Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [25]
When the Guide moved on, taking its building with it, it left a little like a thief in the night. Exactly like a thief in the night in fact. It usually left in the very early hours of the morning, and the following day there always turned out to be a very great deal of stuff missing. Whole cultures and economies would collapse in its wake, often within a week, leaving once-thriving planets desolate and shell-shocked but still somehow feeling they had been part of some great adventure.
The “operatives” who shot puzzled glances at Ford as he marched on into the depths of the building’s most sensitive areas were reassured by the presence of Colin, who was flying along with him in a buzz of emotional fulfillment and easing his path for him at every stage.
Alarms were starting to go off in other parts of the building. Perhaps that meant that Vann Harl had already been discovered, which might be a problem. Ford had been hoping he would be able to slip the Ident-I-Eeze back into his pocket before he came around. Well, that was a problem for later, and he didn’t for the moment have the faintest idea how he was going to solve it. For the moment he wasn’t going to worry. Wherever he went with little Colin, he was surrounded by a cocoon of sweetness and light and, most important, willing and acquiescent elevators and positively obsequious doors.
Ford even began to whistle, which was probably his mistake. Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes our ends.
The next door wouldn’t open.
And that was a pity, because it was the very one that Ford had been making for. It stood there before him, gray and resolutely closed with a sign on it saying:
NO ADMITTANCE.
NOT EVEN TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.
YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.
GO AWAY.
Colin reported that the doors had been getting generally a lot grimmer down in these lower reaches of the building.
They were about ten stories below ground level now. The air was refrigerated and the tasteful gray hessian wall-weave had given way to brutal gray bolted steel walls. Colin’s rampant euphoria had subsided into a kind of determined cheeriness. He said that he was beginning to tire a little. It was taking all his energy to pump the slightest bonhomie whatsoever into the doors down here.
Ford kicked at the door. It opened.
“Mixture of pleasure and pain,” he muttered. “Always does the trick.”
He walked in and Colin flew in after him. Even with a wire stuck straight into his pleasure electrode, his happiness was a nervous kind of happiness. He bobbed around a little.
The room was small, gray and humming.
This was the nerve center of the entire Guide.
The computer terminals that lined the gray walls were windows onto every aspect of the Guide’s operations. Here, on the left-hand side of the room, reports were gathered over the Sub-Etha-Net from field researchers in every corner of the Galaxy, fed straight up into the network of sub-editors’ offices, where they had all the good bits cut out by secretaries because the sub-editors were out having lunch. The remaining copy would then be shot across to the other half of the building-the other leg of the H-which was the legal department. The legal department would cut out anything that was still even remotely good from what remained and fire it back to the offices of the executive editors, who were also out at lunch. So the editors’ secretaries would read it and say it was stupid and cut most of what was left.
When any of the editors finally staggered in from lunch they would exclaim, “What is this feeble crap that X”-where X was the name of the field researcher in question-“has sent us from halfway across the bloody Galaxy? What’s the point of having somebody spending three whole orbital periods out in the bloody Gagrakacka Mind Zones, with all that stuff