fulfilment and easing his path for him at every stage.
Alarms were starting to go off in other parts of the building. Perhaps that meant that Vann Harl had already been discovered, which might be a problem. Ford had been hoping he would be able to slip the Ident-i-Eeze back into his pocket before he came round. Well, that was a problem for later, and he didn't for the moment have the faintest idea how he was going to solve it. For the moment he wasn't going to worry. Wherever he went with little Colin, he was surrounded by a cocoon of sweetness and light and, most importantly, willing and acquiescent elevators and positively obsequious doors.
Ford even began to whistle, which was probably his mistake. Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes our ends.
The next door wouldn't open.
And that was a pity, because it was the very one that Ford had been making for. It stood there before him, grey and resolutely closed with a sign on it saying:
NO ADMITTANCE. NOT EVEN TO AUTHORISED PERSONNEL. YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE. GO AWAY.
Colin reported that the doors had been getting generally a lot grimmer down in these lower reaches of the building.
They were about ten stories below ground level now. The air was refrigerated and the tasteful grey hessian wall-weave had given way to brutal grey bolted steel walls. Colin's rampant euphoria had subsided into a kind of determined cheeriness. He said that he was beginning to tire a little. It was taking all his energy to pump the slightest bonhomie whatsoever into the doors down here.
Ford kicked at the door. It opened.
'Mixture of pleasure and pain,' he muttered. 'Always does the trick.'
He walked in and Colin flew in after him. Even with a wire stuck straight into his pleasure electrode his happiness was a nervous kind of happiness. He bobbed around a little.
The room was small, grey and humming.
This was the nerve centre of the entire Guide.
The computer terminals that lined the grey walls were win– dows on to every aspect of the Guide's operations. Here, on the left-hand side of the room, reports were gathered over the Sub– Etha-Net from field researchers in every corner of the Galaxy, fed straight up into the network of sub-editor's offices where they had all the good bits cut out by secretaries because the sub-editors were out having lunch. The remaining copy would then be shot across to the other half of the building – the other leg of the 'H'
– which was the legal department. The legal department would cut out anything that was still even remotely good from what remained and fire it back to the offices of the executive editors, who were also out at lunch. So the editors' secretaries would read it and say it was stupid and cut most of what was left.
When any of the editors finally staggered in from lunch they would exclaim 'What is this feeble crap that X' – where X was the name of the field researcher in question – 'has sent us from half-way across the bloody Galaxy? What's the point of having somebody spending three whole orbital periods out in the bloody Gagrakacka Mind Zones, with all that stuff going on out there, if this load of anaemic squitter is the best he can be bothered to send us. Disallow his expenses!'
'What shall we do with the copy?' the secretary would ask.
'Ah, put it out over the network. Got to have something going out there. I've got a headache, I'm going home.'
So the edited copy would go for one last slash and burn through the legal department, and then be sent back down here where it would be broadcast out over the Sub-Etha-Net for instantaneous retrieval anywhere in the Galaxy. That was handled by equipment which was monitored and controlled by the terminals on the right-hand side of the room.
Meanwhile the order to disallow the researcher's expenses was relayed down to the computer terminal stuck off in the right-hand corner, and it was to this terminal that Ford Prefect now swiftly made his way.
(If you are reading this on planet Earth then:
a) Good luck to you. There is an awful lot of stuff you don't know anything about, but you are not alone in this. It's just that in your case the consequences of not knowing any of this stuff are particularly terrible, but then, hey, that's just the way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated.
b) Don't imagine you know what a computer terminal is. A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.) Ford hurried over to the terminal, sat in front of it and quickly dipped himself into its universe.
It wasn't the normal universe he knew. It was a universe of densely enfolded worlds, of wild topographies, towering moun– tain peaks, heart stopping ravines, of moons shattering off into sea horses, hurtful blurting crevices, silently heaving oceans and bottomless hurtling hooping funts.
He held still to get his bearings. He controlled his breathing, closed his eyes and looked again.
So this was where accountants spent their time. There was clearly more to them than met the eye. He looked around carefully, trying not to let it all swell and swim and overwhelm him.
He didn't know his way around this universe. He didn't even know the physical laws that determined its dimensional extents or behaviours, but his instinct told him to look for the most outstanding feature he could detect and make towards it.
Way off in some indistinguishable distance – was it a mile or a million or a mote in his eye? – was a stunning peak that overarched the sky, climbed and climbed and spread out in flowering aigrettes 1, agglomerates 2, and archimandrites 3.
He weltered towards it, hooling and thurling, and at last reached it in a meaninglessly long umthingth of time.
He clung to it, arms outspread, gripping tightly on to its roughly gnarled and pitted surface. Once he was certain that he was secure he made the hideous mistake of looking down.
While he had been weltering, hooling and thurling, the distance beneath him had not bothered him unduly, but now that he was gripping, the distance made his heart wilt and his brain bend. His fingers were white with pain and tension. His teeth were grinding and twisting against each other beyond his control. His eyes turned inwards with waves from the willowing extremities of nausea.
With an immense effort of will and faith he simply let go and pushed.
He felt himself float. Away. And then, counter-intuitively, upwards. And upwards.
He threw his shoulders back, let his arms drop, gazed upwards and let himself be drawn loosely, higher and higher.
Before long, insofar as such terms had any meaning in this virtual universe, a ledge loomed up ahead of him on which he could grip and on to which he could clamber.
He rose, he gripped, he clambered.
He panted a little. This was all a little stressful.
He held tightly on to the ledge as he sat. He wasn't certain if this was to prevent himself from falling down off it or rising up from it, but he needed something to grip on to as he surveyed the world in which he found himself.
The whirling, turning height span him and twisted his brain in upon itself till he found himself, eyes closed, whimpering and hugging the hideous wall of towering rock.
He slowly brought his breathing back under control again. He told himself repeatedly that he was just in a graphic rep– resentation of a world. A virtual universe. A simulated reality. He could snap back out of it at any moment.
He snapped back out of it.
He was sitting in a blue leatherette foam filled swivel-seated office chair in front of a computer terminal.
He relaxed.
He was clinging to the face of an impossibly high peak perched on a narrow ledge above a drop of brain- swivelling dimensions.
