Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (6 page)

The voice continued, reading the second, and altogether stranger part of the poem...

CHAPTER 7

This was the evening of the last day of Gordon Way’s life, and he was wondering if the rain would hold off for the weekend.  The forecast had said changeable -- a misty night tonight followed by bright but chilly days on Friday and Saturday with maybe a few scattered showers towards the end of Sunday when everyone would be heading back into town.

Everyone, that is, other than Gordon Way.

The weather forecast hadn’t mentioned that, of course, that wasn‘t the job of the weather forecast, but then his horoscope had been pretty misleading as well.  It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetary activity in his sign and had urged him to differentiate between what he thought he wanted and what he actually needed, and suggested that he should tackle emotional or work problems with determination and complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention that he would be dead before the day was out.

He turned off the motorway near Cambridge and stopped at a small filling station for some petrol, where he sat for a moment, finishing off a call on his car phone.

‘OK, look, I’ll call you tomorrow,’ he said, ‘or maybe later tonight.  Or call me.  I should be at the cottage in half an hour.  Yes, I know how important the project is to you.  All right, I know how important it is, full stop.  You want it, I want it.  Of course I do.  And I’m not saying that we won’t continue to support it.  I’m just saying it’s expensive and we should look at the whole thing with determination and complete honesty.  Look, why don’t you come out to the cottage, and we can talk it through.  OK, yeah, yes, I know.  I understand.  Well, think about it, Kate.  Talk to you later.  Bye.’

He hung up and continued to sit in his car for a moment.

It was a large car.  It was a large silver-grey Mercedes of the sort that they use in advertisements, and not just advertisements for Mercedes.  Gordon Way, brother of Susan, employer of Richard MacDuff, was a rich man, the founder and owner of WayForward Technologies II.  WayForward Technologies itself had of course gone bust, for the usual reason, taking his entire first fortune with it.

Luckily, he had managed to make another one.

The ‘usual reason’ was that he had been in the business of computer hardware when every twelve-year-old in the country had suddenly got bored with boxes that went bing.  His second fortune had been made in software instead.  As a result of two major pieces of software, one of which was Anthem (the other, more profitable one had never seen the light of day), WFT-II was the only British software company that could be mentioned in the same sentence as such major U.S. companies as Microsoft or Lotus.  The sentence would probably run along the lines of ‘WayForward Technologies, unlike such major U.S. companies as Microsoft or Lotus...’ but it was a start.  WayForward was in there.  And he owned it.

He pushed a tape into the slot on the stereo console.  It accepted it with a soft and decorous click, and a moment or two later Ravel’s Boléro floated out of eight perfectly matched speakers with fine-meshed matte-black grilles.  The stereo was so smooth and spacious you could almost sense the whole ice-rink.  He tapped his fingers lightly on the padded rim of the steering wheel.  He gazed at the dashboard.  Tasteful illuminated figures and tiny, immaculate lights gazed dimly back at him.  After a while he suddenly realised this was a self service station and got out to fill the tank.

This took a minute or two.  He stood gripping the filler nozzle, stamping his feet in the cold night air, then walked over to the small grubby kiosk, paid for the petrol, remembered to buy a couple of local maps, and then stood chatting enthusiastically to the cashier for a few minutes about the directions the computer industry was likely to take in the following year, suggesting that parallel processing was going to be the key to really intuitive productivity software, but also strongly doubting whether artificial intelligence research per se, particularly artificial intelligence research based on the ProLog language, was really going to produce any serious commercially viable products in the foreseeable future, at least as far as the office desk top environment was concerned, a topic that fascinated the cashier not at all.

‘The man just liked to talk,’ he would later tell the police.  ‘Man, I could have walked away to the toilet for ten minutes and he would’ve told it all to the till.  If I’d been fifteen minutes the till would have walked away too.  Yeah, I’m sure that’s him,’ he would add when shown a picture of Gordon Way.  ‘I only wasn’t sure at first because in the picture he’s got his mouth closed.’

‘And you’re absolutely certain you didn’t see anything else suspicious?’ the policeman insisted.  ‘Nothing that struck you as odd in any way at all?’

‘No, like I said, it was just an ordinary customer on an ordinary night, just like any other night.’

