ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless
Page 10
woman decided that the solar panels had absorbed enough
sunlight to run the photocopier now and she disappeared to
rummage inside her cave. She emerged at last with a few sheaves
of paper and fed them through the machine.
She handed the copies to Arthur.
`This is, er, this your advice then, is it?' said Arthur, leafing
through them uncertainly.
`No,' said the old lady. `It's the story of my life. You see,
the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged
against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look
through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major
decisions I ever made to make them stand out. They're all indexed
and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take
decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that
I've taken, then maybe you won't finish up at the end of your
life...' she paused, and filled her lungs for a good shout, `...
in a smelly old cave like this!'
She grabbed up her table tennis bat, rolled up her sleeve,
stomped off to her pile of dead goat-like things, and started
to set about the flies with vim and vigour.
The last village Arthur visited consisted entirely of extremely
high poles. They were so high that it wasn't possible to tell,
from the ground, what was on top of them, and Arthur had to
climb three before he found one that had anything on top of it
at all other than a platform covered with bird droppings.
Not an easy task. You went up the poles by climbing on
the short wooden pegs that had been hammered into them in
slowly ascending spirals. Anybody who was a less diligent tourist
than Arthur would have taken a couple of snapshots and sloped
right off to the nearest Bar & Grill, where you also could buy a
range of particularly sweet and gooey chocolate cakes to eat in
front of the ascetics. But, largely as a result of this, most of the
ascetics had gone now. In fact they had mostly gone and set up
lucrative therapy centres on some of the more affluent worlds
in the North West ripple of the Galaxy, where the living was
easier by a factor of about seventeen million, and the chocolate
was just fabulous. Most of the ascetics, it turned out, had not
known about chocolate before they took up asceticism. Most of
the clients who came to their therapy centres knew about it all
too well.
At the top of the third pole Arthur stopped for a breather. He
was very hot and out of breath, since each pole was about fifty or
sixty feet high. The world seemed to swing vertiginously around
him, but it didn't worry Arthur too much. He knew that, logically.
he could not die until he had been to Stavromula Beta 4, and had
therefore managed to cultivate a merry attitude towards extreme
personal danger. He felt a little giddy perched fifty feet up in the
air on top of a pole, but he dealt with it by eating a sandwich. He
was just about to embark on reading the photocopied life history
of the oracle, when he was rather startled to hear a slight cough
behind him.
He turned so abruptly that he dropped his sandwich, which
turned downwards through the air and was rather small by the
time it was stopped by the ground.
About thirty feet behind Arthur was another pole, and, alone
amongst the sparse forest of about three dozen poles, the top of
it was occupied. It was occupied by an old man who, in turn,
seemed to be occupied by profound thoughts that were making
him scowl.
`Excuse me,' said Arthur. The man ignored him. Perhaps he
couldn't hear him. The breeze was moving about a bit. It was
only by chance that Arthur had heard the slight cough.
`Hello?' called Arthur. `Hello!'
The man at last glanced round at him. He seemed surprised
to see him. Arthur couldn't tell if he was surprised and pleased
to see him or just surprsised.
`Are you open?' called Arthur.
The man frowned in incomprehension. Arthur couldn't tell
if he couldn't understand or couldn't hear.
4 See Life, the Universe and Everything, {bf Chapter 18}.
`I'll pop over,' called Arthur. `Don't go away.'
He clambered off the small platform and climbed quickly
down the spiralling pegs, arriving at the bottom quite dizzy.
He started to make his way over to the pole on which
the old man was sitting, and then suddenly realised that he
had disoriented himself on the way down and didn't know for
certain which one it was.
He looked around for landmarks and worked out which was
the right one.
He climbed it. It wasn't.
`Damn,' he said. `Excuse me!' he called out to the old man
again, who was now straight in front of him and forty feet away.
`Got lost. Be with you in a minute.' Down he went again, getting
very hot and bothered.
When he arrived, panting and sweating, at the top of the
pole that he knew for certain was the right one he realised that
the man was, somehow or other, mucking him about.
