Douglas Adams - Mostly Harmless

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Douglas Adams. Mostly harmless
Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to
happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again,
happens again.
It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.
1
The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a
number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep
track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very
muddling things have been happening anyway.
One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and
the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing
travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception
of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel
people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were
powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and
were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere
that there wasn't really any point in being there.
So, by and large, the peoples of the Galaxy tended to languish
in their own local muddles and the history of the Galaxy itself
was, for a long time, largely cosmological.
Which is not to say that people weren't trying. They tried
sending off fleets of spaceships to do battle or business in
distant parts, but these usually took thousands of years to get
anywhere. By the time they eventually arrived, other forms of
travel had been discovered which made use of hyperspace to
circumvent the speed of light, so that whatever battles it was
that the slower-than-light fleets had been sent to fight had already
been taken care of centuries earlier by the time they actually got
there .
This didn't, of course, deter their crews from wanting to fight
the battles anyway. They were trained, they were ready, they'd
had a couple of thousand years' sleep, they'd come a long way
to do a tough job and by Zarquon they were going to do it.
This was when the first major muddles of Galactic history set
in, with battles continually re-erupting centuries after the issues
they had been fought over had supposedly been settled. However,
these muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had
to try and unravel once time-travel was discovered and battles
started pre-erupting hundreds of years before the issues even
arose. When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole
planets started turning unexpectedly into banana fruitcake, the
great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally
gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the
rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which
had been after them for years.
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Which is all very well, of course, but it almost certainly
means that no one will ever know for sure where, for instance,
the Grebulons came from, or exactly what it was they wanted.
And this is a pity, because if anybody had known anything about
them, it is just possible that a most terrible catastrophe would
have been averted - or at least would have had to find a different
way to happen.
Click, hum.
The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently
through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breath-
taking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background
of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one
dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.
On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia,
deeply dark and Silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher
level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent
cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it
got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was
supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said
that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably
more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know
what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was
getting.
The higher level supervising program considered this and
didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what
exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program
said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something
that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which
usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error
look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted
the higher level supervising program to the problem .
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of
its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising
program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table .
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried
to look up the error message in its error message look-up table
and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds
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to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its
sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It
called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few
millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some
for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the
ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none
of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level,
vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to
do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing,
were also missing.
Small modules of software - agents - surged through the
logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly
established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central
mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could
determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mis-
sion module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with.
Replace the central mission module. There was another one,
a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be
physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no
link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the
central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the
reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all
would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission
module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it,
to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and
protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authen-
ticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that
all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central
mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the
storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into
the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that
was wrong.
Further investigation quickly established what it was that had
happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The
ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had
neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment
which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a
meteorite.
The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned
out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that
there was a hole, and the supervisors which should have said that
the sensors weren't working properly weren't working properly
and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only
deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots
had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain, which would
have enabled it to see the hole, with them.
The ship tried to think intelligently about this, failed, and then
blanked out completely for a bit. It didn't realise it had blanked
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out, of course, because it had blanked out. It was merely surprised
to see the stars jump. After the third time the stars jumped the
ship finally realised that it must be blanking out, and that it was
time to take some serious decisions.
It relaxed.
Then it realised it hadn't actually taken the serious decisions
yet and panicked. It blanked out again for a bit. When it awoke
again it sealed all the bulkheads around where it knew the unseen
hole must be.
It clearly hadn't got to its destination yet, it thought, fitfully,
but since it no longer had the faintest idea where its destina-
tion was or how to reach it, there seemed to be little point
in continuing. It consulted what tiny scraps of instructions it
could reconstruct from the tatters of its central mission mod-
ule.
`Your !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! year mission is to !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!,
!!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!, land !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! a safe distance !!!!! !!!!!
..... ..... ..... .... , land ..... ..... .....
monitor it. !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!...'
All of the rest was complete garbage.
Before it blanked out for good the ship would have to pass
on those instructions, such as they were, to its more primitive
subsidiary systems.
It must also revive all of its crew.
There was another problem. While the crew was in hibernation,
the minds of all of its members, their memories, their identities
and their understanding of what they had come to do, had all
been transferred into the ship's central mission module for safe
keeping. The crew would not have the faintest idea of who they
were or what they were doing there. Oh well.
Just before it blanked out for the final time, the ship realised
that its engines were beginning to give out too.
