Dirk Gently 1 - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Dirk Gently 1 - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Dirk Gently 1 - Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency By Adams, Douglas To my mother, who liked the bit about the horse AUTHOR’S NOTE The physical descriptions of St Cedd’s College in this book, inso far as they are specific at all, owe a little to my memories of StJohn’s College, Cambridge, although I’ve also borrowed indiscriminatelyfrom other colleges as well. Sir Isaac Newton was at Trinity College inreal life, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at Jesus. The point is that St Cedd’s College is a completely fictitiousassemblage, and no correspondence is intended between any institutionsor characters in this book and any real institutions or people, living,dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment. This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh Pluscomputer and LaserWriter Plus printer using MacAuthor word-processingsoftware. The completed document was then printed using a Linotron 100 atThe Graphics Factory, London SW3, to produce a final high-resolutionimage of the text. My thanks to Mike Glover of Icon Technology for hishelp with this process. Finally, my very special thanks are due to Sue Freestone for allher help in nursing this book into existence. Douglas Adams London, 1987 Dirk Gently 1 - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency CHAPTER 1 This time there would be no witnesses. This time there was just the dead earth, a rumble of thunder, andthe onset of that interminable light drizzle from the north-east bywhich so many of the world’s most momentous events seem to beaccompanied. The storms of the day before, and of the day before that, and thefloods of the previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulgedwith rain, but all that actually fell in the gathering evening gloomwas a dreary kind of prickle. Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered throughthe low hills and gusted across a shallow valley where stood astructure, a kind of tower, alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning. It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusionof magma from one of the more pestilential pits of hell, and it leanedat a peculiar angle, as if oppressed by something altogether moreterrible than its own considerable weight. It seemed a dead thing, longages dead. The only movement was that of a river of mud that movedsluggishly along the bottom of the valley past the tower. A mile or sofurther on, the river ran down a ravine and disappeared underground. But as the evening darkened it became apparent that the tower wasnot entirely without life. There was a single dim red light guttering deep within it. The light was only just visible — except of course that therewas no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was neverthelessa light. Every few minutes it grew a little stronger and a littlebrighter and then faded slowly away almost to nothing. At the same timea low keening noise drifted out on the wind, built up to a kind ofwailing climax, and then it too faded, abjectly, away. Time passed, and then another light appeared, a smaller, mobilelight. It emerged at ground level and moved in a single bobbing circuitof the tower, pausing occasionally on its way around. Then it, and theshadowy figure that could just be discerned carrying it, disappearedinside once more. An hour passed, and by the end of it the darkness was total. Theworld seemed dead, the night a blankness. And then the glow appeared again near the tower’s peak, this timegrowing in power more purposefully. It quickly reached the peak ofbrightness it had previously attained, and then kept going, increasing,increasing. The keening sound that accompanied it rose in pitch andstridency until it became a wailing scream. The scream screamed on andon till it became a blinding noise and the light a deafening redness. And then, abruptly, both ceased. There was a millisecond of silent darkness. An astonishing pale new light billowed and bulged from deepwithin the mud beneath the tower. The sky clenched, a mountain of mudconvulsed, earth and sky bellowed at each other, there was a horriblepinkness, a sudden greenness, a lingering orangeness that stained theclouds, and then the light sank and the night at last was deeply,hideously dark. There was no further sound other than the soft tinkleof water. But in the morning the sun rose with an unaccustomed sparkle on aday that was, or seemed to be, or at least would have seemed to be ifthere had been anybody there to whom it could seem to be anything atall, warmer, clearer and brighter — an altogether livelier day thanany yet known. A clear river ran through the shattered remains of thevalley. And time began seriously to pass. Dirk Gently 1 - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency CHAPTER 2 High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down intoanother valley, with which it was having a problem. The day was hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat downupon the grey rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, noteven the Monk. The horse’s tail moved a little, swishing slightly totry and move a little air, but that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved. The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasheror a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thussaving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watchedtedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at ityourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you whatwas becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all thethings the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and hadstarted to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing inSalt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Norhad it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number ofmiles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah. The problem with the valley was this. The Monk currently believedthat the valley and everything in the valley and around it, includingthe Monk itself and the Monk’s horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink.This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing fromany other thing, and therefore made doing anything or going anywhereimpossible, or at least difficult and dangerous. Hence the immobilityof the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up witha lot of silly things in its time but was secretly of the opinion thatthis was one of the silliest. How long did the Monk believe these things? Well, as far as the Monk was concerned, forever. The faith whichmoves mountains, or at least believes them against all the availableevidence to be pink, was a solid and abiding faith, a great rockagainst which the world could hurl whatever it would, yet it would notbe shaken. In practice, the horse knew, twenty-four hours was usuallyabout its lot. So what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions, and wassceptical about things? Unusual behaviour for a horse, wasn’t it? Anunusual horse perhaps? No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well-built exampleof its species, it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, suchas convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life isto be found. They have always understood a great deal more than theylet on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some othercreature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, everyday, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thoughtabout them whatsoever. When the early models of these Monks were built, it was felt tobe important that they be instantly recognisable as artificial objects.There must be no danger of their looking at all like real people. Youwouldn’t want your video recorder lounging around on the sofa all daywhile it was watching TV. You wouldn’t want it picking its nose,drinking beer and sending out for pizzas. So the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design andalso for practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People,and indeed things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs wereheld to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primesof seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were givenwas pinkish-looking instead of purple, soft and smooth instead ofcrenellated. They were also restricted to just one mouth and nose, butwere given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two.A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing themost preposterous things. This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too muchto believe in one day. It was, by mistake, cross-connected to a videorecorder that was watching eleven TV channels simultaneously, and thiscaused it to blow a bank of illogic circuits. The video recorder onlyhad to watch them, of course. It didn’t have to believe them all aswell. This is why instruction manuals are so important. So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that goodwas bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed alot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe that thirty-five percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and thenbroke down. The man from the Monk shop said that it needed a whole newmotherboard, but then pointed out that the new improved Monk Plusmodels were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi- taskingNegative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteenentirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneouslywithout generating any irritating system errors, were twice as fast andat least three times as glib, and you could have a whole new one forless than the cost of replacing the motherboard of the old model. That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it couldbelieve what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard doneby. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap tomake. For a number of days and nights, which it variously believed tobe three, forty-three, and five hundred and ninety-eight thousand sevenhundred and three, it roamed the desert, putting its simple Electrictrust in rocks, birds, clouds and a form of non-existent elephant -?asparagus, until at last it fetched up here, on this high rock,overlooking a valley that was not, despite the deep fervour of theMonk’s belief, pink. Not even a little bit. Time passed.