“Then the planet got demolished,” he shouted. “Really worthwhile job, eh? They’ve still got to pay me, though.”
“You work for that thing?” the girl yelled back.
“Yeah.”
“Good number.”
“You want to see the stuff I wrote?” he shouted. “Before it gets erased? The new revisions are due to be released tonight over the net. Someone must have found out that the planet I spent fifteen years on has been demolished by now. They missed it on the last few revisions, but it can’t escape their notice for ever.”
“It’s getting impossible to talk isn’t it?”
“What?”
She shrugged and pointed upwards.
There was a copter above them now which seemed to be involved in a side skirmish with the band upstairs. Smoke was billowing from the building. The sound engineer was hanging out of the window by his fingertips, and a maddened guitarist was beating on his fingers with a burning guitar. The helicopter was firing at all of them.
“Can we move?”
They wandered down the street, away from the noise. They ran into a street theatre group which tried to do a short play for them about the problems of the inner city, but then gave up and disappeared into the small restaurant most recently patronized by the pack animal.
All the time, Ford was poking at the interface panel of the Guide. They ducked into an alleyway. Ford squatted on a garbage can while information began to flood over the screen of the Guide.
He located his entry.
“Earth: Mostly harmless.”
Almost immediately the screen became a mass of system messages.
“Here it comes,” he said.
“Please wait,” said the messages. “Entries are being updated over the Sub.Etha Net. This entry is being revised. The system will be down for ten seconds.”
At the end of the alley a steel grey limousine crawled past.
“Hey look,” said the girl, “if you get paid, look me up. I’m a working girl, and there are people over there who need me. I gotta go.”
She brushed aside Ford’s half-articulated protests, and left him sitting dejectedly on his garbage can preparing to watch a large swathe of his working life being swept away electronically into the ether.
Out in the street things had calmed down a little. The police battle had moved off to other sectors of the city, the few surviving members of the rock band had agreed to recognize their musical differences and pursue solo careers, the street theatre group were re-emerging from the pasta restaurant with the pack animal, telling it they would take it to a bar they knew where it would be treated with a little respect, and a little way further on the steel grey limousine was parked silently by the kerbside.
The girl hurried towards it.
Behind her, in the darkness of the alley, a green flickering glow was bathing Ford Prefect’s face, and his eyes were slowly widening in astonishment.
For where he had expected to find nothing, an erased, closed-off entry, there was instead a continuous stream of data – text, diagrams, figures and images, moving descriptions of surf on Australian beaches, Yoghurt on Greek islands, restaurants to avoid in Los Angeles, currency deals to avoid in Istanbul, weather to avoid in London, bars to go everywhere. Pages and pages of it. It was all there, everything he had written.
With a deepening frown of blank incomprehension he went backwards and forwards through it, stopping here and there at various entries.
“Tips for aliens in New York: Land anywhere, Central Park, anywhere. No one will care, or indeed even notice.
“Surviving: get a job as cab driver immediately. A cab driver’s job is to drive people anywhere they want to go in big yellow machines called taxis. Don’t worry if you don’t know how the machine works and you can’t speak the language, don’t understand the geography or indeed the basic physics of the area, and have large green antennae growing out of your head. Believe me, this is the best way of staying inconspicuous.
“If your body is really weird try showing it to people in the streets for money.
“Amphibious life forms from any of the worlds in the Swulling, Noxios or Nausalia systems will particularly enjoy the East River, which is said to be richer in those lovely life-giving nutrients then the finest and most virulent laboratory slime yet achieved.