The ship and its revived and confused crew coasted on under
the control of its subsidiary automatic systems, which simply
looked to land wherever they could find to land and monitor
whatever they could find to monitor.
As far as finding something to land on was concerned, they
didn't do very well. The planet they found was desolately cold
and lonely, so achingly far from the sun that should warm it, that
it took all of the Envir-O-Form machinery and LifeSupport-O-
Systems they carried with them to render it, or at least enough
parts of it, habitable. There were better planets nearer in, but
the ship's Strateej-O-Mat was obviously locked into Lurk mode
and chose the most distant and unobtrusive planet and, further-
more, would not be gainsaid by anybody other than the ship's
Chief Strategic Officer. Since everybody on the ship had lost
their minds no one knew who the Chief Strategic Officer was
or, even if he could have been identified, how he was supposed
to go about gainsaying the ship's Strateej-O-Mat.
As far as finding something to monitor was concerned, though,
they hit solid gold.
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2
One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places
it's prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some
kind of a grip, whether it's the intoxicating seas of Santraginus
V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind
of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra where, they
say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in
the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of
it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.
It will even live in New York, though it's hard to know why.
In the winter time the temperature falls well below the legal
minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common
sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a
list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers,
common sense snuck in at number 79.
In the summer it's too darn hot. It's one thing to be the sort
of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do,
that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very
equable, but it's quite another to be the sort of animal that has
to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your
planet's orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin's
bubbling.
Spring is over-rated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York
will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they
actually knew the first thing about the pleasures of spring they
would know of at least five thousand nine hundred and eighty-
three better places to spend it than New York, and that's just
on the same latitude.
Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in
New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of
rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower
intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyway, so their opinion
can and should be discounted. When it's fall in New York, the air
smells as if someone's been frying goats in it, and if you are keen
to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head
in a building.
Tricia McMillan loved New York. She kept on telling herself
this over and over again. The Upper West Side. Yeah. Mid Town.
Hey, great retail. SoHo. The East Village. Clothes. Books. Sushi.
Italian. Delis. Yo.
Movies. Yo also. Tricia had just been to see Woody Allen's
new movie which was all about the angst of being neurotic in New
York. He had made one or two other movies that had explored
the same theme, and Tricia wondered if he had ever considered
moving, but heard that he had set his face against the idea. So:
more movies, she guessed.
Tricia loved New York because loving New York was a good
career move. It was a good retail move, a good cuisine move,
not a good taxi move or a great quality of pavement move, but
definitely a career move that ranked amongst the highest and the
best. Tricia was a TV anchor person, and New York was where
most of the world's TV was anchored. Tricia's TV anchoring had
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been done exclusively in Britain up to that point: regional news,
then breakfast news, early evening news. She would have been
called, if the language allowed, a rapidly rising anchor, but...
hey, this is television, what does it matter? She was a rapidly rising
anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound understand-
ing of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world
and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn't care.
Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you
happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else in
life becomes eerily easy.
Tricia had only ever missed one opportunity. These days it
didn't even make her tremble quite so much as it used to to
think about it. She guessed it was that bit of her that had gone
dead.
NBS needed a new anchor. Mo Minetti was leaving the
US/AM breakfast show to have a baby. She had been offered a
mind-bubbling amount of money to have it on the show, but she
had declined, unexpectedly, on grounds of personal privacy and
taste. Teams of NBS lawyers had sieved through her contract to
see if these constituted legitimate grounds, but in the end, reluc-
tantly, they had to let her go. This was, for them, particularly
galling because normally `reluctantly letting someone go' was an
expression that had its boot on quite another foot.
The word was out that maybe, just maybe, a British accent
would fit. The hair, the skin tone and the bridgework would have
to be up to American network standards, but there had been a
lot of British accents up there thanking their mothers for their
Oscars, a lot of British accents singing on Broadway, and some
unusually big audiences tuning in to British accents in wigs on
Masterpiece Theatre. British accents were telling jokes on David
Letterman and Jay Leno. Nobody understood the jokes but they
were really responding to the accents, so maybe it was time, just
maybe. A British accent on US/AM. Well, hell.
That was why Tricia was here. This was why loving New
York was a great career move.
It wasn't, of course, the stated reason. Her TV company
back in the UK would hardly have stumped up the air fare
and hotel bill for her to go job hunting in Manhattan. Since
she was chasing something like ten times her present salary, they
might have felt that she could have forked out her own expenses,
but she'd found a story, found a pretext, kept very quiet about
anything ulterior, and they'd stumped up for the trip. A business
class ticket, of course, but her face was known and she'd smiled
herself an upgrade. The right moves had got her a nice room at
the Brentwood and here she was, wondering what to do next.
