Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

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Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Douglas Adams (1987)

to my mother,

who liked the bit about the horse

[::: AUTHOR’S NOTE ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

The physical descriptions of St Cedd’s College in this book, in so

far as they are specific at all, owe a little to my memories of St

John’s College, Cambridge, although I’ve also borrowed indiscriminately

from other colleges as well. Sir Isaac Newton was at Trinity College in

real life, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at Jesus.

The point is that St Cedd’s College is a completely fictitious

assemblage, and no correspondence is intended between any institutions

or characters in this book and any real institutions or people, living,

dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment.

This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh Plus

computer and LaserWriter Plus printer using MacAuthor word-processing

software.

The completed document was then printed using a Linotron 100 at The

Graphics Factory, London SW3, to produce a final high-resolution image

of the text. My thanks to Mike Glover of Icon Technology for his help

with this process.

Finally, my very special thanks are due to Sue Freestone for all her

help in nursing this book into existence.

Douglas Adams

London, 1987

[::: CHAPTER 1 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

This time there would be no witnesses.

This time there was just the dead earth, a rumble of thunder, and

the onset of that interminable light drizzle from the north-east by

which so many of the world’s most momentous events seem to be

accompanied.

The storms of the day before, and of the day before that, and the

floods of the previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulged

with rain, but all that actually fell in the gathering evening gloom

was a dreary kind of prickle.

Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered through the

low hills and gusted across a shallow valley where stood a structure, a

kind of tower, alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning.

It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusion of

magma from one of the more pestilential pits of hell, and it leaned at

a peculiar angle, as if oppressed by something altogether more terrible

than its own considerable weight. It seemed a dead thing, long ages

dead.

The only movement was that of a river of mud that moved sluggishly

along the bottom of the valley past the tower. A mile or so further on,

the river ran down a ravine and disappeared underground.

But as the evening darkened it became apparent that the tower was

not entirely without life. There was a single dim red light guttering

deep within it.

The light was only just visible -- except of course that there was

no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a

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light. Every few minutes it grew a little stronger and a little

brighter and then faded slowly away almost to nothing. At the same time

a low keening noise drifted out on the wind, built up to a kind of

wailing climax, and then it too faded, abjectly, away.

Time passed, and then another light appeared, a smaller, mobile

light. It emerged at ground level and moved in a single bobbing circuit

of the tower, pausing occasionally on its way around. Then it, and the

shadowy figure that could just be discerned carrying it, disappeared

inside once more.

An hour passed, and by the end of it the darkness was total. The

world seemed dead, the night a blankness.

And then the glow appeared again near the tower’s peak, this time

growing in power more purposefully. It quickly reached the peak of

brightness it had previously attained, and then kept going, increasing,

increasing. The keening sound that accompanied it rose in pitch and

stridency until it became a wailing scream. The scream screamed on and

on till it became a blinding noise and the light a deafening redness.

And then, abruptly, both ceased.

There was a millisecond of silent darkness.

An astonishing pale new light billowed and bulged from deep within

the mud beneath the tower. The sky clenched, a mountain of mud

convulsed, earth and sky bellowed at each other, there was a horrible

pinkness, a sudden greenness, a lingering orangeness that stained the

clouds, and then the light sank and the night at last was deeply,

hideously dark. There was no further sound other than the soft tinkle

of water.

But in the morning the sun rose with an unaccustomed sparkle on a

day that was, or seemed to be, or at least would have seemed to be if

there had been anybody there to whom it could seem to be anything at

all, warmer, clearer and brighter -- an altogether livelier day than

any yet known. A clear river ran through the shattered remains of the

valley.

And time began seriously to pass.

[::: CHAPTER 2 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.

From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into

another valley, with which it was having a problem.

The day was hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down

upon the grey rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not

even the Monk. The horse’s tail moved a little, swishing slightly to

try and move a little air, but that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved.

