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“Do I get an exclusive?”
“Yes.”
“I’m your girl,” said Tricia, thinking that at the very least she could sell it to the National Enquirer.
As she boarded the craft that would take her off to the farthest limits of the solar system, the first thing that met her eyes was a bank of video monitors across which thousands of images were sweeping. A fourth alien was sitting watching them, but was focused on one particular screen that held a steady image. It was a replay of the impromptu interview which Tricia had just conducted with his three colleagues. He looked up when he saw her apprehensively climbing in.
“Good evening, Ms. McMillan,” he said. “Nice camera work.”
Chapter 6
Ford Prefect hit the ground ru
All over the building, alarms were erupting into their usual frenzy of excitement. He dove for cover behind the usual storage cabinets, glanced around to check that he was unseen and started rapidly to fish around inside his satchel for the usual things he needed.
His ankle, unusually, was hurting like hell.
The ground was not only three inches farther from the ventilation shaft than he remembered, it was also on a different planet than he remembered, but it was the three inches that had caught him by surprise. The offices of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were quite often shifted at very short notice to another planet, for reasons of local climate, local hostility, power bills or taxes, but they were always reconstructed exactly the same way, almost to the very molecule. For many of the company’s employees, the layout of their offices represented the only constant they knew in a severely distorted personal universe.
Something, though, was odd.
This was not in itself surprising, thought Ford as he pulled out his lightweight throwing towel. Virtually everything in his life was, to a greater or lesser extent, odd. It was just that this was odd in a slightly different way than he was used to things being odd, which was, well, strange. He couldn’t quite get it into focus immediately.
He got out his no. 3-gauge prising tool.
The alarms were going in the same old way that he knew well. There was a kind of music to them that he could almost hum along to. That was all very familiar. The world outside had been a new one to Ford. He had not been to Saquo-Pilia Hensha before, and he liked it. It had a kind of carnival atmosphere to it.
He took from his satchel a toy bow and arrow, which he had bought in a street market.
He had discovered that the reason for the carnival atmosphere on Saquo-Pilia Hensha was that the local people were celebrating the a
The familiar H-shaped building of the Hitchhiker’s Guide offices rose above the outskirts of the city, and Ford Prefect, on arriving at it, had broken into it in the familiar way. He always entered via the ventilation system rather than the main lobby because the main lobby was patrolled by robots whose job it was to quiz incoming employees about their expense accounts. Ford Prefect’s expense accounts were notoriously complex and difficult affairs and he had found, on the whole, that the lobby robots were ill-equipped to understand the arguments he wished to put forward in relation to them, and he preferred, therefore, to make his entrance by another route.
This meant setting off nearly every alarm in the building, but not the one in the accounts department, which was the way that Ford preferred it.
He hunkered down behind the storage cabinet, licked the rubber suction cup of the toy arrow and then fitted it to the string of the bow.
Within about thirty seconds a security robot the size of a small melon came flying down the corridor at about waist height, sca
With impeccable timing Ford shot the toy arrow across its path. The arrow flew across the corridor and stuck, wobbling, on the opposite wall. As it flew, the robot’s sensors locked onto it instantly and the robot twisted through ninety degrees to follow it, see what the hell it was and where it was going.
This bought Ford one precious second, during which the robot was looking in the opposite direction from him. He hurled the towel over the flying robot and caught it.
Because of the various sensory protuberances with which the robot was festooned, it couldn’t maneuver inside the towel, and it just twitched back and forth without being able to turn and face its captor.
Ford hauled it quickly toward him and pi
Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted mille
A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.
It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, Ah! A herring sandwich …, etc, and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot.
The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and i