Mostly Harmless (4 page)

A neutrino is not a big thing to be hit by.
In fact it's hard to think of anything much smaller by which one could reasonably hope to be hit. And it's not as if being hit by neutrinos was in itself a particularly unusual event for something the size of the Earth. Far from it. It would be an unusual nanosecond in which the Earth was not hit by several billion passing neutrinos.
It all depends on what you mean by `hit', of course, seeing as matter consists almost entirely of nothing at all. The chances of a neutrino actually hitting something as it travels through all this howling emptiness are roughly comparable to that of dropping a ball bearing at random from a cruising 747 and hitting, say, an egg sandwich.
Anyway, this neutrino hit something. Nothing terribly impor- tant in the scale of things, you might say. But the problem with saying something like that is that you would be talking cross- eyed badger spit. Once something actually happens somewhere in something as wildly complicated as the Universe, Kevin knows where it will all end up - where `Kevin' is any random entity that doesn't know nothin' about nothin'.
This neutrino struck an atom.
The atom was part of a molecule. The molecule was part of a nucleic acid. The nucleic acid was part of a gene. The gene was part of a genetic recipe for growing... and so on. The upshot was that a plant ended up growing an extra leaf. In Essex. Or what would, after a lot of palaver and local difficulties of a geological nature, become Essex.
The plant was a clover. It threw its weight, or rather its seed, around extremely effectively and rapidly became the world's dominant type of clover. The precise causal connection between this tiny biological happenstance, and a few other minor vari- ations that exist in that slice of the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash - such as Tricia McMillan failing to leave with Zaphod Beeblebrox, abnormally low sales of pecan-flavoured ice-cream and the fact that the Earth On which all this occurred did not get demolished by the Vogons to make way for a new hyperspace bypass - is currently sitting at number 4,763,984,132 on the research project priority list at what was once the History Department of the University of MaxiMegalon, and no one cur- rently at the prayer meeting by the poolside appears to feel any sense of urgency about the problem.
4
Tricia began to feel that the world was conspiring against her. She knew that this was a perfectly normal way to feel after an overnight flight going east, when you suddenly have a whole other mysteriously threatening day to deal with for which you are not the least bit prepared. But still.
There were marks on her lawn.
She didn't really care about marks on her lawn very much. Marks on her lawn could go and take a running jump as far as she was concerned. It was Saturday morning. She had just got home from New York feeling tired, crabby and paranoid, and all she wanted to do was go to bed with the radio on quietly and gradually fall asleep to the sound of Ned Sherrin being terribly clever about something.
But Eric Bartlett was not going to let her get away with not making a thorough inspection of the marks. Eric was the old gardener who came in from the village on Saturday mornings to poke around at her garden with a stick. He didn't believe in people coming in from New York first thing in the morning. Didn't hold with it. Went against natur e. He believed in virtually everything else, though.
`Probably them space aliens,' he said, bending over and prod- ding at the edges of the small indentations with his stick. `Hear a lot about space aliens these days. I expect it's them.'
`Do you?' said Tricia, looking furtively at her watch. Ten minutes, she reckoned. Ten minutes she'd be able to stay standing up. Then she would simply keel over, whether she was in her bedroom or still out here in the garden. That was if she just had to stand. If she also had to nod intelligently and say `Do you?' from time to time, it might cut it down to five.
`Oh yes,' said Eric. `They come down here, land on your lawn, and then buzz off again, sometimes with your cat. Mrs Williams at the Post Office, her cat - you know the ginger. one? - it got abducted by space aliens. Course, they brought it back the next day but it were in a very odd mood. Kept prowling around all morning, and then falling asleep in the afternoon. Used to be the other way round, is the point. Sleep in the morning, prowl in the afternoon. Jet lag, you see, from being in an interplanetary craft.'
`I see,' said Tricia.
`They dyed it tabby, too, she says. These marks are exactly the sort of marks that their landing pods would probably make.'
`You don't think it's the lawn mower?' asked Tricia.
`If the marks were more round, I'd say, but these are just off-round, you see. Altogether more alien in shape.'
`It's just that you mentioned the lawn mower was playing up and needed fixing or it might start gouging holes in the lawn.'