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a

video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving

you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched

tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it

yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what

was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the

things the world expected you to believe.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had

started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was

even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in

Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor

had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of

miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

The problem with the valley was this. The Monk currently believed

that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including

the Monk itself and the Monk’s horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink.

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This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from

any other thing, and therefore made doing anything or going anywhere

impossible, or at least difficult and dangerous. Hence the immobility

of the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up with

a lot of silly things in its time but was secretly of the opinion that

this was one of the silliest.

How long did the Monk believe these things?

Well, as far as the Monk was concerned, forever. The faith which

moves mountains, or at least believes them against all the available

evidence to be pink, was a solid and abiding faith, a great rock

against which the world could hurl whatever it would, yet it would not

be shaken. In practice, the horse knew, twenty-four hours was usually

about its lot.

So what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions, and was

sceptical about things? Unusual behaviour for a horse, wasn’t it? An

unusual horse perhaps?

No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well-built example of

its species, it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as

convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to

be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let

on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other

creature, without forming an opinion about them.

On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every

day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought

about them whatsoever.

When the early models of these Monks were built, it was felt to be

important that they be instantly recognisable as artificial objects.

There must be no danger of their looking at all like real people. You

wouldn’t want your video recorder lounging around on the sofa all day

while it was watching TV. You wouldn’t want it picking its nose,

drinking beer and sending out for pizzas.

So the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design and

also for practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People,

and indeed things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs were

held to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes

of seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were given

was pinkish-looking instead of purple, soft and smooth instead of

crenellated. They were also restricted to just one mouth and nose, but

were given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two.

A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the

most preposterous things.

This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too much to

believe in one day. It was, by mistake, cross-connected to a video

recorder that was watching eleven TV channels simultaneously, and this

caused it to blow a bank of illogic circuits. The video recorder only

had to watch them, of course. It didn’t have to believe them all as

well. This is why instruction manuals are so important.

So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good

was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a

lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe

that thirty-five percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then

broke down. The man from the Monk shop said that it needed a whole new

motherboard, but then pointed out that the new improved Monk Plus

models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking

Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteen

entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously

without generating any irritating system errors, were twice as fast and

at least three times as glib, and you could have a whole new one for

less than the cost of replacing the motherboard of the old model.

That was it. Done.

The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it could

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believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done

by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to

make.

For a number of days and nights, which it variously believed to be

three, forty-three, and five hundred and ninety-eight thousand seven

hundred and three, it roamed the desert, putting its simple Electric

trust in rocks, birds, clouds and a form of non-existent elephant-

asparagus, until at last it fetched up here, on this high rock,

overlooking a valley that was not, despite the deep fervour of the

Monk’s belief, pink. Not even a little bit.

Time passed.

[::: CHAPTER 3 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Time passed.

Susan waited.

The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn’t ring. Or the

phone. She looked at her watch. She felt that now was about the time

that she could legitimately begin to feel cross. She was cross already,

of course, but that had been in her own time, so to speak. They were

well and truly into his time now, and even allowing for traffic,

mishaps, and general vagueness and dilatoriness, it was now well over

half an hour past the time that he had insisted was the latest time

they could possibly afford to leave, so she’d better be ready.

She tried to worry that something terrible had happened to him, but

didn’t believe it for a moment. Nothing terrible ever happened to him,

though she was beginning to think that it was time it damn well did. If

nothing terrible happened to him soon maybe she’d do it herself. Now

there was an idea.

She threw herself crossly into the armchair and watched the news on

television. The news made her cross. She flipped the remote control and

watched something on another channel for a bit. She didn’t know what it

was, but it also made her cross. Perhaps she should phone. She was

damned if she was going to phone. Perhaps if she phoned he would phone

her at the same moment and not be able to get through.

She refused to admit that she had even thought that.

Damn him, where was he? Who cared where he was anyway? She didn’t,

that was for sure.