The policeman stared at him blankly.  ‘Just for the sake of argument,’ he went on to say, ‘if I were suddenly to do this...’ -- he made himself go cross-eyed, stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and danced up and down twisting his fingers in his ears -- ‘would anything strike you about that?’

‘Well, er, yeah,’ said the cashier, backing away nervously.  ‘I’d think you’d gone stark raving mad.’

‘Good,’ said the policeman, putting his notebook away.  ‘It’s just that different people sometimes have a different idea of what “odd” means, you see, sir.  If last night was an ordinary night just like any other night, then I am a pimple on the bottom of the Marquess of Queensbury’s aunt.  We shall  be requiring a statement later, sir.  Thank you for your time.’

That was all yet to come.

Tonight, Gordon pushed the maps in his pocket and strolled back towards his car.  Standing under the lights in the mist it had gathered a finely beaded coat of matte moisture on it, and looked like -- well, it looked like an extremely expensive Mercedes-Benz.  Gordon caught himself, just for a millisecond, wishing that he had something like that, but he was now quite adept at fending off that particular line of thought, which only led off in circles and left him feeling depressed and confused.

He patted it in a proprietorial manner, then, walking around it, noticed that the boot wasn’t closed properly and pushed it shut.  It closed with a good healthy clunk.  Well, that made it all worth it, didn’t it?  Good healthy clunk like that.  Old-fashioned values of quality and workmanship.  He thought of a dozen things he had to talk to Susan about and climbed back into the car, pushing the auto-dial code on his phone as soon as the car was prowling back on to the road.

‘...so if you’d like to leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.  Maybe.’

Beep.

‘Oh, Susan, hi, it’s Gordon,’ he said, cradling the phone awkwardly on his shoulder.  ‘Just on my way to the cottage.  It’s er, Thursday night, and it’s, er... 8.47.  Bit misty on the roads.  Listen, I have those people from the States coming over this weekend to thrash out the distribution on Anthem Version 2.00, handling the promotion, all that stuff, and look you know I don’t like to ask you this sort of thing, but you know I always do anyway, so here it is.

‘I just need to know that Richard is on the case.  I mean really on the case.  I can ask him, and he says, Oh sure, it’s fine, but half the time -- shit, that lorry had bright lights, none of these bastard lorry drivers ever dips them properly, it’s a wonder I don’t end up dead in the ditch, that would be something, wouldn’t it, leaving your famous last words on somebody’s answering machine, there’s no reason why these lorries shouldn’t have automatic light-activated dipper switches.  Look, can you make a note for me to tell Susan -- not you, of course, secretary Susan at the office -- to tell her to send a letter from me to that fellow at the Department of the Environment saying we can provide the technology if he can provide the legislation?  It’s for the public good, and anyway he owes me a favour plus what’s the point in having a CBE if you can’t kick a little ass?  You can tell I’ve been talking to Americans all week.

‘That reminds me, God, I hope I remembered to pack the shotguns.  What is it with these Americans that they’re always so mad to shoot my rabbits?  I bought them some maps in the hope that I can persuade them to go on long healthy walks and take their minds off shooting rabbits.  I really feel quite sorry for the creatures.  I think I should put one of those signs on my lawn when the Americans are coming, you know, like they have in Beverly Hills, saying ‘Armed Response’.

‘Make a note to Susan, would you please, to get an ‘Armed Response’ sign made up with a sharp spike on the bottom at the right height for rabbits to see.  That’s secretary Susan at the office not you, of course.

‘Where was I?

‘Oh yes.  Richard and Anthem 2.00.  Susan, that thing has got to be in beta testing in two weeks.  He tells me it’s fine.  But every time I see him he’s got a picture of a sofa spinning on his computer screen.  He says it’s an important concept, but all I see is furniture.  People who want their company accounts to sing to them do not want to buy a revolving sofa.  Nor do I think he should be turning the erosion patterns of the Himalayas into a flute quintet at this time.

‘And as for what Kate’s up to, Susan, well, I can’t hide the fact that I get anxious at the salaries and computer time it’s eating up.  Important long-term research and development it might be, but there is also the possibility, only a possibility, I’m saying, but nevertheless a possibility which I think we owe it to ourselves fully to evaluate and explore, which is that it’s a lemon.  That’s odd, there’s a noise coming from the boot, I thought I’d just closed it properly.

