Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [24]
“You mean you’re on the wrong planet?” said the man, lugubriously. “Funny how many people say that. ’Specially the people who live here.” He eyed the remains of the boghog with a deep, ancestral resentment.
“Oh no,” said Arthur, “it’s the right planet, all right.” He picked up the damp brochure lying on the bed and put it in his pocket. “It’s okay, thanks, I’ll take that,” he said, taking his case from the man. He went to the door and looked out into the cold, wet night.
“Yes, it’s the right planet, all right,” he said again. “Right planet, wrong universe.”
A single bird wheeled in the sky above him as he set off back for the spaceport.
Chapter 8
Ford had his own code of ethics. It wasn’t much of one, but it was his and he stuck by it, more or less. One rule he made was never to buy his own drinks. He wasn’t sure if that counted as an ethic, but you have to go with what you’ve got. He was also firmly and utterly opposed to all and any forms of cruelty to any animals whatsoever except geese. And furthermore he would never steal from his employers.
Well, not exactly steal.
If his accounts supervisor didn’t start to hyperventilate and put out a seal-all-exits security alert when Ford handed in his expenses claim, then Ford felt he wasn’t doing his job properly. But actually stealing was another thing. That was biting the hand that feeds you. Sucking very hard on it, even nibbling it in an affectionate kind of a way was okay, but you didn’t actually bite it. Not when that hand was the Guide. The Guide was something sacred and special.
But that, thought Ford as he ducked and weaved his way down through the building, was about to change. And they had only themselves to blame. Look at all this stuff. Lines of neat gray office cubicles and executive workstation pods. The whole place was dreary with the hum of memos and minutes of meetings flitting through its electronic networks. Out in the street they were playing Hunt the Wocket, for Zark’s sake, but here in the very heart of the Guide offices no one was even recklessly kicking a ball around the corridors or wearing inappropriately colored beachwear.
“InfiniDim Enterprises,” Ford snarled to himself as he stalked rapidly down one corridor after another. Door after door magically opened to him without question. Elevators took him happily to places they should not. Ford was trying to pursue the most tangled and complicated route he could, heading generally downward through the building. His happy little robot took care of everything, spreading waves of acquiescent joy through all the security circuits it encountered.
Ford thought it needed a name and decided to call it Emily Saunders, after a girl he had very fond memories of. Then he thought that Emily Saunders was an absurd name for a security robot, and decided to call it Colin instead, after Emily’s dog.
He was moving deep into the bowels of the building now, into areas he had never entered before, areas of higher and higher security. He was beginning to encounter puzzled looks from the operatives he passed. At this level of security you didn’t even call them people anymore. And they were probably doing stuff that only operatives would do. When they went home to their families in the evening they became people again, and when their little children looked up to them with their sweet shining eyes and said, “Daddy, what did you do all day today?” they just said, “I performed my duties as an operative,” and left it at that.
The truth of the matter was that all sorts of highly dodgy stuff went on behind the cheery, happy-go-lucky front that the Guide liked to put up-or used to like to put up before this new InfiniDim Enterprises bunch marched in and started to make the whole thing highly dodgy. There were all kinds of tax scams and rackets and graft and shady deals supporting the shining edifice, and down in the secure research and data processing levels of the building was where it all went on.
Every few years the Guide would set up its business, and indeed its building, on a new