Three times in a row he’d done this. Three times in a row was

enough. She angrily flipped channels one more time. There was a

programme about computers and some interesting new developments in the

field of things you could do with computers and music.

That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herself

that that was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final real

ultimate it.

She jumped to her feet and went to the phone, gripping an angry

Filofax. She flipped briskly through it and dialed a number.

‘Hello, Michael? Yes, it’s Susan. Susan Way. You said I should call

you if I was free this evening and I said I’d rather be dead in a

ditch, remember? Well, I suddenly discover that I am free, absolutely,

completely and utterly free, and there isn’t a decent ditch for miles

around. Make your move while you’ve got your chance is my advice to

you. I’ll be at the Tangiers Club in half an hour.’

She pulled on her shoes and coat, paused when she remembered that it

was Thursday and that she should put a fresh, extra-long tape on the

answering machine, and two minutes later was out of the front door.

When at last the phone did ring the answering machine said sweetly that

Susan Way could not come to the phone just at the moment, but that if

the caller would like to leave a message, she would get back to them as

soon as possible. Maybe.

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[::: CHAPTER 4 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

It was a chill November evening of the old-fashioned type.

The moon looked pale and wan, as if it shouldn’t be up on a night

like this. It rose unwillingly and hung like an ill spectre.

Silhouetted against it, dim and hazy through the dampness which rose

from the unwholesome fens, stood the assorted towers and turrets of St

Cedd’s, Cambridge, a ghostly profusion of buildings thrown up over

centuries, medieval next to Victorian, Odeon next to Tudor. Only rising

through the mist did they seem remotely to belong to one another.

Between them scurried figures, hurrying from one dim pool of light

to another, shivering, leaving wraiths of breath which folded

themselves into the cold night behind them.

It was seven o’clock. Many of the figures were heading for the

college dining hall which divided First Court from Second Court, and

from which warm light, reluctantly, streamed. Two figures in particular

seemed ill-matched. One, a young man, was tall, thin and angular; even

muffled inside a heavy dark coat he walked a little like an affronted

heron.

The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly

restlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape from

a sack. His own age was on the older side of completely indeterminate.

If you picked a number at random, he was probably a little older than

that, but -- well, it was impossible to tell. Certainly his face was

heavily lined, and the small amount of hair that escaped from under his

red woollen skiing hat was thin, white, and had very much its own ideas

about how it wished to arrange itself. He too was muffled inside a

heavy coat, but over it he wore a billowing gown with very faded purple

trim, the badge of his unique and peculiar academic office.

As they walked the older man was doing all the talking. He was

pointing at items of interest along the way, despite the fact that it

was too dark to see any of them. The younger man was saying ‘Ah yes,’

and ‘Really? How interesting...’ and ‘Well, well, well,’ and ‘Good

heavens.’ His head bobbed seriously.

They entered, not through the main entrance to the hall, but through

a small doorway on the east side of the court. This led to the Senior

Combination Room and a dark-panelled anteroom where the Fellows of the

college assembled to slap their hands and make ‘brrrrrr’ noises before

making their way through their own entrance to the High Table.

They were late and shook off their coats hurriedly. This was

complicated for the older man by the necessity first of taking off his

professorial gown, and then of putting it back on again once his coat

was off, then of stuffing his hat in his coat pocket, then of wondering

where he’d put his scarf, and then of realising that he hadn’t brought

it, then of fishing in his coat pocket for his handkerchief, then of

fishing in his other coat pocket for his spectacles, and finally of

finding them quite unexpectedly wrapped in his scarf, which it turned

out he had brought after all but hadn’t been wearing despite the damp

and bitter wind blowing in like a witch’s breath from across the fens.

He bustled the younger man into the hall ahead of him and they took

the last two vacant seats at the High Table, braving a flurry of frowns

and raised eyebrows for interrupting the Latin grace to do so.

