`Oh yes? Whose?’
`Never you mind. Then, what with one thing and another, I thought it prudent to jump out of the window again, being fresh out of other options at the time. Luckily for me the jetcar was there otherwise I would have had to fall back on ingenious quick-thinking, agility, maybe another shoe or, failing all else, the ground. But it meant that, whether I liked it or not, the Guide was, well, working for me, and that was deeply worrying.’
`Why?’
`Because if you’ve got the Guide you think that you are the one it’s working for. Everything went swimmingly smoothly for me from then on, up to the very moment that I come up against the totty with the rock, then, bang, I’m history. I’m out of the loop.’
`Are you referring to my daughter?’
`As politely as I can. She’s the next one in the chain who will think that everything is going fabulously for her. She can beat whoever she likes around the head with bits of the landscape, everything will just swim for her until she’s done whatever she’s supposed to do and then it will be all up for her too. It’s reverse temporal engineering, and clearly nobody understood what was being unleashed!’
`Like me for instance.’
`What? Oh, wake up, Arthur. Look, let me try it again. The new Guide came out of the research labs. It made use of this new technology of Unfiltered Perception. Do you know what that means?’
`Look, I’ve been making sandwiches for Bob’s sake!’
`Who’s Bob?’
`Never mind. Just carry on.’
`Unfiltered Perception means it perceives everything. Got that? I don’t perceive everything. You don’t perceive everything. We have filters. The new Guide doesn’t have any sense filters. It perceives everything. It wasn’t a complicated technological idea. It was just a question of leaving a bit out. Got it?’
`Why don’t I just say that I’ve got it, and then you can carry on regardless.’
`Right. Now because the bird can perceive every possible Universe. it is present in every possible universe. Yes?’
`Y… e… e… s. Ish.’
`So what happens is, the bozos in the marketing and account- ing departments say, oh that sounds good, doesn’t that mean we only have to make one of them and then sell it an infinite number of times? Don’t squint at me like that, Arthur, this is how accountants think!’
`That’s quite clever, isn’t it?’
`No! It is fantastically stupid. Look. The machine’s only a little Guide. It’s got some quite clever cybertechnology in it, but because it has Unfiltered Perception, any smallest move it makes has the power of a virus. It can propagate throughout space, time and a million other dimensions. Anything can be focused anywhere in any of the universes that you and I move in. Its power is recursive. Think of a computer program. Somewhere, there is one key instruction, and everything else is just functions calling themselves, or brackets billowing out endlessly through an infinite address space. What happens when the brackets collapse? Where’s the final “end if”? Is any of this making sense? Arthur?’
`Sorry, I was nodding off for a moment. Something about the Universe, yes?’
`Something about the Universe, yes,’ said Ford, wearily. He sat down again.
`All right,’ he said. `Think about this. You know who I think I saw at the Guide offices? Vogons. Ah. I see I’ve said a word you understand at last.’
Arthur leapt to his feet.
`That noise,’ he said.
`What noise?’
`The thunder.’
`what about it?’
`It isn’t thunder. It’s the spring migration of the Perfectly Normal Beasts. It’s started.’
`What are these animals you keep on about?’
`I don’t keep on about them. I just put bits of them in sandwiches.’
`Why are they called Perfectly Normal Beasts?’
Arthur told him.
It wasn’t often that Arthur had the pleasure of seeing Ford’s eyes open wide with astonishment.
19
It was a sight that Arthur never quite got used to, or tired of. He and Ford had tracked their way swiftly along the side of the small river that flowed down along the bed of the valley, and when at last they reached the margin of the plains they pulled themselves up into the branches of a large tree to get a better view of one of the stranger and more wonderful visions that the Galaxy has to offer.