`What do you want?' shouted the old man crossly at him. He
was now sitting on top of the pole that Arthur recognised was
the one that he had been on himself when eating his sandwich.
`How did you get over there?' called Arthur in bewilder-
ment.
`You think I'm going to tell you just like that what it took
me forty springs, summers and autumns of sitting on top of a
pole to work out?'
`What about winter?'
`What about winter?'
`Don't you sit on the pole in the winter?'
`Just because I sit up a pole for most of my life,' said the
man, `doesn't mean I'm an idiot. I go south in the winter. Got
a beach house. Sit on the chimney stack.'
`Do you have any advice for a traveller?'
`Yes. Get a beach house.'
`I see.'
The man stared out over the hot, dry scrubby landscape.
From here Arthur could just see the old woman, a tiny speck
in the distance, dancing up and down swatting flies.
`You see her?' called the old man, suddenly.
`Yes,' said Arthur. `I consulted her in fact.'
`Fat lot she knows. I got the beach house because she turned
it down. What advice did she give you?'
`Do exactly the opposite of everything she's done.'
`In other words, get a beach house.'
`I suppose so,' said Arthur. `Well, maybe I'll get one.'
`Hmmm.'
The horizon was swimming in a fetid heat haze.
`Any other advice?' asked Arthur. `Other than to do with
real estate?'
`A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind,'
said the man. He turned and looked at Arthur.
Oddly, the man's face was now only a couple of feet away.
He seemed in one way to be a perfectly normal shape, but his
body was sitting cross-legged on a pole forty feet away while his
face was only two feet from Arthur's. Without moving his head,
and without seeming to do anything odd at all, he stood up and
stepped on to the top of anot
her pole. Either it was just the heat,
thought Arthur, or space was a different shape for him.
`A beach house,' he said, `doesn't even have to be on the
beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate,'
he went on, `at boundary conditions.'
`Really?' said Arthur.
`Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where
body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be
on one side, and look at the other.'
Arthur got terribly excited. This was exactly the sort of
thing he'd been promised in the brochure. Here was a man who
seemed to be moving through some kind of Escher space saying
really profound things about all sorts of stuff.
It was unnerving though. The man was now stepping from
pole to ground, from ground to pole, from pole to pole, from
pole to horizon and back: he was making complete nonsense of
Arthur's spatial universe. `Please stop!' Arthur said, suddenly.
`Can't take it, huh?' said the man. Without the slightest
movement he was now back, sitting cross-legged, on top of the
pole forty feet in front of Arthur. `You come to me for advice,
but you can't cope with anything you don't recognise. Hmmm.
So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make
it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual I suppose.' He
sighed and squinted mournfully into the distance.
`Where you from, boy?' he then asked.
Arthur decided to be clever. He was fed up with being
mistaken for a complete idiot by everyone he ever met. `Tell
you what,' he said. `You're a seer. Why don't you tell me?'
The old man sighed again. `I was just,' he said, passing his
hand round behind his head, `making conversation.' When he
brought his hand round to the front again, he had a globe of the
Earth spinning on his up-pointed forefinger. It was unmistakable.
He put it away again. Arthur was stunned.
`How did you -'
`I can't tell you.'
`Why not? I've come all this way.'
`You cannot see what I see because you see what you see.
You cannot know what I know because you know what you
know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what
you see and what you know because they are not of the same
kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know,
because that would be to replace you yourself.'
`Hang on, can I write this down?' said Arthur, excitedly
fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.
`You can pick up a copy at the spaceport,' said the old
man . `They've got racks of the stuff.'
`Oh,' said Arthur, disappointed. `Well, isn't there anything
that's perhaps a bit more specific to me?'
`Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at
all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it,
so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.'
Arthur looked at him doubtfully. `Can I get that at the
spaceport, too?' he said.
`Check it out,' said the old man.
`It says in the brochure,' said Arthur, pulling it out of his
pocket and looking at it again, `that I can have a special prayer,
individually tailored to me and my special needs.'
