Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [42]
He closed his eyes, which he’d been wanting to do for a bit anyway. He wondered what the hell to do next. Jump? Climb? He didn’t think there was going to be any way of breaking in. Okay, the supposedly rocket-proof glass hadn’t stood up, when it came to it, to an actual rocket, but then that had been a rocket that had been fired at very short range from inside, which probably wasn’t what the engineers who designed it had had in mind. It didn’t mean he was going to be able to break the window here by wrapping his fist in his towel and punching. What the hell, he tried it anyway and hurt his fist. It was just as well he couldn’t get a good swing from where he was sitting or he might have hurt it quite badly. The building had been sturdily reinforced when it was completely rebuilt after the Frogstar attack and was probably the most heavily armored publishing company in the business, but there was always, he thought, some weakness in any system designed by a corporate committee. He had already found one of them. The engineers who designed the windows had not expected them to be hit by a rocket from short range from the inside, so the window had failed.
So, what would the engineers not be expecting someone sitting on the ledge outside the window to do?
He wracked his brains for a moment or so before he got it.
The thing they wouldn’t be expecting him to do was to be there in the first place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, so he was winning already. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
He pulled his newly acquired credit card from his pocket, slid it into the crack where the window met its surrounding frame and did something a rocket would not have been able to do. He wiggled it around a bit. He felt a catch slip. He slid the window open and almost fell backward off the ledge laughing, giving thanks as he did so for the Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454.
The Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454 had started off as just a lot of hot air. Hot air was, of course, the problem that ventilation was supposed to solve and generally it had solved the problem reasonably well up to the point that someone invented air-conditioning, which solved the problem far more throbbingly.
And that was all well and good, provided you could stand the noise and the dribbling until someone else came up with something even sexier and smarter than air-conditioning, which was called in-building climate control.
Now this was quite something.
The major differences from just ordinary air-conditioning were that it was thrillingly more expensive, and involved a huge amount of sophisticated measuring and regulating equipment which was far better at knowing, moment by moment, what kind of air people wanted to breathe than mere people did.
It also meant that, to be sure that mere people didn’t muck up the sophisticated calculations which the system was making on their behalf, all the windows in the buildings were built sealed shut. This is true.
While the systems were being installed, a number of the people who were going to work in the buildings found themselves having conversations with Breathe-O-Smart systems fitters which went something like this:
“But what if we want to have the windows open?”
“You won’t want to have the windows open with new Breathe-O-Smart.”
“Yes, but supposing we just wanted to have them open for a little bit?”
“You won’t want to have them open even for a little bit. The new Breathe-O-Smart system will see to that.”
“Hmmm.”
“Enjoy Breathe-O-Smart!”
“Okay, so what if the Breathe-O-Smart breaks down or goes wrong or something?”
“Ah! One of the smartest features of the Breathe-O-Smart