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'Really?' said Arthur.
'Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other.'
Arthur got terribly excited. This was exactly the sort of thing he'd been promised in the brochure. Here was a man who seemed to be moving through some kind of Escher space saying really profound things about all sorts of stuff.
It was unnerving though. The man was now stepping from pole to ground, from ground to pole, from pole to pole, from pole to horizon and back: he was making complete nonsense of Arthur's spatial universe. 'Please stop!' Arthur said, suddenly.
'Can't take it, huh?' said the man. Without the slightest movement he was now back, sitting cross-legged, on top of the pole forty feet in front of Arthur. 'You come to me for advice, but you can't cope with anything you don't recognise. Hmmm. So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual I suppose.' He sighed and squinted mournfully into the distance.
'Where you from, boy?' he then asked.
Arthur decided to be clever. He was fed up with being mistaken for a complete idiot by everyone he ever met. 'Tell you what,' he said. 'You're a seer. Why don't you tell me?'
The old man sighed again. 'I was just,' he said, passing his hand round behind his head, 'making conversation.' When he brought his hand round to the front again, he had a globe of the Earth spinning on his up-pointed forefinger. It was unmistakable. He put it away again. Arthur was stunned.
'How did you- '
'I can't tell you.'
'Why not? I've come all this way.'
'You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.'
'Hang on, can I write this down?' said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.
'You can pick up a copy at the spaceport,' said the old man. 'They've got racks of the stuff.'
'Oh,' said Arthur, disappointed. 'Well, isn't there anything that's perhaps a bit more specific to me?'
'Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.'
Arthur looked at him doubtfully. 'Can I get that at the spaceport, too?' he said.
'Check it out,' said the old man.
'It says in the brochure,' said Arthur, pulling it out of his pocket and looking at it again, 'that I can have a special prayer, individually tailored to me and my special needs.'
'Oh, all right,' said the old man. 'Here's a prayer for you. Got a pencil?'
'Yes,' said Arthur.
'It goes like this. Let's see now: > That's it. It's what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.'
'Hmmm,' said Arthur. 'Well, thank you-'
'There's another prayer that goes with it that s very Impor-tant,' continued the old man, 'so you'd better jot this down, too.
in, just in case. You can never be too sure. > And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from missing out that last part.'
'Ever heard of a place called Stavromula Beta?' asked Arthur.
'No.'
'Well, thank you for your help,' said Arthur.
'Don't mention it,' said the man on the pole, and vanished.
Chapter 10
Ford hurled himself at the door of the editor-in-chief's office, tucked himself into a tight ball as the frame splintered and gave way once again, rolled rapidly across the floor to where the smart grey crushed leather sofa was and set up his strategic operational base behind it.
That, at least, was the plan Unfortunately the smart grey crushed leather sofa wasn't there.
Why, thought Ford, as he twisted himself round in mid-air, lurched, dived and scuttled for cover behind Harl's desk, did people have this stupid obsession with rearranging their office furniture every five minutes?
Why, for instance, replace a perfectly serviceable if rather muted grey crushed leather sofa with what appeared to be a small tank?
And who was the big guy with the mobile rocket launcher on his shoulder? Someone from head office? Couldn't be. This was head office. At least it was the head office of the Guide. Where these InfiniDim Enterprises guys came from Zarquon knew. Nowhere very sunny, judging from the slug-like colour and texture of their skins. This was all wrong, thought Ford. People connected with the Guide should come from sunny places.
There were several of them, in fact, and all of them seemed to be more heavily armed and armoured than you normally expected corporate executives to be, even in today's rough and tumble business world.
He was making a lot of assumptions here, of course. He was assuming that the big, bull-necked, slug-like guys were in some way connected with InfiniDim Enterprises, but it was a reasonable assumption and he felt happy about it because they had logos on their armour-plating which said 'InfiniDim Enterprises' on them. He had a nagging suspicion that this was not a business meeting, though. He also had a nagging feeling that these slug-like creatures were familiar to him in some way. Familiar, but in an unfamiliar guise.
Well, he had been in the room for a good two and a half seconds now, and thought that it was probably about time to start doing something constructive. He could take a hostage. That would be good.
Vann Harl was in his swivel chair, looking alarmed, pale and shaken. Had probably had some bad news as well as a nasty bang to the back of his head. Ford leapt to his feet and made a running grab for him.
Under the pretext of getting him into a good solid double underpinned elbow-lock, Ford managed surreptitiously to slip the Ident-i-Eeze back into Harl's inner pocket.
Bingo!
He'd done what he came to do. Now he just had to talk his way out of here.
'OK,' he said. 'I . . .' He paused.
The big guy with the rocket launcher was turning towards Ford Prefect and pointing it at him, which Ford couldn't help feeling was wildly irresponsible behaviour.
'I ...' he started again, and then on a sudden impulse decided to duck.
There was a deafening roar as flames leapt from the back of the rocket launcher and a rocket leapt from its front.
The rocket hurtled past Ford and hit the large plate-glass window, which billowed outwards in a shower of a million shards under the force of the explosion. Huge shock waves of noise and air pressure reverberated around the room, sweeping a couple of chairs, a filing cabinet and Colin the security robot out of the window.
Ah! So they're not totally rocket-proof after all, thought Ford Prefect to himself. Someone should have a word with somebody about that. He disentangled himself from Harl and tried to work out which way to run.
He was surrounded.
The big guy with the rocket launcher was moving it up into position for another shot.
Ford was completely at a loss for what to do next.
'Look,' he said in a stern voice. But he wasn't certain how far saying things like 'Look' in a stern voice was necessarily going to get him, and time was not on his side. What
the hell, he thought, you're only young once, and threw himself out of the window. That would at least keep the element of surprise on his side.
Chapter 11
The first thing Arthur Dent had to do, he realised resignedly, was to get himself a life. This meant he had to find a planet he could have one on. It had to be a planet he could breathe on, where he could stand up and sit down without experiencing gravitational discomfort. It had to be somewhere where the acid levels were low and the plants didn't actually attack you.
'I hate to be anthropic about this,' he said to the strange thing behind the desk at the Resettlement Advice Centre on Pintleton Alpha, 'but I'd quite like to live somewhere where the people look vaguely like me as well. You know. Sort of human . '
The strange thing behind the desk waved some of its stranger bits around and seemed rather taken aback by this. It oozed and glopped off its seat, thrashed its way slowly across the floor, ingested the old metal filing cabinet and then, with a great belch, excreted the appropriate drawer. It popped out a couple of glistening tentacles from its ear, removed some files from the drawer. sucked the drawer back in and vomited up the cabinet again. It thrashed its way back across the floor, slimed its way back up on to the seat and slapped the files on the table.
'See anything you fancy?' it asked.
Arthur looked nervously through some grubby and damp pieces of paper. He was definitely in some backwater part of the Galaxy here, and somewhere off to the left as far as the universe he knew and recognised was concerned. In the space where his own home should have been there was a rotten hick planet, drowned with rain and inhabited by thugs and boghogs. Even The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy seemed to work only fitfully here, which was why he was reduced to making these sorts of enquiries in these sorts of places. One place he always asked after was Stavromula Beta, but no one had ever heard of such a planet.
The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realise that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and armagnac he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was not a lot of demand for his services.
