Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (3 page)

Next to him was a man whom Richard had never managed to identify.  Neither, in fact, had anyone else.  He was thin and vole-like and had the most extraordinarily long bony nose -- it really was very, very long and bony indeed.  In fact it looked a lot like the controversial keel which had helped the Australians win the America’s Cup in 1983, and this resemblance had been much remarked upon at the time, though not of course to his face.  No one had said anything to his face at all.

No one.

Ever.

Anyone meeting him for the first time was too startled and embarrassed by his nose to speak, and the second time was worse because of the first time, and so on.  Years had gone by now, seventeen in all.  In all that time he had been cocooned in silence.  In hall it had long been the habit of the college servants to position a separate set of salt, pepper and mustard on either side of him, since no one could ask him to pass them, and to ask someone sitting on the other side of him was not only rude but completely impossible because of his nose being in the way.

The other odd thing about him was a series of gestures he made and repeated regularly throughout every evening.  They consisted of tapping each of the fingers of his left hand in order, and then one of the fingers of his right hand.  He would then occasionally tap some other part of his body, a knuckle, an elbow or a knee.  Whenever he was forced to stop this by the requirements of eating he would start blinking each of his eyes instead, and occasionally nodding.  No one, of course, had ever dared to ask him why he did this, though all were consumed with curiosity.

Richard couldn’t see who was sitting beyond him.

In the other direction, beyond Reg’s deathly neighbour, was Watkin, the Classics Professor, a man of terrifying dryness and oddity.  His heavy rimless glasses were almost solid cubes of glass within which his eyes appeared to lead independent existences like goldfish.  His nose was straight enough and ordinary, but beneath it he wore the same beard as Clint Eastwood.  His eyes gazed swimmingly around the table as he selected who was going to be spoken at tonight.  He had thought that his prey might be one of the guests, the newly appointed Head of Radio Three, who was sitting opposite -- but unfortunately he had already been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of Philosophy.  These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase ‘too much Mozart’ was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy.  The poor man was already beginning to grip his cutlery too tightly.  His eyes darted about desperately looking for rescue, and made the mistake of lighting on those of Watkin.

‘Good evening,’ said Watkin with smiling charm, nodding in the most friendly way, and then letting his gaze settle glassily on to his bowl of newly arrived soup, from which position it would not allow itself to be moved.  Yet.  Let the bugger suffer a little.  He wanted the rescue to be worth at least a good half dozen radio talk fees.

Beyond Watkin, Richard suddenly discovered the source of the little girlish giggle that had greeted Reg’s conjuring trick.  Astonishingly enough it was a little girl.  She was about eight years old with blonde hair and a glum look.  She was sitting occasionally kicking pettishly at the table leg.

‘Who’s that?’ Richard asked Reg in surprise.

‘Who’s what?’ Reg asked Richard in surprise.

Richard inclined a finger surreptitiously in her direction.  ‘The girl,’ he whispered, ‘the very, very little girl.  Is it some new maths professor?’

Reg peered round at her.  ‘Do you know,’ he said in astonishment, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.  Never known anything like it.  How extraordinary.’

At that moment the problem was solved by the man from the BBC, who suddenly wrenched himself out of the logical half-nelson into which his neighbours had got him, and told the girl off for kicking the table.  She stopped kicking the table, and instead kicked the air with redoubled vigour.  He told her to try and enjoy herself, so she kicked him.  This did something to bring a brief glimmer of pleasure into her glum evening, but it didn’t last.  Her father briefly shared with the table at large his feelings about baby-sitters who let people down, but nobody felt able to run with the topic.

‘A major season of Buxtehude,’ resumed the Director of Music, ‘is of course clearly long overdue.  I’m sure you’ll be looking forward to remedying this situation at the first opportunity.’

‘Oh, er, yes,’ replied the girl’s father, spilling his soup, ‘er, that is... he’s not the same one as Gluck, is he?’

The little girl kicked the table leg again.  When her father looked sternly at her, she put her head on one side and mouthed a question at him.

‘Not now,’ he insisted at her as quietly as he could.

