the situation was becoming a little urgent.
He suddenly remembered the floor display panel in the eleva-
tor. It hadn't had a thirteenth floor. He'd thought no more about
it because, having spent fifteen years on the rather backward
planet Earth where they were superstitious about the number
thirteen, he was used to being in buildings that numbered their
floors without it. No reason for that here, though.
The windows of the thirteenth floor, he could not help noticing
as he flashed swiftly by them, were darkened.
What was going on in there? He started to remember all
the stuff that Harl had been talking about. One, new, multi-
dimensional Guide spread across an infinite number of universes.
It had sounded, the way Harl had put it, like wild meaninglessness
dreamed up by the marketing department with the backing of the
accountants. If it was any more real than that then it was a very
weird and dangerous idea. Was it real? What was going on behind
the darkened windows of the sealed-off thirteenth floor?
Ford felt a rising sense of curiosity, and then a rising sense
of panic. That was the complete list of rising feelings he had. In
every other respect he was falling very rapidly. He really ought
to turn his mind to wondering how he was going to get out of
this situation alive.
He glanced down. A hundred feet or so below him people
were milling around, some of them beginning to look up expect-
antly. Clearing a space for him. Even temporarily calling off the
wonderful and completely fatuous hunt for wockets.
He would hate to disappoint them, but about two feet below
him, he hadn't realised before, was Colin. Colin had obviously
been happily dancing attendance and waiting for him to decide
what he wanted to do.
`Colin!' Ford bawled.
Colin didn't respond. Ford went cold. Then he suddenly
realised that he hadn't told Colin his name was Colin.
`Come up here!' Ford bawled.
Colin bobbed up beside him. Colin was enjoying the ride
down immensely and hoped that Ford was, too.
Colin's world went unexpectedly dark as Ford's towel suddenly
enveloped him. Colin immediately felt himself get much, much
heavier. He was thrilled and delighted by the challenge that Ford
had presented him with. Just not sure if he could handle it, that
was all.
The towel was slung over Colin. Ford was hanging from the
towel, gripping to its seams. Other hitch hikers had seen fit to
modify their towels in exotic ways, weaving all kinds of esoteric
tools and utilities and even computer equipment into their fabric.
Ford was a purist. He liked to keep things simple. He carried
a regular towel from a regular domestic soft furnishings shop.
It even had a kind of blue and pink floral pattern despite his
repeated attempts to bleach and stone wash it. It had a couple
of pieces of wire threaded into it, a bit of flexible writing stick,
and also some nutrients soaked into one of the corners of the
fabric so he could suck it in an emergency, but otherwise it was
a simple towel you could dry your face on.
The only actual modification he had been persuaded by a
friend to make to it was to reinforce the seams.
Ford gripped the seams like a maniac.
They were still descending, but the rate had slowed.
`Up, Colin!' he shouted.
Nothing.
`Your name,' shouted Ford, `is Colin. So when I shout ``Up,
Colin!'' I want you, Colin, to go up. OK? Up, Colin!'
Nothing. Or rather a sort of muffled groaning sound from
Colin. Ford was very anxious. They were descending very slow-
ly now, but Ford was very anxious about the sort of people he
could see assembling on the ground beneath him. Friendly,
local, wocket-hunting types were dispersing, and thick, heavy,
bull-necked, slug-like creatures with rocket launchers were, it
seemed, sliding out of what was usually called thin air. Thin
air, as all experienced Galactic travellers well know, is, in fact,
extremely thick with multi-dimensional complexities.
`Up,' bellowed Ford again. `Up! Colin, go up!'
Colin was straining and groaning. They were now more or
less stationary in the air. Ford felt as if his fingers were breaking.
`Up!'
They stayed put.
`Up, up, up!'
A slug was preparing to launch a rocket at him. Ford couldn't
believe it. He was hanging from a towel in mid-air and a slug
was preparing to fire rockets at him. He was running out of
anything he could think of doing and was beginning to get
seriously alarmed.
This was the sort of predicament that he usually relied on
having the Guide available for to give advice, however infuriating
or glib, but this was not a moment for reaching into his pocket.
And the Guide seemed to be no longer a friend and ally but was
now itself a source of danger. These were the Guide offices he
was hanging outside, for Zark's sake, in danger of his life from
the people who now appeared to own the thing. What had become
of all the dreams he vaguely remembered having on the Bwenelli
Atoll? They should have let it all be. They should have stayed
there. Stayed on the beach. Loved good women. Lived on fish.
He should have known it was all wrong the moment they started
hanging grand pianos over the sea-monster pool in the atrium.
He began to feel thoroughly wasted and miserable. His fingers
were on fire with clenched pain. And his ankle was still hurting.
Oh thank you, ankle, he thought to himself bitterly. Thank
you for bringing up your problems at this time. I expect you'd
like a nice warm footbath to make you feel better, wouldn't you?
Or at least you'd like me to...
He had an idea.
The armoured slug had hoisted the rocket launcher up on to
its shoulder. The rocket was presumably designed to hit anything
in its path that moved.
Ford tried not to sweat because he could feel his grip on
the seams of his towel slipping.
With the toe of his good foot he nudged and prised at
the heel of the shoe on his hurting foot.
`Go up, damn you!' Ford muttered hopelessly to Colin, who
was cheerily straining away but unable to rise. Ford worked away
at the heel of his shoe.
He was trying to judge the timing, but there was no point.
Just go for it. He only had one shot and that was it. He had
now eased the back of his shoe down off his heel. His twisted
ankle felt a little better. Well that was good, wasn't it?
With his other foot he kicked at the heel of the shoe. It slipped
off his foot and fell through the air. About half a second later a
rocket erupted up from the muzzle of its launcher, encountered
the shoe falling through its path, went straight for it, hit it, and
exploded with a great sense of satisfaction and achievement.
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
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 requited 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.')