`I did say that, Miss Tricia, and I stand by what I said. I'm not saying it's not the lawn mower for definite, I'm just saying what seems to me more likely given the shapes of the holes. They come in over these trees, you see, in their landing pods...'
`Eric...,' said Tricia, patiently.
`Tell you what, though, Miss Tricia,' said Eric, `I will take a look at the mower, like I meant to last week, and leave you to get on with whatever you' re wanting to.'
`Thank you, Eric,' said Tricia. `I'm going to bed now, in fact. Help yourself to anything you want in the kitchen.'
`Thank you, Miss Tricia, and good luck to you,' said Eric. He bent over and picked something from the lawn.
`There,' he said. `Three-leaf clover. Good luck you see.'
He peered at it closely to check that it was a real three-leaf clover and not just a regular four-leaf one that one of the leaves had fallen off. `If I were you, though, I'd watch for signs of alien activity in the area.' He scanned the horizon keenly. `Particularly from over there in the Henley direction.'
`Thank you, Eric,' said Tricia again. `I will.'
She went to bed and dreamt fitfully of parrots and other birds. In the afternoon she got up and prowled around restlessly, not certain what to do with the rest of the day, or indeed the rest of her life. She spent at least an hour dithering, trying to make up her mind whether to head up into town and go to Stavro's for the evening. This was the currently fashionable spot for high-flying media people, and seeing a few friends there might help her ease herself back into the swing of things. She decided at last she would go. It was good. It was fun there. She was very fond of Stavro himself, who was a Greek with a German father - a fairly odd combination. Tricia had been to the Alpha a couple of nights earlier, which was Stavro's original club in New York, now run by his brother Karl, who thought of himself as a German with a Greek mother. Stavro would be very happy to be told that Karl was making a bit of a pig's ear of running the New York club, so Tricia would go and make him happy. There was little love lost between Stavro and Karl Mueller.
OK. That's what she would do.
She then spent another hour dithering about what to wear. At last she settled on a smart little black dress she'd got in New York. She phoned a friend to see who was likely to be at the club that evening, and was told that it was closed this evening for a private wedding party.
She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from the supermarket. You get one of those trolleys which simply will not go in the direction you push it and end up just having to buy completely different stuff. What do you do with it? What do you do with the recipe? She didn't know.
Anyway, that night an alien spacecraft landed on her lawn.
5
She watched it coming in from over the Henley direction with mild curiosity at first, wondering what those lights were. Living, as she did, not a million miles from Heathrow, she was used to seeing lights in the sky. Not usually so late in the evening, or so low, though, which was why she was mildly curious.
When whatever it was began to come closer and closer her curiosity began to turn to bemusement.
`Hmmm,' she thought, which was about as far as she could get with thinking. She was still feeling dopey and jet-lagged and the messages that one part of her brain was busy sending to another were not necessarily arriving on time or the right way up. She left the kitchen where she'd been fixing herself a coffee and went to open the back door which led out to the garden. She took a deep breath of cool evening air, stepped outside and looked up.
There was something roughly the size of a large camper van parked about a hundred feet above her lawn.
It was really there. Hanging there. Almost silent.
Something moved deep inside her.
Her arms dropped slowly down to her side. She didn't notice the scalding coffee slopping over her foot. She was hardly breathing as slowly, inch by inch, foot by foot, the craft came downwards. Its lights were playing softly over the ground as if probing and feeling it. They played over her.
It seemed beyond all hope that she should be given her chance again. Had he found her? Had he come back? The craft dropped down and down until at last it had settled quietly on her lawn. It didn't look exactly like the one she had seen departing all those years ago, she thought, but flashing lights in the night sky are hard to resolve into clear shapes.
Silence.
Then a click and a hum.
Then another click and another hum. Click hum, click hum.
A doorway slid open, spilling light towards her across the lawn.
She waited, tingling.
A figure stood silhouetted in the light, then another, and another.
Wide eyes blinked slowly at her. Hands were slowly raised in greeting.
`McMillan?' a voice said at last, a strange, thin voice that managed the syllables with difficulty. `Tricia McMillan. Ms Tricia McMillan?'
`Yes,' said Tricia, almost soundlessly.
