bass player getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times
in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.
Ford stopped and peered into the dark doorway.
"You what?" he said.
The girl laughed and stepped forward a little out of the shadow.
She was tall, and had that kind of self-possessed shyness which
is a great trick if you can do it.
"It's my big number," she said. "I have a Master's degree in
Social Economics and can be very convincing. People love it.
Especially in this city."
"Goosnargh," said Ford Prefect, which was a special Betelgeusian
word he used when he knew he should say something but didn't know
what it should be.
He sat on a step, took from his satchel a bottle of that Ol' Janx
Spirit and a towel. He opened the bottle and wiped the top of it
with the towel, which had the opposite effect to the one
intended, in that the Ol' Janx Spirit instantly killed off
millions of the germs which had been slowly building up quite a
complex and enlightened civilization on the smellier patches of
the towel.
"Want some?" he said, after he'd had a swig himself.
She shrugged and took the proffered bottle.
They sat for a while, peacefully listening to the clamour of
burglar alarms in the next block.
"As it happens, I'm owed a lot of money," said Ford, "so if I
ever get hold of it, can I come and see you then maybe?"
"Sure, I'll be here," said the girl. "So how much is a lot?"
"Fifteen years' back pay."
"For?"
"Writing two words."
"Zarquon," said the girl. "Which one took the time?"
"The first one. Once I'd got that the second one just came one
afternoon after lunch."
A huge electronic drum kit hurtled through the window high above
them and smashed itself to bits in the street in front of them.
It soon became apparent that some of the burglar alarms on the
next block had been deliberately set off by one police tribe in
order to lay an ambush for the other. Cars with screaming sirens
converged on the area, only to find themselves being picked off
by copters which came thudding through the air between the city's
mountainous tower blocks.
"In fact," said Ford, having to shout now above the din, "it
wasn't quite like that. I wrote an awful lot, but they just cut
it down."
He took his copy of the Guide back out of his satchel.
"Then the planet got demolished," he shouted. "Really worthwhile
job, eh? They've still got to pay me, though."
"You work for that thing?" the girl yelled back.
"Yeah."
"Good number."
"You want to see the stuff I wrote?" he shouted. "Before it gets
erased? The new revisions are due to be released tonight over the
net. Someone must have found out that the planet I spent fifteen
years on has been demolished by now. They missed it on the last
few revisions, but it can't escape their notice for ever."
"It's getting impossible to talk isn't it?"
"What?"
She shrugged and pointed upwards.
There was a copter above them now which seemed to be involved in
a side skirmish with the band upstairs. Smoke was billowing from
the building. The sound engineer was hanging out of the window by
his fingertips, and a maddened guitarist was beating on his
fingers with a burning guitar. The helicopter was firing at all
of them.
"Can we move?"
They wandered down the street, away from the noise. They ran into
a street theatre group which tried to do a short play for them
about the problems of the inner city, but then gave up and
disappeared into the small restaurant most recently patronized by
the pack animal.
All the time, Ford was poking at the interface panel of the
Guide. They ducked into an alleyway. Ford squatted on a garbage
can while information began to flood over the screen of the
Guide.
He located his entry.
"Earth: Mostly harmless."
Almost immediately the screen became a mass of system messages.
"Here it comes," he said.
"Please wait," said the messages. "Entries are being updated over
the Sub.Etha Net. This entry is being revised. The system will be
down for ten seconds."
At the end of the alley a steel grey limousine crawled past.
"Hey look," said the girl, "if you get paid, look me up. I'm a
working girl, and there are people over there who need me. I
gotta go."
She brushed aside Ford's half-articulated protests, and left him
sitting dejectedly on his garbage can preparing to watch a large
swathe of his working life being swept away electronically into
the ether.
Out in the street things had calmed down a little. The police
battle had moved off to other sectors of the city, the few
surviving members of the rock band had agreed to recognize their
musical differences and pursue solo careers, the street theatre
group were re-emerging from the pasta restaurant with the pack
animal, telling it they would take it to a bar they knew where it
would be treated with a little respect, and a little way further
on the steel grey limousine was parked silently by the kerbside.
The girl hurried towards it.
Behind her, in the darkness of the alley, a green flickering glow
was bathing Ford Prefect's face, and his eyes were slowly
widening in astonishment.
For where he had expected to find nothing, an erased, closed-off
entry, there was instead a continuous stream of data - text,
diagrams, figures and images, moving descriptions of surf on
Australian beaches, Yoghurt on Greek islands, restaurants to
avoid in Los Angeles, currency deals to avoid in Istanbul,
weather to avoid in London, bars to go everywhere. Pages and
pages of it. It was all there, everything he had written.
With a deepening frown of blank incomprehension he went backwards
and forwards through it, stopping here and there at various
entries.
"Tips for aliens in New York: Land anywhere, Central Park,
anywhere. No one will care, or indeed even notice.
"Surviving: get a job as cab driver immediately. A cab driver's
job is to drive people anywhere they want to go in big yellow
machines called taxis. Don't worry if you don't know how the
machine works and you can't speak the language, don't understand
the geography or indeed the basic physics of the area, and have
large green antennae growing out of your head. Believe me, this
is the best way of staying inconspicuous.
"If your body is really weird try showing it to people in the
streets for money.
"Amphibious life forms from any of the worlds in the Swulling,
Noxios or Nausalia systems will particularly enjoy the East
River, which is said to be richer in those lovely life-giving
nutrients then the finest and most virulent laboratory slime yet
achieved.
