'I assume from the manner of your entrance that you do not have new material for the, er, Guide, at the moment,' said the smooth-faced individual. He was sitting with his elbows resting on the table and holding his fingertips together in a manner which, inexplicably, has never been made a capital offence.

'I've been busy,' said Ford, rather weakly. He staggered to his feet, brushing himself down. Then he thought, what the hell was he saying things weakly for? He had to get on top of this situation. He had to find out who the hell this person was, and he suddenly thought of a way of doing it.

'Who the hell are you?' he demanded.

'I am your new editor-in-chief. That is, if we decide to retain your services. My name is Vann Harl.' He didn't put his hand out. He just added, 'What have you done to that security robot? '

The little robot was rolling very, very slowly round the ceiling and moaning quietly to itself. 'I've made it very happy,' snapped Ford. 'It's a kind of mission I have. Where's Stagyar? More to the point, where's his drinks trolley?'

'Mr zil-Doggo is no longer with this organisation. His drinks trolley is, I imagine, helping to console him for this fact.'

'Organisation?' yelled Ford. 'Organisation? What a bloody stupid word for a set-up like this!'

'Precisely our sentiments. Under-structured, over-resourced, under-managed, over-inebriated. And that,' said Harl, 'was just the editor.'

'I'll do the jokes,' snarled Ford.

'No,' said Harl. 'You will do the restaurant column.'

He tossed a piece of plastic on to the desk in front of him. Ford did not move to pick it up.

'You what?' said Ford.

'No. Me Harl. You Prefect. You do restaurant column. Me editor. Me sit here tell you you do restaurant column. You get?'

'Restaurant column?' said Ford, too bewildered to be really angry yet.

'Siddown, Prefect,' said Harl. He swung round in his swivel chair, got to his feet, and stood staring out at the tiny specks enjoying the carnival twenty-three stories below.

'Time to get this business on its feet, Prefect,' he snapped. 'We at InfiniDim Enterprises are . . .'

'You at what?'

'InfiniDim Enterprises. We have bought out the Guide.'

'InfiniDim?'

'We spent millions on that name, Prefect. Start liking it or start packing.'

Ford shrugged. He had nothing to pack.

'The Galaxy is changing,' said Harl. 'We've got to change with it. Go with the market. The market is moving up. New aspirations. New technology. The future is . . .'

'Don't tell me about the future,' said Ford. 'I've been all over the future. Spend half my time there. It's the same as anywhere else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air.'

'That's one future,' said Harl. 'That's your future, if you accept it. You've got to learn to think multi-dimensionally. There are limitless futures stretching out in every direction from this moment – and from this moment and from this. Billions of them, bifurcating every instant! Every possible position of every possible electron balloons out into billions of probabilities! Bil– lions and billions of shining, gleaming futures! You know what that means?'

'You're dribbling down your chin.'

'Billions and billions of markets!'

'I see,' said Ford. 'So you sell billions and billions of Guides.'

'No,' said Harl, reaching for his handkerchief and not finding one. 'Excuse me,' he said, 'but this gets me so excited.' Ford handed him his towel.

'The reason we don't sell billions and billions of Guides,' continued Harl, after wiping his mouth, 'is the expense. What we do is we sell one Guide billions and billions of times. We exploit the multidimensional nature of the Universe to cut down on manufacturing costs. And we don't sell to penniless hitch hikers. What a stupid notion that was! Find the one section of the market that, more or less by definition, doesn't have any money, and try and sell to it. No. We sell to the affluent business traveller and his vacationing wife in a billion, billion different futures. This is the most radical, dynamic and thrusting business venture in the entire multidimensional infinity of space/time/probability ever.'

'And you want me to be its restaurant critic,' said Ford.

'We would value your input.'

'Kill!' shouted Ford. He shouted it at his towel.

The towel leapt up out of Harl's hands.

This was not because it had any motive force of its own, but because Harl was so startled at the idea that it might. The next thing that startled him was the sight of Ford Prefect hurtling across the desk at him fists first. In fact Ford was just lunging for the credit card, but you don't get to occupy the sort of position that Harl occupied in the sort of organisation in which Harl occupied it without developing a healthily paranoid view of life. He took the sensible precaution of hurling himself backwards, and striking his head a sharp blow on the rocket-proof glass, then subsided into a series of worrying and highly personal dreams.

Ford lay on the desk, surprised at how swimmingly every– thing had gone. He glanced quickly at the piece of plastic he now held in his hand– it was a Dine-O-Charge credit card with his name already embossed on it, and an expiry date two years from now, and was possibly the single most exciting thing Ford had ever seen in his life – then he clambered over the desk to see to Harl.

He was breathing fairly easily. It occurred to Ford that he might breathe more easily yet without the weight of his wallet bearing down on his chest, so he slipped it out of Harl's breast 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 Iying 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.