‘When, then?’

‘Later.  Maybe.  Later, we’ll see.’

She hunched grumpily back in her seat.  ‘You always say later,’ she mouthed at him.

‘Poor child,’ murmured Reg.  ‘There isn’t a don at this table who doesn’t behave exactly like that inside.  Ah, thank you.’  Their soup arrived, distracting his attention, and Richard’s.

‘So tell me,’ said Reg, after they had both had a couple of spoonsful and arrived independently at the same conclusion, that it was not a taste explosion, ‘what you’ve been up to, my dear chap.  Something to do with computers, I understand, and also to do with music.  I thought you read English when you were here -- though only, I realise, in your spare time.’  He looked at Richard significantly over the rim of his soup spoon.  ‘Now wait,’ he interrupted before Richard even had a chance to start, ‘don’t I vaguely remember that you had some sort of computer when you were here?  When was it?  1977?’

Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electric abacus, but...’

Oh, now, don’t underestimate the abacus,’ said Reg.  ‘In skilled hands it’s a very sophisticated calculating device.  Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work.’

‘So an electric one would be particularly pointless,’ said Richard.

‘True enough,’ conceded Reg.

‘There really wasn’t a lot this machine could do that you couldn’t do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble,’ said Richard, ‘but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil.’

Reg looked at him quizzically.

‘I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply,’ he said.  ‘I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I’m sitting.’

‘I’m sure.  But look at it this way.  What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?’

This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.

Richard continued, ‘What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.  That forces you to sort it out in your own mind.  And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas.  And that’s really the essence of programming.  By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself.  The teacher usually learns more than the pupil.  Isn’t that true?’

‘It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,’ came a low growl from somewhere on the table, ‘without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy.’

‘So I used to spend days struggling to write essays on this 16K machine that would have taken a couple of hours on a typewriter, but what was fascinating to me was the process of trying to explain to the machine what it was I wanted it to do.  I virtually wrote my own word processor in BASIC.  A simple search and replace routine would take about three hours.’

‘I forget, did you ever get any essays done at all?’

‘Well, not as such.  No actual essays, but the reasons why not were absolutely fascinating.  For instance, I discovered that...’

He broke off, laughing at himself.

‘I was also playing keyboards in a rock group, of course,’ he added.  ‘That didn’t help.’

‘Now, that I didn’t know,’ said Reg.  ‘Your past has murkier things in it than I dreamed possible.  A quality, I might add, that it shares with this soup.’  He wiped his mouth with his napkin very carefully.  ‘I must go and have a word with the kitchen staff one day.  I would like to be sure that they are keeping the right bits and throwing the proper bits away.  So.  A rock group, you say.  Well, well, well.  Good heavens.

‘Yes,’ said Richard.  ‘We called ourselves The Reasonably Good Band, but in fact we weren’t.  Our intention was to be the Beatles of the early eighties, but we got much better financial and legal advice than the Beatles ever did, which was basically ‘Don’t bother’, so we didn’t.  I left Cambridge and starved for three years.’

‘But didn’t I bump into you during that period,’ said Reg, ‘and you said you were doing very well?’

‘As a road sweeper, yes.  There was an awful lot of mess on the roads.  More than enough, I felt, to support an entire career.  However, I got the sack for sweeping the mess on to another sweeper’s patch.’

Reg shook his head.  ‘The wrong career for you, I’m sure.  There are plenty of vocations where such behaviour would ensure rapid preferment.’

‘I tried a few -- none of them much grander, though.  And I kept none of them very long, because I was always too tired to do them properly.  I’d be found asleep slumped over the chicken sheds or filing cabinets -- depending on what the job was.  Been up all night with the computer you see, teaching it to play “Three Blind Mice”.  It was an important goal for me.’

‘I’m sure,’ agreed Reg.  ‘Thank you,’ he said to the college servant who took his half-finished plate of soup from him, ‘thank you very much.  “Three Blind Mice”, eh?  Good.  Good.  So no doubt you succeeded eventually, and this accounts for your present celebrated status.  Yes?