Hall was full tonight. It was always more popular with the

undergraduates in the colder months. More unusually, the hall was

candlelit, as it was now only on very few special occasions. Two long,

crowded tables stretched off into the glimmering darkness. By

candlelight, people’s faces were more alive, the hushed sounds of their

voices, the clink of cutlery and glasses, seemed more exciting, and in

the dark recesses of the great hall, all the centuries for which it had

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existed seemed present at once. High Table itself formed a crosspiece

at the top, and was raised about a foot above the rest. Since it was a

guest night, the table was set on both sides to accommodate the extra

numbers, and many diners therefore sat with their backs to the rest of

the hall.

‘So, young MacDuff,’ said the Professor once he was seated and

flapping his napkin open, ‘pleasure to see you again, my dear fellow.

Glad you could come. No idea what all this is about,’ he added, peering

round the hall in consternation. ‘All the candles and silver and

business. Generally means a special dinner in honour of someone or

something no one can remember anything about except that it means

better food for a night.’

He paused and thought for a moment, and then said, ‘It seems odd,

don’t you think, that the quality of the food should vary inversely

with the brightness of the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinary

heights the kitchen staff could rise to if you confined them to

perpetual darkness. Could be worth a try, I think. Got some good vaults

in the college that could be turned over to the purpose. I think I

showed you round them once, hmmm? Nice brickwork.’

All this came as something of a relief to his guest. It was the

first indication his host had given that he had the faintest

recollection who he was. Professor Urban Chronotis, the Regius

Professor of Chronology, or ‘Reg’ as he insisted on being called had a

memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra

Birdwing Butterfly, in that it was colourful, flitted prettily hither

and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct.

When he had telephoned with the invitation a few days previously, he

had seemed extremely keen to see his former pupil, and yet when Richard

had arrived this evening, a little on the late side, admittedly, the

Professor had thrown open the door apparently in anger, had started in

surprise on seeing Richard, demanded to know if he was having emotional

problems, reacted in annoyance to being reminded gently that it was now

ten years since he had been Richard’s college tutor, and finally agreed

that Richard had indeed come for dinner, whereupon he, the Professor,

had started talking rapidly and at length about the history of the

college architecture, a sure sign that his mind was elsewhere entirely.

‘Reg’ had never actually taught Richard, he had only been his

college tutor, which meant in short that he had had charge of his

general welfare, told him when the exams were and not to take drugs,

and so on. Indeed, it was not entirely clear if Reg had ever taught

anybody at all and what, if anything, he would have taught them. His

professorship was an obscure one, to say the least, and since he

dispensed with his lecturing duties by the simple and time-honoured

technique of presenting all his potential students with an exhaustive

list of books that he knew for a fact had been out of print for thirty

years, then flying into a tantrum if they failed to find them, no one

had ever discovered the precise nature of his academic discipline. He

had, of course, long ago taken the precaution of removing the only

extant copies of the books on his reading list from the university and

college libraries, as a result of which he had plenty of time to, well,

to do whatever it was he did.

Since Richard had always managed to get on reasonably well with the

old fruitcake, he had one day plucked up courage to ask him what,

exactly, the Regius Professorship of Chronology was. It had been one of

those light summery days when the world seems about to burst with

pleasure at simply being itself, and Reg had been in an

uncharacteristically forthcoming mood as they had walked over the

bridge where the River Cam divided the older parts of the college from

the newer.

‘Sinecure, my dear fellow, an absolute sinecure,’ he had beamed. ‘A

small amount of money for a very small, or shall we say non-existent,

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amount of work. That puts me permanently just ahead of the game, which

is a comfortable if frugal place to spend your life. I recommend it.’

He leaned over the edge of the bridge and started to point out a

particular brick that he found interesting. ‘But what sort of study is

it supposed to be?’ Richard had pursued. ‘Is it history? Physics?

Philosophy? What?’

‘Well,’ said Reg, slowly, ‘since you’re interested, the chair was

originally instituted by King George III, who, as you know, entertained

a number of amusing notions, including the belief that one of the trees

in Windsor Great Park was in fact Frederick the Great.

