AllFreeNovel
Share Us
This happened about fifteen feet from the ground.
The main force of the explosion was directed downwards. Where, a second earlier, there had been a squad of InfiniDim Enterprises executives with a rocket launcher standing on an elegant terraced plaza paved with large slabs of lustrous stone cut from the ancient alabastrum quarries of Zentalquabula there was now, instead, a bit of a pit with nasty bits in it.
A great wump of hot air welled up from the explosion throwing Ford and Colin violently up into the sky. Ford fought desperately and blindly to hold on and failed. He turned helplessly upwards through the sky, reached the peak of a parabola, paused and then started to fall again. He fell and fell and fell and suddenly winded himself badly on Colin, who was still rising.
He clasped himself desperately on to the small spherical robot. Colin slewed wildly through the air towards the tower of the Guide offices, trying delightedly to control himself and slow down.
The world span sickeningly round Ford's head as they span and twisted round each other and then, equally sickeningly, everything suddenly stopped.
Ford found himself deposited dizzily on a window ledge.
His towel fell past and he grabbed at it and caught it.
Colin bobbed in the air inches away from him.
Ford looked around himself in a bruised, bleeding and breath-less daze. The ledge was only about a foot wide and he was perched precariously on it, thirteen stories up.
Thirteen.
He knew they were thirteen stories up because the windows were dark. He was bitterly upset. He had bought those shoes for some absurd price in a store on the Lower East Side in New York. He had, as a result, written an entire essay on the joys of great footwear, all of which had been jettisoned in the 'Mostly harmless' debacle. Damn everything.
And now one of the shoes was gone. He threw his head back and stared at the sky.
It wouldn't be such a grim tragedy if the planet in question hadn't been demolished, which meant that he wouldn't even be able to get another pair.
Yes, given the infinite sideways extension of probability there was, of course, an almost infinite multiplicity of planets Earth, but, when you came down to it, a major pair of shoes wasn't something you could just replace by mucking about in multi-dimensional space/time.
He sighed.
Oh well, he'd better make the best of it. At least it had saved his life. For the time being.
He was perched on a foot-wide ledge thirteen stories up the side of a building and he wasn't at all sure that that was worth a good shoe.
He stared in woozily through the darkened glass.
It was as dark and silent as the tomb.
No. That was a ridiculous thing to think. He'd been to some great parties in tombs.
Could he detect some movement? He wasn't quite sure. It seemed that he could see some kind of weird, flapping shad-ow. Perhaps it was just blood dribbling over his eyelashes. He wiped it away. Boy, he'd love to have a farm somewhere, keep some sheep. He peered into the window again, trying to make out what the shape was, but he had the feeling, so common in today's universe, that he was looking into some kind of optical illusion and that his eyes were just playing silly buggers with him.
Was there a bird of some kind in there? Was that what they had hidden away up here on a concealed floor behind darkened, rocket-proof glass? Someone's aviary? There was certainly something flapping about in there, but it seemed like not so much a bird, more a kind of bird-shaped hole in space.
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. OK, 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 armoured 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 is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
He pulled his newly acquired credit card from his pocket, slid it into a 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 backwards 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 when 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, 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 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!'
'OK, 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 is that it cannot possibly go wrong. So. No worries on that score. Enjoy your breathing now, and have a nice day.'
(It was, of course, as a result of the Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454, that all mechanical or electri-cal or quantum-mechanical or hydraulic or even wind, steam or piston-driven devices, are now required to have a certain legend emblazoned on them somewhere. It doesn't matter how small the object is, the designers of the object have got to find a way of squeezing the legend in somewhere, because it is their attention which is being drawn to it rather than necessarily that of the user's.
The legend is this:
'The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.') Major heat waves started to
coincide, with almost magical precision, with major failures of the Breathe-o-Smart systems. To begin with this merely caused simmering resentment and only a few deaths from asphyxiation.
The real horror erupted on the day that three events happened simultaneously. The first event was that Breathe-o-Smart Inc. issued a statement to the effect that best results were achieved by using their systems in temperate climates.