‘Well, there’s a bit more to it than that.’

‘I feared there might be.  Pity you didn’t bring it with you though.  It might have cheered up the poor young lady who is currently having our dull and crusty company forced upon her.  A swift burst of “Three Blind Mice” would probably do much to revive her spirits.’  He leaned forward to look past his two right-hand neighbours at the girl, who was still sitting sagging in her chair.

‘Hello,’ he said.

She looked up in surprise, and then dropped her eyes shyly, swinging her legs again.

‘Which do you think is worse,’ enquired Reg, ‘the soup or the company?’

She gave a tiny, reluctant laugh and shrugged, still looking down.

‘I think you’re wise not to commit yourself at this stage,’ continued Reg.  ‘Myself, I’m waiting to see the carrots before I make any judgements.  They’ve been boiling them since the weekend, but I fear it may not be enough.  The only thing that could possibly be worse than the carrots is Watkin.  He’s the man with the silly glasses sitting between us.  My name’s Reg, by the way.  Come over and kick me when you have a moment.’  The girl giggled and glanced up at Watkin, who stiffened and made an appallingly unsuccessful attempt to smile good-naturedly.

‘Well, little girl,’ he said to her awkwardly, and she had desperately to suppress a hoot of laughter at his glasses.  Little conversation therefore ensued, but the girl had an ally, and began to enjoy herself a tiny little bit.  Her father gave her a relieved smile.

Reg turned back to Richard, who said, suddenly, ‘Do you have any family?’

‘Er... no,’ said Reg, quietly.  ‘But tell me.  After “Three Blind Mice”, what then?’

‘Well, to cut a long story short, Reg, I ended up working for WayForward Technologies...’

‘Ah, yes, the famous Mr Way.  Tell me, what’s he like?’

Richard was always faintly annoyed by this question, probably because he was asked it so often.

‘Both better and worse than he’s represented in the press.  I like him a lot, actually.  Like any driven man he can be a bit trying at times, but I’ve known him since the very early days of the company when neither he nor I had a bean to our names.  He’s fine.  It’s just that it’s a good idea not to let him have your phone number unless you possess an industrial-grade answering machine.

‘What?  Why’s that?’

‘Well, he’s one of those people who can only think when he’s talking.  When he has ideas, he has to talk them out to whoever will listen.  Or, if the people themselves are not available, which is increasingly the case, their answering machines will do just as well.  He just phones them up and talks at them.  He has one secretary whose sole job is to collect tapes from people he might have phoned, transcribe them, sort them and give him the edited text the next day in a blue folder.’

‘A blue one, eh?’

‘Ask me why he doesn’t simply use a tape recorder,’ said Richard with a shrug.

Reg considered this.  ‘I expect he doesn’t use a tape recorder because he doesn’t like talking to himself,’ he said.  ‘There is a logic there.  Of a kind.’

He took a mouthful of his newly arrived porc au poivre and ruminated on it for a while before gently laying his knife and fork aside again for the moment.

‘So what,’ he said at last, ‘is the role of young MacDuff in all this?’

‘Well, Gordon assigned me to write a major piece of software for the Apple Macintosh.  Financial spreadsheet, accounting, that sort of thing, powerful, easy to use, lots of graphics.  I asked him exactly what he wanted in it, and he just said, “Everything.  I want the top piece of all-singing, all-dancing business software for that machine.”  And being of a slightly whimsical turn of mind I took him literally.

‘You see, a pattern of numbers can represent anything you like, can be used to map any surface, or modulate any dynamic process -- and so on.  And any set of company accounts are, in the end, just a pattern of numbers.  So I sat down and wrote a program that’ll take those numbers and do what you like with them.  If you just want a bar graph it’ll do them as a bar graph, if you want them as a pie chart or scatter graph it’ll do them as a pie chart or scatter graph.  If you want dancing girls jumping out of the pie chart in order to distract attention from the figures the pie chart actually represents, then the program will do that as well.  Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of each division of your company.  Great for producing animated corporate logos that actually mean something.