Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [7]
That must throw a few calculations out, mustn’t it?
What about all those star charts and planetary motions and so on? We all knew (apparently) what happened when Neptune was in Virgo, and so on, but what about when Rupert was rising? Wouldn’t the whole of astrology have to be rethought? Wouldn’t now perhaps be a good time to own up that it was all just a load of hogwash and instead take up pig farming, the principles of which were founded on some kind of rational basis? If we’d known about Rupert three years ago, might President Hudson have been eating the chocolate flavor on Thursday rather than Friday? Might Damascus still be standing? That sort of thing.
Gail Andrews had taken it all reasonably well. She was just starting to recover from the initial onslaught, when she made the rather serious mistake of trying to shake Tricia off by talking smoothly about diurnal arcs, right ascensions and some of the more abstruse areas of three-dimensional trigonometry.
To her shock she discovered that everything she delivered to Tricia came right back at her with more spin on it than she could cope with. Nobody had warned Gail that being a TV bimbo was, for Tricia, her second stab at a role in life. Behind her Chanel lip gloss, her coupe sauvage and her crystal blue contact lenses lay a brain that had acquired for itself, in an earlier, abandoned phase of her life, a first-class degree in mathematics and a doctorate in astrophysics.
As she was getting into the elevator, Tricia, slightly preoccupied, realized she had left her bag in her room and wondered whether to duck back out and get it. No. It was probably safer where it was and there wasn’t anything she particularly needed in it. She let the door close behind her.
Besides, she told herself, taking a deep breath, if life had taught her anything it was this: Never go back for your bag.
As the elevator went down she stared at the ceiling in a rather intent way. Anyone who didn’t know Tricia McMillan better would have said that that was exactly the way people sometimes stared upward when they were trying to hold back tears. She must have been staring at the tiny security video camera mounted up in the corner. She marched rather briskly out of the elevator a minute later, and went up to the reception desk again.
“Now, I’m going to write this out,” she said, “because I don’t want anything to go wrong.”
She wrote her name in large letters on a piece of paper, then her room number, then IN THE BAR and gave it to the receptionist, who looked at it.
“That’s in case there’s a message for me. Okay?”
The receptionist continued to look at it.
“You want me to see if she’s in her room?” he said.
Two minutes later, Tricia swiveled into the bar seat next to Gail Andrews, who was sitting in front of a glass of white wine.
“You struck me as the sort of person who preferred to sit up at the bar rather than demurely at a table,” she said. This was true, and caught Tricia a little by surprise. “Vodka?” said Gail.
“Yes,” said Tricia, suspiciously. She just stopped herself from asking, How did you know? but Gail answered anyway.
“I asked the barman,” she said, with a kindly smile.
The barman had her vodka ready for her and slid it charmingly across the glossy mahogany.
“Thank you,” said Tricia, stirring it sharply.
She didn’t know quite what to make out of all this sudden niceness and was determined not to be wrong-footed by it. People in New York were not nice to each other without reason.
“Ms. Andrews,” she said, firmly, “I’m sorry that you’re not happy. I know you probably feel I was a bit rough with you this morning, but astrology is, after all, just popular entertainment, which is fine. It’s part of showbiz and it’s a part that you have done well out of and good luck to you. It’s fun. It’s not a science though, and it shouldn’t be mistaken for one. I think that’s something we both managed to demonstrate very successfully together this morning, while at the same time generating some popular entertainment, which is