Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams Page A

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