`We have been monitoring you.'
`M... monitoring? Me?'
`Yes.'
They looked at her for a while, their large eyes moving up and down her very slowly.
`You look smaller in real life,' one said at last.
`What?' said Tricia.
`Yes.'
`I... I don't understand,' said Tricia. She hadn't expected any of this, of course, but even for something she hadn't expected to begin with it wasn't going the way she expected. At last she said,
`Are you... are you from... Zaphod?'
This question seemed to cause a little consternation among the three figures. They conferred with each other in some skittering language of their own and then turned back to her.
`We don't think so. Not as far as we know,' said one.
`Where is Zaphod?' said another, looking up into the night sky.
`I... I don't know, said Tricia, helplessly.
`Is it far from here? Which direction? We don't know.'
Tricia realised with a sinking heart that they had no idea who she was talking about. Or even what she was talking about. And she had no idea what they were talking about. She put her hopes tightly away again and snapped her brain back into gear. There was no point in being disappointed. She had to wake up to the fact that she had here the journalistic scoop of the cen- tury. What should she do? Go back into the house for a video camera? Wouldn't they just be gone when she got back? She was thoroughly confused as to strategy. Keep'em talking, she thought. Figure it out later.
`You've been monitoring... me?'
`All of you. Everything on your planet. TV. Radio. Tele- communications. Computers. Video circuitry. Warehouses.'
`What?'
`Car parks. Everything. We monitor everything.'
Tricia stared at them.
`That must be very boring, isn't it?' she blurted out.
`Yes.'
`So why...'
`Except...'
`Yes? Except what?'
`Game shows. We quite like game shows.'
There was a terribly long silence as Tricia looked at the aliens and the aliens looked at her.
`There's something I would just like to get from indoors,' said Tricia very deliberately. `Tell you what. Would you, or one of you, like to come inside with me and have a look?'
`Very much,' they all said, enthusiastically.
All three of them stood, slightly awkwardly in her sitting room, as she hurried around picking up a video camera, a 35mm camera, a tape recorder, every recording medium she could grab hold of. They were all thin and, under domestic lighting conditions, a sort of dim purplish green.
`I really won't be a second, guys,' Tricia said, as she rummaged through some drawers for spare tapes and films.
The aliens were looking at the shelves that held her CDs and her old records. One of them nudged one of the others very slightly.
`Look,' he said. `Elvis.'
Tricia stopped, and stared at them all over again.
`You like Elvis?' she said.
`Yes,' they said.
`Elvis Presley?'
`Yes.'
She shook her head in bewilderment as she tried to stuff a new tape into her video camera.
`Some of your people,' said one of her visitors, hesitantly, `think that Elvis has been kidnapped by space aliens.'
`What?' said Tricia. `Has he?'
`It is possible.'
`Are you telling me that you have kidnapped Elvis?' gasped Tricia. She was trying to keep cool enough not to foul up her equipment, but this was all almost too much for her.
`No. Not us,' said her guests. `Aliens. It is a very interesting possibility. We talk of it often.'
`I must get this down,' Tricia muttered to herself. She checked her video was properly loaded and working now. She pointed the camera at them. She didn't put it up to her eye because she didn't want to freak them out. But she was sufficiently experienced to be able to shoot accurately from the hip.
`OK,' she said. `Now tell me slowly and carefully who you are. You first,' she said to the one on the left. `What's your name?'
`I don't know.'
`You don't know.'
`No.'
`I see,' said Tricia. `And what about you other two?'
`We don't know.'
`Good. OK. Perhaps you can tell me where you are from?'
They shook their heads.
`You don't know where you're from?'
They shook their heads again.
`So,' said Tricia. `What are you... er...'
She was floundering but, being a professional, kept the camera steady while she did it.
`We are on a mission,' said one of the aliens.
`A mission? A mission to do what?'
`We do not know.'
Still she kept the camera steady.
`So what are you doing here on Earth, then?'
`We have come to fetch you.'
Rock steady, rock steady. Could have been on a tripod. She wondered if she should be using a tripod, in fact. She wondered that because it gave her a moment or two to digest what they had just said. No, she thought, hand-held gave her more flexibility. She also thought, help, what am I going to do?