‘Anyway, the main thing’s Richard.  And the point is that there’s only one person who’s really in a position to know if he’s getting the important work done, or if he’s just dreaming, and that one person is, I’m afraid, Susan.

‘That’s you, I mean, of course, not secretary Susan at the office.

‘So can you, I don’t like to ask you this, I really don’t, can you really get on his case?  Make him see how important it is?  Just make sure he realises that WayForward Technologies is meant to be an expanding commercial business, not an adventure playground for crunch-heads.  That’s the problem with crunch-heads -- they have one great idea that actually works and then they expect you to carry on funding them for years while they sit and calculate the topographies of their navels.  I’m sorry, I’m going to have to stop and close the boot properly.  Won’t be a moment.’

He put the telephone down on the seat beside him, pulled over on to the grass verge, and got out.  As he went to the boot, it opened, a figure rose out of it, shot him through the chest with both barrels of a shotgun and then went about its business.

Gordon Way’s astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing to his astonishment at what happened next.

CHAPTER 8

‘Come in, dear fellow, come in.’

The door to Reg’s set of rooms in college was up a winding set of wooden stairs in the corner of Second Court, and was not well lit, or rather it was perfectly well lit when the light was working, but the light was not working, so the door was not well lit and was, furthermore, locked.  Reg was having difficulty in finding the key from a collection which looked like something that a fit Ninja warrior could hurl through the trunk of a tree.

Rooms in the older parts of the college have double doors, like airlocks, and like airlocks they are fiddly to open.  The outer door is a sturdy slab of grey painted oak, with no features other than a very narrow slit for letters, and a Yale lock, to which suddenly Reg at last found the key.

He unlocked it and pulled it open.  Behind it lay an ordinary white-panelled door with an ordinary brass doorknob.

‘Come in, come in,’ repeated Reg, opening this and fumbling for the light switch.  For a moment only the dying embers of a fire in the stone grate threw ghostly red shadows dancing around the room, but then electric light flooded it and extinguished the magic.  Reg hesitated on the threshold for a moment, oddly tense, as if wishing to be sure of something before he entered, then bustled in with at least the appearance of cheeriness.

It was a large panelled room, which a collection of gently shabby furniture contrived to fill quite comfortably.  Against the far wall stood a large and battered old mahogany table with fat ugly legs, which was laden with books, files, folders and teetering piles of papers.  Standing in its own space on the desk, Richard was amused to note, was actually a battered old abacus.

There was a small Regency writing desk standing nearby which might have been quite valuable had it not been knocked about so much, also a couple of elegant Georgian chairs, a portentous Victorian bookcase, and so on.  It was, in short, a don’s room.  It had a don’s framed maps and prints on the walls a threadbare and faded don’s carpet on the floor, and it looked as if little had changed in it for decades, which was probably the case because a don lived in it.

Two doors led out from either end of the opposite wall, and Richard knew from previous visits that one led to a study which looked much like a smaller and more intense version of this room -- larger clumps of books, taller piles of paper in more imminent danger of actually falling, furniture which, however old and valuable, was heavily marked with myriad rings of hot tea or coffee cups, on many of which the original cups themselves were probably still standing.

The other door led to a small and rather basically equipped kitchen, and a twisty internal staircase at the top of which lay the Professor’s bedroom and bathroom.

‘Try and make yourself comfortable on the sofa,’ invited Reg, fussing around hospitably.  ‘I don’t know if you’ll manage it.  It always feels to me as if it’s been stuffed with cabbage leaves and cutlery.’  He peered at Richard seriously.  ‘Do you have a good sofa?’ he enquired.

‘Well, yes.’ Richard laughed.  He was cheered by the silliness of the question.

‘Oh,’ said Reg solemnly.  ‘Well, I wish you’d tell me where you got it.  I have endless trouble with them, quite endless.  Never found a comfortable one in all my life.  How do you find yours?’  He encountered, with a slight air of surprise, a small silver tray he had left out with a decanter of port and three glasses.

‘Well, it’s odd you should ask that,’ said Richard.  ‘I’ve never sat on it.’

‘Very wise,’ insisted Reg earnestly, ‘very, very wise.’  He went through a palaver similar to his previous one with his coat and hat.