‘It was his own appointment, hence “Regius”. His own idea as well,

which is somewhat more unusual.’

Sunlight played along the River Cam. People in punts happily shouted

at each other to fuck off. Thin natural scientists who had spent months

locked away in their rooms growing white and fishlike, emerged blinking

into the light. Couples walking along the bank got so excited about the

general wonderfulness of it all that they had to pop inside for an

hour.

‘The poor beleaguered fellow,’ Reg continued, ‘George III, I mean,

was, as you may know, obsessed with time. Filled the palace with

clocks. Wound them incessantly. Sometimes would get up in the middle of

the night and prowl round the palace in his nightshirt winding clocks.

He was very concerned that time continued to go forward, you see. So

many terrible things had occurred in his life that he was terrified

that any of them might happen again if time were ever allowed to slip

backwards even for a moment. A very understandable fear, especially if

you’re barking mad, as I’m afraid to say, with the very greatest

sympathy for the poor fellow, he undoubtedly was. He appointed me, or

rather I should say, my office, this professorship, you understand, the

post that I am now privileged to hold to -- where was I? Oh yes. He

instituted this, er, Chair of Chronology to see if there was any

particular reason why one thing happened after another and if there was

any way of stopping it. Since the answers to the three questions were,

I knew immediately, yes, no, and maybe, I realised I could then take

the rest of my career off.’

‘And your predecessors?’

‘Er, were much of the same mind.’

‘But who were they?’

‘Who were they? Well, splendid fellows of course, splendid to a man.

Remind me to tell you about them some day. See that brick? Wordsworth

was once sick on that brick. Great man.’

All that had been about ten years ago.

Richard glanced around the great dining hall to see what had changed

in the time, and the answer was, of course, absolutely nothing. In the

dark heights, dimly seen by the flickering candlelight, were the

ghostly portraits of prime ministers, archbishops, political reformers

and poets, any of whom might, in their day, have been sick on that same

brick.

‘Well,’ said Reg, in a loudly confidential whisper, as if

introducing the subject of nipple-piercing in a nunnery, ‘I hear you’ve

suddenly done very well for yourself, at last, hmmm?’

‘Er, well, yes, in fact,’ said Richard, who was as surprised at the

fact as anybody else, ‘yes, I have.’

Around the table several gazes stiffened on him.

‘Computers,’ he heard somebody whisper dismissively to a neighbour

further down the table. The stiff gazes relaxed again, and turned

away.

‘Excellent,’ said Reg. ‘I’m so pleased for you, so pleased.’

‘Tell me,’ he went on, and it was a moment before Richard realised

that the Professor wasn’t talking to him any more, but had turned to

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the right to address his other neighbour, ‘what’s all this about,

this,’ he flourished a vague hand over the candles and college silver,

‘...stuff?’

His neighbour, an elderly wizened figure, turned very slowly and

looked at him as if he was rather annoyed at being raised from the dead

like this.

‘Coleridge,’ he said in a thin rasp, ‘it’s the Coleridge Dinner you

old fool.’ He turned very slowly back until he was facing the front

again. His name was Cawley, he was a Professor of Archaeology and

Anthropology, and it was frequently said of him, behind his back, that

he regarded it not so much as a serious academic study, more as a

chance to relive his childhood.

‘Ah, is it,’ murmured Reg, ‘is it?’ and turned back to Richard.

‘It’s the Coleridge Dinner,’ he said knowledgeably. ‘Coleridge was a

member of the college, you know,’ he added after a moment. ‘Coleridge.

Samuel Taylor. Poet. I expect you’ve heard of him. This is his Dinner.

Well, not literally, of course. It would be cold by now.’ Silence.

‘Here, have some salt.’

‘Er, thank you, I think I’ll wait,’ said Richard, surprised. There

was no food on the table yet.