`Oh, all right,' said the old man. `Here's a prayer for you.
Got a pencil?'
`Yes,' said Arthur.
`It goes like this. Let's see now: ``Protect me from knowing what
I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there
are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing
that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to
know about. Amen.'' That's it. It's what you pray silently inside
yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.'
`Hmmm,' said Arthur. `Well, thank you -'
`There's another prayer that goes with it that's very impor-
tant,' continued the old man, `so you'd better jot this down,
too.'
`OK.'
`It goes, ``Lord, lord, lord...'' It's best to put that bit
in, just in case. You can never be too sure ``Lord, lord, lord.
Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen...''
And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes
from missing out that last part.'
`Ever heard of a place called Stavromula Beta?' asked Arthur.
`No.'
`Well, thank you for your help,' said Arthur.
`Don't mention it,' said the man on the pole, and vanished.
10
Ford hurled himself at the door of the editor-in-chief's office,
tucked himself into a tight ball as the frame splintered and gave
way once again, rolled rapidly across the floor to where the smart
grey crushed leather sofa was and set up his strategic operational
base behind it.
That, at least, was the plan.
Unfortunately the smart grey crushed leather sofa wasn't there.
Why, thought Ford, as he twisted himself round in mid-air,
lurched, dived and scuttled for cover behind Harl's desk, did
people have this stupid obsession with rearranging their office
furniture every five minutes?
Why, for instance, replace a perfectly serviceable if rather
muted grey crushed leather sofa with what appeared to be a
small tank?
And who was the big guy with the mobile rocket launcher
on his shoulder? Someone from head office? Couldn't be. This
was head office. At least it was the head office of the Guide.
Where these InfiniDim Enterprises guys came from Zarquon
knew. Nowhere very sunny, judging from the slug-like colour
and texture of their skins. This was all wrong, thought Ford.
People connected with the Guide should come from sunny
places.
There were several of them, in fact, and all of them seemed
to be more heavily armed and armoured than you normally
expected corporate executives to be, even in today's rough and
tumble business world.
He was making a lot of assumptions here, of course. He
was assuming that the big, bull-necked, slug-like guys were
in some way connected with InfiniDim Enterprises, but it was
a reasonable assumption and he felt happy about it because
they had logos on their armour-plating which said `InfiniDim
Enterprises' on them. He had a nagging suspicion that this was
not a business meeting, though. He also had a nagging feeling
that these slug-like creatures were familiar to him in some way.
Familiar, but in an unfamiliar guise.
Well, he had been in the room for a good two and a half
seconds now, and thought that it was probably about time to
start doing something constructive. He could take a hostage.
That would be good.
Vann Harl was in his swivel chair, looking alarmed, pale
and shaken. Had probably had some bad news as well as a
nasty bang to the back of his head. Ford leapt to his feet and
made a running grab for him.
Under the pretext of getting him into a good solid double
underpinned elbow-lock, Ford managed surreptitiously to slip
the Ident-i-Eeze back into Harl's inner pocket.
Bingo!
He'd
done what he came to do. Now he just had to talk
his way out of here.
`OK,' he said. `I...' He paused.
The big guy with the rocket launcher was turning towards
Ford Prefect and pointing it at him, which Ford couldn't help
feeling was wildly irresponsible behaviour.
`I...' he started again, and then on a sudden impulse
decided to duck.
There was a deafening roar as flames leapt from the back
of the rocket launcher and a rocket leapt from its front.
The rocket hurtled past Ford and hit the large plate-glass
window, which billowed outwards in a shower of a million
shards under the force of the explosion. Huge shock waves of
noise and air pressure reverberated around the room, sweeping
a couple of chairs, a filing cabinet and Colin the security robot
out of the window.
Ah! So they're not totally rocket-proof after all, thought Ford
Prefect to himself. Someone should have a word with somebody
about that. He disentangled himself from Harl and tried to work
out which way to run.
He was surrounded.
The big guy with the rocket launcher was moving it up
into position for another shot.
Ford was completely at a loss for what to do next.