‘Not that I wouldn’t like to,’ said Richard.  ‘It’s just that it’s stuck halfway up a long flight of stairs which leads up into my flat.  As far as I can make it out, the delivery men got it part way up the stairs, got it stuck, turned it around any way they could, couldn’t get it any further, and then found, curiously enough, that they couldn’t get it back down again.  Now, that should be impossible.’

‘Odd,’ agreed Reg.  ‘I’ve certainly never come across any irreversible mathematics involving sofas.  Could be a new field.  Have you spoken to any spatial geometricians?’

‘I did better than that.  I called in a neighbour’s kid who used to be able to solve Rubik’s cube in seventeen seconds.  He sat on a step and stared at it for over an  hour before pronouncing it irrevocably stuck.  Admittedly he’s a few years older now and has found out about girls, but it’s got me puzzled.’

‘Carry on talking, my dear fellow, I’m most interested, but let me know first if there’s anything I can get you.  Port perhaps?  Or brandy?  The port I think is the better bet, laid down by the college in 1934, one of the finest vintages I think you’ll find, and on the other hand I don’t actually have any brandy.  Or coffee?  Some more wine perhaps?  There’s an excellent Margaux I’ve been looking for an excuse to open, though it should of course be allowed to stand open for an hour or two, which is not to say that I couldn’t... no,’ he said hurriedly, ‘probably best not to go for the Margaux tonight.’

‘Tea is what I would really like,’ said Richard, ‘if you have some.’

Reg raised his eyebrows.  ‘Are you sure?’

‘I have to drive home.’

‘Indeed.  Then I shall be a moment or two in the kitchen.  Please carry on, I shall still be able to hear you.  Continue to tell me of your sofa, and do feel free in the meantime to sit on mine.  Has it been stuck there for long?’

‘Oh, only about three weeks,’ said Richard, sitting down.  ‘I could just saw it up and throw it away, but I can’t believe that there isn’t a logical answer.  And it also made me think -- it would be really useful to know before you buy a piece of furniture whether it’s actually going to fit up the stairs or around the corner.  So I’ve modelled the problem in three dimensions on my computer -- and so far it just says no way.’

‘It says what?’ called Reg, over the noise of filling the kettle.

‘That it can’t be done.  I told it to compute the moves necessary to get the sofa out, and it said there aren’t any.  I said “What?” and it said there aren’t any.  I then asked it, and this is the really mysterious thing, to compute the moves necessary to get the sofa into its present position in the first place, and it said that it couldn’t have got there.  Not without fundamental restructuring of the walls.  So, either there’s something wrong with the fundamental structure of the matter in my walls or,’ he added with a sigh, ‘there’s something wrong with the program.  Which would you guess?’

‘And are you married?’ called Reg.

‘What?  Oh, I see what you mean.  A sofa stuck on the stairs for a month.  Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girl that I’m not married to.’

‘What’s she like?  What does she do?’

‘She’s a professional cellist.  I have to admit that the sofa has been a bit of a talking point.  In fact she’s moved back to her own flat until I get it sorted out.  She, well...’

He was suddenly sad, and he stood up and wandered around the room in a desultory sort of way and ended up in front of the dying fire.  He gave it a bit of a poke and threw on a couple of extra logs to try and ward off the chill of the room.

‘She’s Gordon’s sister, in fact,’ he added at last.  ‘But they are very different.  I’m not sure she really approves of computers very much.  And she doesn’t much like his attitude to money.  I don’t think I entirely blame her, actually, and she doesn’t know the half of it.’

‘Which is the half she doesn’t know?’

Richard sighed.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s to do with the project which first made the software incarnation of the company profitable.  It was called Reason, and in its own way it was sensational.’

‘What was it?’

‘Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program.  It’s funny how many of  the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front.  You see there have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly ordering and analysing all the relevant facts so that they then point naturally towards the right decision.  The drawback with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want.’

‘Yeeeess...’ said Reg’s voice from the kitchen.

‘Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts.  The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion.

‘And I have to say that it worked brilliantly.  Gordon was able to buy himself a Porsche almost immediately despite being completely broke and a hopeless driver.  Even his bank manager was unable to find fault with his reasoning.  Even when Gordon wrote it off three weeks later.’

‘Heavens.  And did the program sell very well?’

‘No.  We never sold a single copy.’

‘You astonish me.  It sounds like a real winner to me.’

