They munched for a bit.
'It's quite good in fact,' said Ford. 'What's the meat in it?'
'Perfectly Normal Beast.'
'Not come across that one. So, the question is,' Ford con– tinued, 'who is the bird really doing it for? What's the real game here?'
'Mmm,' ate Arthur.
'When I found the bird,' continued Ford, 'which I did by a series of coincidences that are interesting in themselves, it put on the most fantastic multi-dimensional display of pyrotechnics I've ever seen. It then said that it would put its services at my disposal in my universe. I said, thanks but no thanks. It said that it would anyway, whether I liked it or not. I said just try it, and it said it would and, indeed, already had done. I said we'd see about that and it said that we would. That's when I decided pack the thing up and get it out of there. So I sent it to you for safety.'
'Oh yes? Whose?'
'Never you mind. Then, what with one thing and another, I thought it prudent to jump out of the window again, being fresh out of other options at the time. Luckily for me the jetcar was there otherwise I would have had to fall back on ingenious quick-thinking, agility, maybe another shoe or, failing all else, the ground. But it meant that, whether I liked it or not, the Guide was, well, working for me, and that was deeply worrying.'
'Why? '
'Because if you've got the Guide you think that you are the one it's working for. Everything went swimmingly smoothly for me from then on, up to the very moment that I come up against the totty with the rock, then, bang, I'm history. I'm out of the loop.'
'Are you referring to my daughter?'
'As politely as I can. She's the next one in the chain who will think that everything is going fabulously for her. She can beat whoever she likes around the head with bits of the landscape, everything will just swim for her until she's done whatever she's supposed to do and then it will be all up for her too. It's reverse temporal engineering, and clearly nobody understood what was being unleashed!'
'Like me for instance.'
'What? Oh, wake up, Arthur. Look, let me try it again. The new Guide came out of the research labs. It made use of this new technology of Unfiltered Perception. Do you know what that means?'
'Look, I've been making sandwiches for Bob's sake!'
'Who's Bob?'
'Never mind. Just carry on.'
'Unfiltered Perception means it perceives everything. Got that? I don't perceive everything. You don't perceive everything. We have filters. The new Guide doesn't have any sense filters. It perceives everything. It wasn't a complicated technological idea. It was just a question of leaving a bit out. Got it?'
'Why don't I just say that I've got it, and then you can carry on regardless.'
'Right. Now because the bird can perceive every possible Universe, it is present in every possible universe. Yes?'
'Y . . . e . . . e . . . s. Ish.'
'So what happens is, the bozos in the marketing and account– ing departments say, oh that sounds good, doesn't that mean we only have to make one of them and then sell it an infinite number of times? Don't squint at me like that, Arthur, this is how accountants think!'
'That's quite clever, isn't it?'
'No! It is fantastically stupid. Look. The machine's only a little Guide. It's got some quite clever cybertechnology in it, but because it has Unfiltered Perception, any smallest move it makes has the power of a virus. It can propagate throughout space, time and a million other dimensions. Anything can be focused anywhere in any of the universes that you and I move in. Its power is recursive. Think of a computer program. Somewhere, there is one key instruction, and everything else is just functions calling themselves, or brackets billowing out endlessly through an infinite address space. What happens when the brackets collapse? Where's the final «end if»? Is any of this making sense? Arthur?'
'Sorry, I was nodding off for a moment. Something about the Universe, yes?'
'Something about the Universe, yes,' said Ford, wearily. He sat down again.
'All right,' he said. 'Think about this. You know who I think I saw at the Guide offices? Vogons. Ah. I see I've said a word you understand at last.'
Arthur leapt to his feet.
'That noise,' he said.
'What noise?'
'The thunder.'
'What about it?'
'It isn't thunder. It's the spring migration of the Perfectly Normal Beasts. It's started.'
'What are these animals you keep on about?'
'I don't keep on about them. I just put bits of them in sandwiches.'
'Why are they called Perfectly Normal Beasts?'
Arthur told him.
It wasn't often that Arthur had the pleasure of seeing Ford's eyes open wide with astonishment.
Chapter 19
It was a sight that Arthur never quite got used to, or tired of. He and Ford had tracked their way swiftly along the side of the small river that flowed down along the bed of the valley, and when at last they reached the margin of the plains they pulled themselves up into the branches of a large tree to get a better view of one of the stranger and more wonderful visions that the Galaxy has to offer.
The great thunderous herd of thousand upon thousand of Perfectly Normal Beasts was sweeping in magnificent array across the Anhondo Plain. In the early pale light of the morning, as the great animals charged through the fine steam of the sweat of their bodies mingled with the muddy mist churned up by their pounding hooves, their appearance seemed a little unreal and ghostly anyway, but what was heart-stopping about them was where they came from and where they went to, which appeared to be, simply, nowhere.
They formed a solid, charging phalanx roughly a hundred yards wide and half a mile long. The phalanx never moved, except that it exhibited a slight gradual drift sideways and backwards for the eight or nine days that it regularly appeared for. But though the phalanx stayed more or less constant, the great beasts of which it was composed charged steadily at upwards of twenty miles an hour, appearing suddenly from thin air at one end of the plain, and disappearing equally abruptly at the other end.
No one knew where they came from, no one knew where they went. They were so important to the lives of the Lamuellans, it was almost as if nobody liked to ask. Old Thrashbarg had said on one occasion that sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away. Some of the villagers had privately said that this was the only properly wise thing they'd ever heard Thrashbarg say, and after a short debate on the matter, had put it down to chance.
The noise of the pounding of the hooves was so intense that it was hard to hear anything else above it.
'What did you say?' shouted Arthur.
'I said,' shouted Ford, 'this looks like it might be some kind of evidence of dimensional drift.'
'Which is what?' shouted Arthur back.
'Well, a lot of people are beginning to worry that space/time is showing signs of cracking up with everything that's happening to it. There are quite a lot of worlds where you can see how the landmasses have cracked up and moved around just from the weirdly long or meandering routes that migrating animals take. This might be something like that. We live in twisted times. Still, in the absence of a decent spaceport . . .'
Arthur looked at him in a kind of frozen way.