"Having fun: This is the big section. It is impossible to have
more fun without electrocuting your pleasure centres ..."
Ford flipped the switch which he saw was now marked "Mode Execute
Ready" instead of the now old-fashioned "Access Standby" which
had so long ago replaced the appallingly stone-aged "Off".
This was a planet he had seen completely destroyed, seen with his
own two eyes or rather, blinded as he had been by the hellish
disruption of air and light, felt with his own two feet as the
ground had started to pound at him like a hammer, bucking,
roaring, gripped by tidal waves of energy pouring out of the
loathsome yellow Vogon ships. And then at last, five seconds
after the moment he had determined as being the last possible
moment had already passed, the gently swinging nausea of
dematerialization as he and Arthur Dent had been beamed up
through the atmosphere like a sports broadcast.
There was no mistake, there couldn't have been. The Earth had
definitely been destroyed. Definitely, definitely. Boiled away
into space.
And yet here - he activated the Guide again - was his own entry
on how you would set about having a good time in Bournemouth,
Dorset, England, which he had always prided himself on as being
one of the most baroque pieces of invention he had ever
delivered. He read it again and shook his head in sheer wonder.
Suddenly he realized what the answer to the problem was, and it
was this, that something very weird was happening; and if
something very weird was happening, he thought, he wanted it to
be happening to him.
He stashed the Guide back in his satchel and hurried out on to
the street again.
Walking north he again passed a steel grey limousine parked by
the kerbside, and from a nearby doorway he heard a soft voice
saying, "It's OK, honey, it's really OK, you got to learn to feel
good about it. Look at the way the whole economy is structured
..."
Ford grinned, detoured round the next block which was now in
flames, found a police helicopter which was standing unattended
in the street, broke into it, strapped himself in, crossed his
fingers and sent it hurtling inexpertly into the sky.
He weaved terrifyingly up through the canyoned walls of the city,
and once clear of them, hurtled through the black and red pall of
smoke which hung permanently above it.
Ten minutes later, with all the copter's sirens blaring and its
rapid-fire cannon blasting at random into the clouds, Ford
Prefect brought it careering down among the gantries and landing
lights at Han Dold spaceport, where it settled like a gigantic,
startled and very noisy gnat.
Since he hadn't damaged it too much he was able to trade it in
for a first class ticket on the next ship leaving the system, and
settled into one of its huge, voluptuous body-hugging seats.
This was going to be fun, he thought to himself, as the ship
blinked silently across the insane distances of deep space and
the cabin service got into its full extravagant swing.
"Yes please," he said to the cabin attendants whenever they
glided up to offer him anything at all.
He smiled with a curious kind of manic joy as he flipped again
through the mysteriously re-instated entry on the planet Earth.
He had a major piece of unfinished business that he would now be
able to attend to, and was terribly pleased that life had
suddenly furnished him with a serious goal to achieve.
It suddenly occurred to him to wonder where Arthur Dent was, and
if he knew.
Arthur Dent was one thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven light
years away in a Saab, and anxious.
Behind him in the backseat was a girl who had made him crack his
head on the door as he climbed in. He didn't know if it was just
because she was the first female of his own species that he had
laid eyes on in years, or what it was, but he felt stupefied
with, with ... This is absurd, he told himself. Calm down, he
told himself. You are not, he continued to himself in the firmest
internal voice he could muster, in a fit and rational state. You
have just hitch-hiked over a hundred thousand light years across
the galaxy, you are very tired, a little confused and extremely
vulnerable. Relax, don't panic, concentrate on breathing deeply.
He twisted round in his seat.
"Are you sure she's all right?" he said again.
Beyond the fact that she was, to him, heartthumpingly beautiful,
he could make out very little, how tall she was, how old she was,
the exact shading of her hair. And nor could he ask her anything
about herself because, sadly, she was completely unconscious.
"She's just drugged," said her brother, shrugging, not moving his
eyes from the road ahead.
"And that's all right, is it?" said Arthur, in alarm.
"Suits me," he said.
"Ah," said Arthur. "Er," he added after a moment's thought.
The conversation so far had been going astoundingly badly.
After an initial flurry of opening hellos, he and Russell - the
wonderful girl's brother's name was Russell, a name which, to
Arthur's mind, always suggested burly men with blond moustaches
and blow-dried hair, who would at the slightest provocation start
wearing velvet tuxedos and frilly shirtfronts and would then have
to be forcibly restrained from commentating on snooker matches -
had quickly discovered they didn't like each other at all.
Russell was a burly man. He had a blond moustache. His hair was
fine and blow dried. To be fair to him - though Arthur didn't see
any necessity for this beyond the sheer mental exercise of it -
he, Arthur, was looking pretty grim himself. A man can't cross a
hundred thousand light years, mostly in other people's baggage
compartments, without beginning to fray a little, and Arthur had
frayed a lot.
"She's not a junkie," said Russell suddenly, as if he clearly
thought that someone else in the car might be. "She's under
sedation."
"But that's terrible," said Arthur, twisting round to look at her
again. She seemed to stir slightly and her head slipped sideways
on her shoulder. Her dark hair fell across her face, obscuring
it.
"What's the matter with her, is she ill?"
"No," said Russell, "merely barking mad."
"What?" said Arthur, horrified.
"Loopy, completely bananas. I'm taking her back to the hospital
and telling them to have another go. They let her out while she
still thought she was a hedgehog."
