but you are not alone in this. It's
just that in your case the consequences of not knowing any of
this stuff are particularly terrible, but then, hey, that's just the
way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated.
item{}
b) Don't imagine you know what a computer terminal is.
end{description}
A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with
a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and
body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.)
Ford hurried over to the terminal, sat in front of it and
quickly dipped himself into its universe.
It wasn't the normal universe he knew. It was a universe of
densely enfolded worlds, of wild topographies, towering moun-
tain peaks, heart stopping ravines, of moons shattering off into
sea horses, hurtful blurting crevices, silently heaving oceans and
bottomless hurtling hooping funts.
He held still to get his bearings. He controlled his breathing,
closed his eyes and looked again.
So this was where accountants spent their time. There was
clearly more to them than met the eye. He looked around
carefully, trying not to let it all swell and swim and overwhelm
him.
He didn't know his way around this universe. He didn't
even know the physical laws that determined its dimensional
extents or behaviours, but his instinct told him to look for the
most outstanding feature he could detect and make towards it.
Way off in some indistinguishable distance - was it a mile
or a million or a mote in his eye? - was a stunning peak that
overarched the sky, climbed and climbed and spread out in
flowering aigrettes 1, agglomerates 2, and arch imandrites 3.
He weltered towards it, hooling and thurling, and at last
reached it in a meaninglessly long umthingth of time.
He clung to it, arms outspread, gripping tightly on to its
roughly gnarled and pitted surface. Once he was certain that
he was secure he made the hideous mistake of looking down.
While he had been weltering, hooling and thurling, the distance
beneath him had not bothered him unduly, but now that he was
begin{enumerate}
item An ornamental tuft of plumes.
item A jumbled mass.
item A cleric ranking below a bishop.
end{enumerate}
gripping, the distance made his heart wilt and his brain bend.
His fingers were white with pain and tension. His teeth were
grinding and twisting against each other beyond his control. His
eyes turned inwards with waves from the willowing extremities
of nausea.
With an immense effort of will and faith he simply let go
and pushed.
He felt himself float. Away. And then, counter-intuitively,
upwards. And upwards.
He threw his shoulders back, let his arms drop, gazed upwards
and let himself be drawn loosely, higher and higher.
Before long, insofar as such terms had any meaning in this
virtual universe, a ledge loomed up ahead of him on which he
could grip and on to which he could clamber.
He
rose, he gripped, he clambered.
He panted a little. This was all a little stressful.
He held tightly on to the ledge as he sat. He wasn't certain if
this was to prevent himself from falling down off it or rising up
from it, but he needed something to grip on to as he surveyed
the world in which he found himself.
The whirling, turning height span him and twisted his brain
in upon itself till he found himself, eyes closed, whimpering and
hugging the hideous wall of towering rock.
He slowly brought his breathing back under control again.
He told himself repeatedly that he was just in a graphic rep-
resentation of a world. A virtual universe. A simulated reality.
He could snap back out of it at any moment.
He snapped back out of it.
He was sitting in a blue leatherette foam filled swivel-seated
office chair in front of a computer terminal.
He relaxed.
He was clinging to the face of an impossibly high peak perched
on a narrow ledge above a drop of brain-swivelling dimensions.
It wasn't just the landscape being so far beneath him -
he wished it would stop undulating and waving.
He had to get a grip. Not on the rock wall - that was an
illusion. He had to get a grip on the situation, be able to look
at the physical world he was in while drawing himself out of it
emotionally.
He clenched inwardly and then, just as he had let go of the
rock face itself, he let go of the idea of the rock face and let
himself just sit there clearly and freely. He looked out at the
world. He was breathing well. He was cool. He was in charge
again.
He was in a four-dimensional topological model of the Guide's
financial systems, and somebody or something would very shortly
want to know why.
And here they came.
Swooping through virtual space towards him came a small
flock of mean and steely-eyed creatures with pointy little heads,
pencil moustaches and querulous demands as to who he was,
what he was doing there, what his authorisation was, what the
authorisation of his authorising agent was, what his inside leg
measurement was and so on. Laser light flickered all over him
as if he was a packet of biscuits at a supermarket check-out. The
heavier duty laser guns were held, for the moment, in reserve.
The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no
difference. Being virtually killed by a virtual laser in virtual space
is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as
you think you are.
