pocket and flipped through it. Fair amount of cash. Credit tokens. Ultragolf club membership. Other club memberships. Photos of someone's wife and family - presumably Harl's, but it was hard to be sure these days. Busy executives often didn't have time for a full-time wife and family and would just rent them for weekends.
Ha!
He couldn't believe what he'd just found.
He slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.
It wasn't insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface .
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your iden- tity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all- purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
Ford pocketed it. A remarkably good idea had just occurred to him. He wondered how long Harl would remain unconscious.
`Hey!' he shouted to the little melon-sized robot still slobbering with euphoria up on the ceiling. `You want to stay happy?'
The robot gurgled that it did.
`Then stick with me and do everything I tell you without fail.'
The robot said that it was quite happy where it was up on the ceiling thank you very much. It had never realised before how much sheer titillation there was to be got from a good ceiling and it wanted to explore its feelings about ceilings in greater depth.
`You stay there,' said Ford, `and you'll soon be recaptured and have your conditional chip replaced. You want to stay happy, come now.'
The robot let out a long heartfelt sigh of impassioned tristesse and sank reluctantly away from the ceiling.
`Listen,' said Ford, `can you keep the rest of the security system happy for a few minutes?'
`One of the joys of true happiness,' trilled the robot, `is sharing. I brim, I froth, I overflow with...'
`OK,' said Ford. `Just spread a little happiness around the security network. Don't give it any information. Just make it feel good so it doesn't feel the need to ask for any.'
He picked up his towel and ran cheerfully for the door. Life had been a little dull of late. It showed every sign now of becoming extremely froody.
7
Arthur Dent had been in some hell-holes in his life, but he had never before seen a spaceport which had a sign saying, `Even travelling despondently is better than arriving here.' To welcome visitors the arrivals hall featured a picture of the President of NowWhat, smiling. It was the only picture anybody could find of him, and it had been taken shortly
Ha!
He couldn't believe what he'd just found.
He slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.
It wasn't insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface .
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your iden- tity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all- purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
Ford pocketed it. A remarkably good idea had just occurred to him. He wondered how long Harl would remain unconscious.
`Hey!' he shouted to the little melon-sized robot still slobbering with euphoria up on the ceiling. `You want to stay happy?'
The robot gurgled that it did.
`Then stick with me and do everything I tell you without fail.'
The robot said that it was quite happy where it was up on the ceiling thank you very much. It had never realised before how much sheer titillation there was to be got from a good ceiling and it wanted to explore its feelings about ceilings in greater depth.
`You stay there,' said Ford, `and you'll soon be recaptured and have your conditional chip replaced. You want to stay happy, come now.'
The robot let out a long heartfelt sigh of impassioned tristesse and sank reluctantly away from the ceiling.
`Listen,' said Ford, `can you keep the rest of the security system happy for a few minutes?'
`One of the joys of true happiness,' trilled the robot, `is sharing. I brim, I froth, I overflow with...'
`OK,' said Ford. `Just spread a little happiness around the security network. Don't give it any information. Just make it feel good so it doesn't feel the need to ask for any.'
He picked up his towel and ran cheerfully for the door. Life had been a little dull of late. It showed every sign now of becoming extremely froody.
7
Arthur Dent had been in some hell-holes in his life, but he had never before seen a spaceport which had a sign saying, `Even travelling despondently is better than arriving here.' To welcome visitors the arrivals hall featured a picture of the President of NowWhat, smiling. It was the only picture anybody could find of him, and it had been taken shortly
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