Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe
he, the Professor, had started talking rapidly and at length about the history of the college architecture, a sure sign that his mind was elsewhere entirely.
who suddenly wrenched himself out of the logical half nelson into which his neighbors had got him,
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,
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.
“My dear chap!” he said. “My dear chap! My dear, dear chap! What was I saying?” “Er, you were saying ‘My dear chap.’ ” “Yes, but I feel sure it was a prelude to something. A sort of short toccata on the theme of what a splendid fellow you are prior to introducing the main subject of my discourse, the nature of which I currently forget.
You have no idea what I was about to say?” “No.” “Oh. Well, I suppose I should be pleased. If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?
He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the way to . . . to . . . The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.
The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief? The Door would still be there, even if the door was not.
He looked. The Door was there. The horse, it must be said, was quite surprised.
People gravitated around him, drawn in by the stories he denied about himself, but what the source of these stories might be, if not his own denials, was never entirely clear.
By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat. What did “psychosassic” mean? It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all.
Dirk allowed himself to be persuaded to make, under hypnosis, a firm prediction about what questions would be set for examination that summer. He himself first planted the idea by explaining exactly the sort of thing that he would never, under any circumstances, be prepared to do, though in many ways he would like to, just to have the chance to disprove his alleged and strongly disavowed abilities.
no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girl that I’m not married to.”
Or maybe she decided that an evening with your old tutor would be blisteringly dull and opted for the more exhilarating course of washing her hair instead. Dear me, I know what I would have done. It’s only lack of hair that forces me to pursue such a hectic social round these days.”
If there was any basis to his firmly held belief that the rhythms and harmonies of music which he found most satisfying could be found in, or at least derived from, the rhythms and harmonies of naturally occurring phenomena, then satisfying forms of modality and intonation should emerge naturally as well, rather than being forced. For the moment, though, he forced it.
fact a rather large house by anybody else’s standards, but he had always wanted to have a cottage in the country and so when the time came for him finally to buy one and he discovered that he had rather more money available than he had ever seriously believed he might own, he bought a large old rectory and called it a cottage in spite of its seven bedrooms and its four acres of dank Cambridgeshire land. This did little to endear him to people who only had cottages, but then if Gordon Way had allowed his actions to be governed by what endeared him to people he wouldn’t have been Gordon Way.
“Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson? “No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.”
a copy of the new edition of Personal Computer World, which had a picture of Gordon Way on the front. “Pity about him, isn’t it?” said the news agent. “What? Oh, er . . . yes,” said Richard. He often thought the same himself, but was surprised to find his feelings so widely echoed.
“You sadden me, Mrs Sauskind. I wish I could find it in my heart to tell you that I find your skepticism rewarding and invigorating, but with the best will in the world I cannot.
“Exploiting?” asked Dirk. “Well, I suppose it would be if anybody ever paid me, but I do assure you, my dear Richard, that there never seems to be the remotest danger of that. I live in what are known as hopes. I hope for fascinating and remunerative cases, my secretary hopes that I will pay her, her landlord hopes that she will produce some rent, the Electricity Board hopes that he will settle their bill, and so on. I find it a wonderfully optimistic way of life.
his unstinting if rather promiscuous devotion.
It’s like trying to do trigonometry when someone’s kicking your head.
“You’re a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that,” he said, “but you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid. If I turn away it’s for a reason, and the reason was to see what you picked up. I didn’t need to see you pick it up, I just had to
“You’re a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that,” he said, “but you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid. If I turn away it’s for a reason, and the reason was to see what you picked up. I didn’t need to see you pick it up, I just had to see what was missing afterwards.
she certainly wasn’t going to do anything rash like smile until she knew for certain that the check wouldn’t bounce. The last time he signed a check for her he canceled it before the end of the day, to prevent it, as he explained, “falling into the wrong hands.” The wrong hands, presumably, being those of her bank manager.