‘It was,’ said Richard hesitantly.  ‘The entire project was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon.  The deal put WayForward on a very sound financial foundation.  Its moral foundation, on the other hand, is not something I would want to trust my weight to.  I’ve recently been analysing a lot of the arguments put forward in favour of the Star Wars project, and if you know what you’re looking for, the pattern of the algorithms is very clear.

‘So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies over the last couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that the US Navy is using version 2.00 of the program, while the Air Force for some reason only has the beta-test version of 1.5.  Odd, that.’

‘Do you have a copy?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Richard, ‘I wouldn’t have anything to do with it.  Anyway, when the Pentagon bought everything, they bought everything.  Every scrap of code, every disk, every notebook.  I was glad to see the back of it.  If indeed we have.  I just busy myself with my own projects.’

He poked at the fire again and wondered what he was doing here when he had so much work on.  Gordon was on at him continually about getting the new, super version of Anthem ready for taking advantage of the Macintosh II, and he was well behind with it.  And as for the proposed module for converting incoming Dow Jones stock-market information into MIDI data in real time, he’d only meant that as a joke, but Gordon, of course, had flipped over the idea and insisted on its being implemented.  That too was meant to be ready but wasn’t.  He suddenly knew exactly why it was he was here.

Well, it had been a pleasant evening, even if he couldn’t see why Reg had been quite so keen to see him.  He picked up a couple of books from the table.  The table obviously doubled as a dining table, because although the piles looked as if they had been there for weeks, the absence of dust immediately around them showed that they had been moved recently.

Maybe, he thought, the need for amiable chit-chat with someone different can become as urgent as any other need when you live in a community as enclosed as a Cambridge college was, even nowadays.  He was a likeable old fellow, but it was clear from dinner that many of his colleagues found his eccentricities formed rather a rich sustained diet -- particularly when they had so many of their own to contend with.  A thought about Susan nagged him, but he was used to that.  He flipped through the two books he’d picked up.

One of them, an elderly one, was an account of the hauntings of Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in England.  Its spine was getting raggedy, and the photographic plates were so grey and blurry as to be virtually indistinguishable.  A picture he thought must be a very lucky (or faked) shot of a ghostly apparition turned out, when he examined the caption, to be a portrait of the author.

The other book was more recent, and by an odd coincidence was a guide to the Greek islands.  He thumbed through it idly and a piece of paper fell out.

‘Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong?’ called out Reg.  ‘Or Darjeeling?  Or PG Tips?  It’s all tea bags anyway, I’m afraid.  And none of them very fresh.’

‘Darjeeling will do fine,’ replied Richard, stooping to pick up the piece of paper.

‘Milk?’ called Reg.

‘Er, please.’

‘One lump or two?’

‘One, please.’

Richard slipped the paper back into the book, noticing as he did so that it had a hurriedly scribbled note on it.  The note said, oddly enough, ‘Regard this simple silver salt cellar.  Regard this simple hat.’

‘Sugar?’

‘Er, what?’ said Richard, startled.  He put the book hurriedly back on the pile.

‘Just a tiny joke of mine,’ said Reg cheerily, ‘to see if people are listening.’  He emerged beaming from the kitchen carrying a small tray with two cups on it, which he hurled suddenly to the floor.  The tea splashed over the carpet.  One of the cups shattered and the other bounced under the table.  Reg leaned against the door frame, white-faced and staring.

A frozen instant of time slid silently by while Richard was too startled to react, then he leaped awkwardly forward to help.  But the old  man was already apologising and offering to make him another cup.  Richard helped him to the sofa.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Richard helplessly.  ‘Shall I get a doctor?’

Reg waved him down.  ‘It’s all right,’ he insisted, ‘I’m perfectly well.  Thought I heard, well, a noise that startled me.  But it was nothing.  Just overcome with the tea fumes, I expect.  Let me just catch my breath.  I think a little, er, port will revive me excellently.  So sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’  He waved in the general direction of the port decanter.  Richard hurriedly poured a small glass and gave it to him.

‘What kind of noise?’ he asked, wondering what on earth could shock him so much.

At that moment came the sound of movement upstairs and an extraordinary kind of heavy breathing noise.

‘That...’ whispered Reg.  The glass of port lay shattered at his feet.  Upstairs someone seemed to be stamping.  ‘Did you hear it?’

‘Well, yes.’

This seemed to relieve the old man.