‘Go on, take it,’ insisted the Professor, proffering him the heavy

silver salt cellar.

Richard blinked in bemusement but with an interior shrug he reached

to take it. In the moment that he blinked, however, the salt cellar had

completely vanished.

He started back in surprise.

‘Good one, eh?’ said Reg as he retrieved the missing cruet from

behind the ear of his deathly right-hand neighbour, provoking a

surprisingly girlish giggle from somewhere else at the table. Reg

smiled impishly. ‘Very irritating habit, I know. It’s next on my list

for giving up after smoking and leeches.’

Well, that was another thing that hadn’t changed. Some people pick

their noses, others habitually beat up old ladies on the streets. Reg’s

vice was a harmless if peculiar one -- an addiction to childish

conjuring tricks. Richard remembered the first time he had been to see

Reg with a problem -- it was only the normal /Angst/ that periodically

takes undergraduates into its grip, particularly when they have essays

to write, but it had seemed a dark and savage weight at the time. Reg

had sat and listened to his outpourings with a deep frown of

concentration, and when at last Richard had finished, he pondered

seriously, stroked his chin a lot, and at last leaned forward and

looked him in the eye.

‘I suspect that your problem,’ he said, ‘is that you have too many

paper clips up your nose.’

Richard stared at him.

‘Allow me to demonstrate,’ said Reg, and leaning across the desk he

pulled from Richard’s nose a chain of eleven paper clips and a small

rubber swan.

‘Ah, the real culprit,’ he said, holding up the swan. ‘They come in

cereal packets, you know, and cause no end of trouble. Well, I’m glad

we’ve had this little chat, my dear fellow. Please feel free to disturb

me again if you have any more such problems.’

Needless to say, Richard didn’t.

Richard glanced around the table to see if there was anybody else he

recognised from his time at the college.

Two places away to the left was the don who had been Richard’s

Director of Studies in English, who showed no signs of recognising him

at all. This was hardly surprising since Richard had spent his three

years here assiduously avoiding him, often to the extent of growing a

beard and pretending to be someone else.

Next to him was a man whom Richard had never managed to identify.

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Neither, in fact, had anyone else. He was thin and vole-like and had

the most extraordinarily long bony nose -- it really was very, very

long and bony indeed. In fact it looked a lot like the controversial

keel which had helped the Australians win the America’s Cup in 1983,

and this resemblance had been much remarked upon at the time, though

not of course to his face. No one had said anything to his face at all.

No one.

Ever.

Anyone meeting him for the first time was too startled and

embarrassed by his nose to speak, and the second time was worse because

of the first time, and so on. Years had gone by now, seventeen in all.

In all that time he had been cocooned in silence. In hall it had long

been the habit of the college servants to position a separate set of

salt, pepper and mustard on either side of him, since no one could ask

him to pass them, and to ask someone sitting on the other side of him

was not only rude but completely impossible because of his nose being

in the way.

The other odd thing about him was a series of gestures he made and

repeated regularly throughout every evening. They consisted of tapping

each of the fingers of his left hand in order, and then one of the

fingers of his right hand. He would then occasionally tap some other

part of his body, a knuckle, an elbow or a knee. Whenever he was forced

to stop this by the requirements of eating he would start blinking each

of his eyes instead, and occasionally nodding. No one, of course, had

ever dared to ask him why he did this, though all were consumed with

curiosity.

Richard couldn’t see who was sitting beyond him.

In the other direction, beyond Reg’s deathly neighbour, was Watkin,

the Classics Professor, a man of terrifying dryness and oddity. His

heavy rimless glasses were almost solid cubes of glass within which his

eyes appeared to lead independent existences like goldfish. His nose

was straight enough and ordinary, but beneath it he wore the same beard

as Clint Eastwood. His eyes gazed swimmingly around the table as he

selected who was going to be spoken at tonight. He had thought that his

prey might be one of the guests, the newly appointed Head of Radio

Three, who was sitting opposite -- but unfortunately he had already

been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of

Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the

phrase ‘too much Mozart’ was, given any reasonable definition of those

three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any

sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered

meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an

argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy. The poor

man was already beginning to grip his cutlery too tightly. His eyes

darted about desperately looking for rescue, and made the mistake of

lighting on those of Watkin.