Clearly I wasn’t going to be able to think of anything else until I had the answer, but equally clearly I would have to think of something else if I was ever going to get the answer. How to break this circle? Ask me how.” “How?” said Miss Pearce obediently, but without enthusiasm. “By writing down what the answer is!” exclaimed Dirk. “And here it is!” He slapped the piece of paper triumphantly and sat back with a satisfied smile.
“You see what I have done?” he asked the ceiling, which seemed to flinch slightly at being yanked so suddenly into the conversation. “I have transformed the problem from an intractably difficult and possibly quite insoluble conundrum into a mere linguistic puzzle. Albeit,” he muttered, after a long moment of silent pondering, “an intractably difficult and possibly insoluble one.”
“They should all be deported,” said the taxi driver as they drew to a halt. “Er, who should?” said Richard, who realized he hadn’t been listening to a word the driver said. “Er—” said the driver, who suddenly realized he hadn’t been listening either “—er, the whole lot of them. Get rid of the whole bloody lot, that’s what I say.
He was glad of that, that she was playing. She had an amazing emotional self-sufficiency and control provided she could play her cello. He had noticed an odd and extraordinary thing about her relationship with the music she played. If ever she was feeling emotional or upset she could sit and play some music with utter concentration and emerge seeming fresh and calm.
“There’s not much in the fridge at the moment,” she said, “some yoghurt, I think, and a jar of rollmop herrings you could open. I’m sure you’ll be able to muck it up if you try, but it’s actually quite straightforward. The main trick is not to throw them all over the floor
“There’s not much in the fridge at the moment,” she said, “some yoghurt, I think, and a jar of rollmop herrings you could open. I’m sure you’ll be able to muck it up if you try, but it’s actually quite straightforward. The main trick is not to throw them all over the floor
“There’s not much in the fridge at the moment,” she said, “some yoghurt, I think, and a jar of rollmop herrings you could open. I’m sure you’ll be able to muck it up if you try, but it’s actually quite straightforward.
way?” “Er, yes,” said Richard with a difficult sigh.
He reflected that just about anything you could say about Dirk was subject to these kinds of vague and shifty qualifications. There was even, on his letterhead, a string of vague and shifty-looking qualifications after his name.
“You will have to excuse us, Dirk—” said Richard, coldly. “No, I am afraid you will have to excuse me,” returned Dirk.
“The puzzle is solved, and the solution is so astounding that it took a seven-year-old child on the street to give it to me. But it is undoubtedly the correct one, absolutely undoubtedly. ‘What, then, is the solution?’ you ask me, or rather would ask me if you could get a word in edgewise, which you can’t, so I will save you the bother and ask the question for you,
If you were not quite yourself when you climbed the wall last night . . . then who were you—and why?”
Dirk Gently is the name under which I now trade. There are certain events in the past, I’m afraid, from which I would wish to disassociate myself.” “Absolutely, I know how you feel. Most of the fourteenth century, for instance, was pretty grim,” agreed Reg earnestly. Dirk
Dirk Gently is the name under which I now trade. There are certain events in the past, I’m afraid, from which I would wish to disassociate myself.” “Absolutely, I know how you feel. Most of the fourteenth century, for instance, was pretty grim,” agreed Reg earnestly
“You have a time machine and you use it for . . . watching television?” “Well, I wouldn’t use it at all if I could get the hang of the video recorder.
“do you have any brandy, French cigarettes or worry beads in your rooms?” “No,” said Reg. “Then I shall have to fret unaided,”
a vast exploding ball of harmony expanding in his mind
“Damn and blast British Telecom,” shouted Dirk, the words coming easily from force of habit.
“Such music,” he said. “I’m not religious, but if I were I would say it was like a glimpse into the mind of God. Perhaps it was and I ought to be religious. I have to keep reminding myself that they didn’t create the music, they only created the instrument which could read the score. And the score was life itself. And it’s all up there.”