The laser readers were becoming very agitated as they flickered
over his fingerprints, his retina and the follicle pattern where his
hair line was receding. They didn't like what they were finding at
all. The chattering and screeching of highly personal and insolent
questions was rising in pitch. A little surgical steel scraper was
reaching out towards the skin at the nape of his neck when
Ford, holding his breath and praying very slightly, pulled Vann
Harl's Ident-i-Eeze out of his pocket and waved it in front of
them.
Instantly every laser was diverted to the little card and Swept
backwards and forwards over it and in it, examining and reading
every molecule.
Then, just as suddenly, they stopped.
The entire flock of little virtual inspectors snapped to attention.
`Nice to see you, Mr Harl,' they said in smarmy unison.
`Is there anything we can do for you?'
Ford smiled a slow and vicious smile.
`
Do you know,' he said, `I rather think there is?'
Five minutes later he was out of there.
About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty
to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in
the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred
ownership of the entire organisation into his own name, but he
doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn't want it
anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights
at the office, not to mention massive and time-consuming fraud
investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted
something that nobody other than the computer would notice:
that was the bit that took thirty seconds.
The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming
the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything.
It had to want not to know about what Ford was up to, and
then he could safely leave the computer to rationalise its own
defences against the information ever emerging. It was a pro-
gramming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the
sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal
people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to
high political office.
The other minute was spent discovering that the computer
system already had a mental block. A big one.
He would never have discovered it if he hadn't been busy
engineering a mental block himself. He came across a whole
slew of smooth and plausible denial procedures and diversionary
subroutines exactly where he had been planning to install his
own. The computer denied all knowledge of them, of course,
then blankly refused to accept that there was anything even to
deny knowledge of, and was generally so convincing that even
Ford almost found himself thinking he must have made a mistake.
He was impressed.
He was so impressed, in fact, that he didn't bother to install
his own mental block procedures, he just set up calls to the ones
that were already there, which then called themselves when ques-
tioned, and so on.
He quickly set about debugging the little bits of code he had
installed himself, only to discover they weren't there. Cursing,
he searched all over for them, but could find no trace of them
at all.
He was just about to start installing them all over again when
he realised that the reason he couldn't find them was that they
were working already.
He grinned with satisfaction.
He tried to discover what the computer's other mental block
was all about, but it seemed, not unnaturally, to have a mental
block about it. He could no longer find any trace of it at all, in
fact; it was that good. He wondered if he had been imagining
it. He wondered if he had been imagining that it was something
to do with something in the building, and something to do with
the number 13. He ran a few tests. Yes, he had obviously been
imagining it.
No time for fancy routes now, there was obviously a major
security alert in progress. Ford took the elevator up to the ground
floor to change to the express elevators. He had somehow to get
the Ident-i-Eeze back into Harl's pocket before it was missed.
How, he didn't know.
The doors of the elevator slid open to reveal a large posse of
security guards and robots poised waiting for it and brandishing
filthy looking weapons.
They ordered him out.
<
br /> With a shrug he stepped forward. They all pushed rudely
past him into the elevator which took them down to continue
their search for him on the lower levels.
This was fun, thought Ford, giving Colin a friendly pat.
Colin was about the first genuinely useful robot Ford had ever
encountered. Colin bobbed along in the air in front of him in a
lather of cheerful ecstasy. Ford was glad he'd named him after
a dog.
He was highly tempted just to leave at that point and hope
for the best, but he knew that the best had a far greater chance
of actually occurring if Harl did not discover that his Ident-i-Eeze
was missing. He had somehow, surreptitiously, to return it.
They went to the express elevators.
`Hi,' said the elevator they got into.
`Hi,' said Ford.
`Where can I take you folks today?' said the elevator.
`Floor 23,' said Ford.
`Seems to be a popular floor today,' said the elevator.
`Hmm,' thought Ford, not liking the sound of that at all.
The elevator lit up the twenty-third floor on its floor display
and started to zoom upwards. Something about the floor display
tweaked at Ford's mind but he couldn't catch what it was and
forgot about it. He was more worried about the idea of the floor
he was going to being a popular one. He hadn't really thought
through how he was going to deal with whatever it was that was
happening up there because he had no idea what he was going