Ah, here it came. His childhood. Hum drum stuff, he’d been through it all before. Images flashed by. Boring times on Betelgeuse Five. Zaphod Beeblebrox as a kid. Yes he knew all that. He wished he had some kind of fast forward in his brain. His seventh birthday party, being given his first towel. Come on, come on.
He was twisting and turning downwards, the outside air at this height a cold shock to his lungs. Trying not to inhale glass.
Early voyages to other planets. Oh for Zark’s sake, this was like some sort of bloody travelogue documentary before the main feature. First beginning to work for the Guide.
Ah!
Those were the days. They worked out of a hut on the Bwenelli Atoll on Fanalla before the Riktanarqals and the Danqueds vertled it. Half a dozen guys, some towels, a handful of highly sophisticated digital devices, and most importantly a lot of dreams. No. Most importantly a lot of Fanallan rum. To be completely accurate, that Ol’ Janx Spirit was the absolute most important thing, then the Fanallan rum, and also some of the beaches on the Atoll where the local girls would hang out, but the dreams were important as well. Whatever happened to those?
He couldn’t quite remember what the dreams were in fact, but they had seemed immensely important at the time. They had certainly not involved this huge towering office block he was now falling down the side of. All of that had come when some of the original team had started to settle down and get greedy, while he and others had stayed out in the field, researching and hitch hiking, and gradually becoming more and more isolated from the corporate nightmare the Guide had inexorably turned into, and the architectural monstrosity it had come to occupy. Where were the dreams in that? He thought of all the corporate lawyers who occupied half of the building, all the `operatives’ who occupied the lower levels, and all the sub-editors and their secretaries and their secretaries’ lawyers and their secretaries’ lawyers’ secretaries, and worst of all the accountants and the marketing department.
He had half a mind just to keep on falling. Two fingers to the lot of them.
He was just passing the seventeenth floor now, where the marketing department hung out. Load of tosspots all arguing about what colour the Guide should be and exercising their infinitely infallible skills of being wise after the event. If any of them had chosen to look out of the window at that moment they would have been startled by the sight of Ford Prefect dropping past them to his certain death and flicking V-signs at them.
Sixteenth floor. Sub-editors. Bastards. What about all that copy of his they’d cut? Fifteen years of research he’d filed from one planet alone and they’d cut it to two words. `Mostly Harmless.’ V-signs to them as well.
Fifteenth floor. Logistical Administration, whatever that was about. They all had big cars. That, he thought, was what that was about.
Fourteenth floor. Personnel. He had a very shrewd suspicion that it was they who had engineered his fifteen-year exile while the Guide metamorphosed into the corporate monolith (or rather, duolith – mustn’t forget the lawyers) it had become.
Thirteenth floor. Research and development.
Hang about.
Thirteenth floor.
He was having to think rather fast at the moment because 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?