‘Good evening,’ said Watkin with smiling charm, nodding in the most

friendly way, and then letting his gaze settle glassily on to his bowl

of newly arrived soup, from which position it would not allow itself to

be moved. Yet. Let the bugger suffer a little. He wanted the rescue to

be worth at least a good half dozen radio talk fees.

Beyond Watkin, Richard suddenly discovered the source of the little

girlish giggle that had greeted Reg’s conjuring trick. Astonishingly

enough it was a little girl. She was about eight years old with blonde

hair and a glum look. She was sitting occasionally kicking pettishly at

the table leg.

‘Who’s that?’ Richard asked Reg in surprise.

‘Who’s what?’ Reg asked Richard in surprise.

Richard inclined a finger surreptitiously in her direction. ‘The

girl,’ he whispered, ‘the very, very little girl. Is it some new maths

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professor?’

Reg peered round at her. ‘Do you know,’ he said in astonishment, ‘I

haven’t the faintest idea. Never known anything like it. How

extraordinary.’

At that moment the problem was solved by the man from the BBC, who

suddenly wrenched himself out of the logical half-nelson into which his

neighbours had got him, and told the girl off for kicking the table.

She stopped kicking the table, and instead kicked the air with

redoubled vigour. He told her to try and enjoy herself, so she kicked

him. This did something to bring a brief glimmer of pleasure into her

glum evening, but it didn’t last. Her father briefly shared with the

table at large his feelings about baby-sitters who let people down, but

nobody felt able to run with the topic.

‘A major season of Buxtehude,’ resumed the Director of Music, ‘is of

course clearly long overdue. I’m sure you’ll be looking forward to

remedying this situation at the first opportunity.’

‘Oh, er, yes,’ replied the girl’s father, spilling his soup, ‘er,

that is... he’s not the same one as Gluck, is he?’

The little girl kicked the table leg again. When her father looked

sternly at her, she put her head on one side and mouthed a question at

him.

‘Not now,’ he insisted at her as quietly as he could.

‘When, then?’

‘Later. Maybe. Later, we’ll see.’

She hunched grumpily back in her seat. ‘You always say later,’ she

mouthed at him.

‘Poor child,’ murmured Reg. ‘There isn’t a don at this table who

doesn’t behave exactly like that inside. Ah, thank you.’ Their soup

arrived, distracting his attention, and Richard’s.

‘So tell me,’ said Reg, after they had both had a couple of

spoonsful and arrived independently at the same conclusion, that it was

not a taste explosion, ‘what you’ve been up to, my dear chap. Something

to do with computers, I understand, and also to do with music. I

thought you read English when you were here -- though only, I realise,

in your spare time.’ He looked at Richard significantly over the rim of

his soup spoon. ‘Now wait,’ he interrupted before Richard even had a

chance to start, ‘don’t I vaguely remember that you had some sort of

computer when you were here? When was it? 1977?’

‘Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of

electric abacus, but...’

‘Oh, now, don’t underestimate the abacus,’ said Reg. ‘In skilled

hands it’s a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it

requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and

never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work.’

‘So an electric one would be particularly pointless,’ said Richard.

‘True enough,’ conceded Reg.

‘There really wasn’t a lot this machine could do that you couldn’t

do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble,’ said Richard,

‘but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-

witted pupil.’

Reg looked at him quizzically.

‘I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply,’ he said.

‘I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I’m sitting.’

‘I’m sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of

trying to teach anything to anybody?’

This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval

from up and down the table.

Richard continued, ‘What I mean is that if you really want to

understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone

else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more

slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down

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Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

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