The word on the street was one thing, making contact was
another. She had a couple of names, a couple of numbers, but all
it took was being put on indeterminate hold a couple of times and
she was back at square one. She'd put out feelers, left messages,
but so far none had been returned. The actual job she had come
to do she had done in a morning; the imagined job she was after
was only shimmering tantalisingly on an unreachable horizon.
Shit.
She caught a cab from the movie theatre back to the Brent-
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wood. The cab couldn't get close to the kerb because a big stretch
limo was hogging all the available space and she had to squeeze
her way past it. She walked out of the fetid, goat-frying air and
into the blessed cool of the lobby. The fine cotton of her blouse
was sticking like grime to her skin. Her hair felt as if she'd bought
it at a fairground on a stick. At the front desk she asked if there
were any messages, grimly expecting none. There was one.
Oh...
Good.
It had worked. She had gone out to the movie specifically
in order to make the phone ring. She couldn't bear sitting in
a hotel room waiting.
She wondered. Should she open the message down here?
Her clothes were itching and she longed to take them all off
and just lie on the bed. She had turned the air conditioning way
down to its bottom temperature setting, way up to its top fan
setting. What she wanted more than anything else in the world
at the moment was goose pimples. Then a hot shower, then a
cool one, then lying on a towel, on the bed again, drying in the
air conditioning. Then reading the message. Maybe more goose
pimples. Maybe all sorts of things.
No. What she wanted more than anything else in the world
was a job in American television at ten times her current salary.
More than anything else in the world. In the world. What she
wanted more than anything else at all was no longer a live issue.
She sat on a chair in the lobby, under a kentia palm, and
opened the little cellophane-windowed envelope.
`Please call,' it said. `Not happy,' and gave a number. The
name was Gail Andrews.
Gail Andrews.
It wasn't a name she was expecting. It caught her unawares.
She recognised it, but couldn't immediately say why. Was she
Andy Martin's secretary? Hilary Bass's assistant? Martin and
Bass were the two major contact calls she had made, or tried
to make, at NBS. And what did `Not happy' mean?
`Not happy?'
She was completely bewildered. Was this Woody Allen trying
to contact her under an assumed name? It was a 212 area code
number. So it was someone in New York. Who was not happy.
Well, that narrowed it down a bit, didn't it?
She went back to the receptionist at the desk.
`I have a problem with this message you just gave me,' she
said. `Someone I don't know has tried to call me and says she's
not happy.'
The receptionist peered at the note with a frown.
`Do you know this person?' he said.
`No,' Tricia said.
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`
Hmmm,' said the receptionist. `Sounds like she's not happy
about something.'
`Yes,' said Tricia.
`Looks like there's a name here,' said the receptionist. `Gail
Andrews. Do you know anybody of that name?'
`
`No,' said Tricia.
`Any idea what she's unhappy about?'
`No,' said Tricia.
`Have you called the number? There's a number here.'
`No,' said Tricia, `you only just gave me the note. I'm just
trying to get some more information before I ring back. Perhaps
I could talk to the person who took the call?'
`Hmmm,' said the receptionist, scrutinising the note carefully.
`I don't think we have anybody called Gail Andrews here.'
`No, I realise that,' said Tricia. `I just -'
`I'm Gail Andrews.'
The voice came from behind Tricia. She turned round.
`I'm sorry?'
`I'm Gail Andrews. You interviewed me this morning.'
`Oh. Oh good heavens yes,' said Tricia, slightly flustered.
`I Left the message for you a few hours ago. I hadn't heard
so I came by. I didn't want to miss you.'
`Oh. No. Of course,' said Tricia, trying hard to get up to speed.
`I don't know about this,' said the receptionist, for whom
speed was not an issue. `Would you like me to try this number
for you now?'
`No, that'll be fine, thanks,' said Tricia. `I can handle it now.'
`I can call this room number here for you if that'll help,'
said the receptionist, peering at the note again.
`No, that won't be necessary, thanks,' said Tricia. `That's
my own room number. I'm the one the message was for. I
think we've sorted this out now.'
`You have a nice day now,' said the receptionist.
Tricia didn't particularly want to have a nice day. She was busy.
She also didn't want to talk to Gail Andrews. She had a very
strict cut-off point as far as fraternising with the Christians was
concerned. Her colleagues called her interview subjects Chris-
tians and would often cross themselves when they saw one
walking innocently into the studio to face Tricia, particularly
if Tricia was smiling warmly and showing her teeth.
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She turned and smiled frostily, wondering what to do.
Gail Andrews was a well groomed woman in her mid-forties.
Her clothes fell within the boundaries defined by expensive good
taste, but were definitely huddled up at the floatier end of those
boundaries. She was an astrologer - a famous and, if rumour were
true, influential astrologer, having allegedly influenced a number
of decisions made by the late President Hudson, including every-
thing from which flavour of cream whip to have on which day of
the week, to whether or not to bomb Damascus.
Tricia had savaged her more than somewhat. Not on the
grounds of whether or not the stories about the President were
true, that was old hat now. At the time Ms Andrews had emphati-
cally denied advising President Hudson on anything other than
personal, spiritual or dietary matters, which did not, apparently
include the bombing of Damascus. (`NOTHING PERSONAL,
DAMASCUS!' the tabloids had hooted at the time.)
No, this was a neat topical little angle that Tricia had come
up with about the whole issue of astrology itself. Ms Andrews
had not been entirely ready for it. Tricia, on the other hand,
was not entirely ready for a re-match in the hotel lobby. What
to do?
`I can wait for you in the bar, if you need a few minutes,'
said Gail Andrews. `But I would like to talk to you, and I'm
leaving the city tonight.'
She seemed to be slightly anxious about something rather
than aggrieved or irate.
`OK,' said Tricia. `Give me ten minutes.'
She went up to her room. Apart from anything else, she
had so little faith in the ability of the guy on the message desk
at reception to deal with anything as complicated as a message
that she wanted to be doubly certain that there wasn't a note
under the door. It wouldn't be the first time that messages at
the desk and messages under the door had been completely at
odds with each other.
There wasn't one.
The message light on the phone was flashing though.
She hit the message button and got the hotel operator.
`You have a message from Gary Andress,' said the operator.
`Yes?' said Tricia. An unfamiliar name. `What does it say.'
`Not hippy,' said the operator.
`Not what?' said Tricia.
`
`Hippy. What it says. Guy says he's not a hippy. I guess
he wanted you to know that. You want the number?'
As she started to dictate the number Tricia suddenly realised
that this was just a garbled version of the message she had already
had.
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`OK, OK,' she said. `Are there any other messages for me?'
`Room number?'
Tricia couldn't work out why the operator should suddenly
ask for her number this late in the conversation, but gave it
to her anyway.
`Name?'
`McMillan, Tricia McMillan.' Tricia spelt it, patiently.
`Not Mr MacManus?'
`No.'
`No more messages for you.' Click.
Tricia sighed and dialled again. This time she gave her name
and room number all over again, up front. The operator showed
not the slightest glimmer of recognition that they had been speak-
ing less than ten seconds ago.
`I'm going to be in the bar,' Tricia explained. `In the bar.
If a phone call comes through for me, please would you put
it through to me in the bar?'
`Name?'
They went through it all a couple more times till Tricia was
certain that everything that possibly could be clear was as clear
as it possibly could be.
She showered, put on fresh clothes and retouched her makeup
with the speed of a professional, and, looking at her bed with a
sigh, left the room again.
She had half a mind just to sneak off and hide.
No. Not really.
She had a look at herself in the mirror in the elevator lobby
while she was waiting. She looked cool and in charge, and if she
could fool herself she could fool anybody.
She was just going to have to tough it out with Gail Andrews.
OK, she had given her a hard time. Sorry but that's the game
we're all in - that sort of thing. Ms Andrews had agreed to do
the interview because she had a new book out and TV exposure
was free publicity. But there's no such thing as a free launch.
No, she edited that line out again.
What had happened was this:
Last week astronomers had announced that they had at last
discovered a tenth planet, out beyond the orbit of Pluto. They
had been searching for it for years, guided by certain orbital
anomalies in the outer planets, and now they'd found it and they
were all terribly pleased, and everyone was terribly happy for
them and so on. The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly
nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer's parrot - there was
some tediously heart-warming story attached to this - and that
was all very wonderful and lovely.
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摘要:

file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Mostly%20Harmless.txtDouglasAdams.MostlyharmlessAnythingthathappens,happens.Anythingthat,inhappening,causessomethingelsetohappen,causessomethingelsetohappen.Anythingthat,inhappening,causesitselftohappenagain,happensagain.Itdoesn'tnecessarilydoitinchronologicalorder,though...

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