Read Online Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams - Free Book Online Page B

be able to solve Rubik’s cube in seventeen seconds.  He sat on a step and stared at it for over an  hour before pronouncing it irrevocably stuck.  Admittedly he’s a few years older now and has found out about girls, but it’s got me puzzled.’
    ‘Carry on talking, my dear fellow, I’m most interested, but let me know first if there’s anything I can get you.  Port perhaps?  Or brandy?  The port I think is the better bet, laid down by the college in 1934, one of the finest vintages I think you’ll find, and on the other hand I don’t actually have any brandy.  Or coffee?  Some more wine perhaps?  There’s an excellent Margaux I’ve been looking for an excuse to open, though it should of course be allowed to stand open for an hour or two, which is not to say that I couldn’t... no,’ he said hurriedly, ‘probably best not to go for the Margaux tonight.’
    ‘Tea is what I would really like,’ said Richard, ‘if you have some.’
    Reg raised his eyebrows.  ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘I have to drive home.’
    ‘Indeed.  Then I shall be a moment or two in the kitchen.  Please carry on, I shall still be able to hear you.  Continue to tell me of your sofa, and do feel free in the meantime to sit on mine.  Has it been stuck there for long?’
    ‘Oh, only about three weeks,’ said Richard, sitting down.  ‘I could just saw it up and throw it away, but I can’t believe that there isn’t a logical answer.  And it also made me think -- it would be really useful to know before you buy a piece of furniture whether it’s actually going to fit up the stairs or around the corner.  So I’ve modelled the problem in three dimensions on my computer -- and so far it just says no way.’
    ‘It says what?’ called Reg, over the noise of filling the kettle.
    ‘That it can’t be done.  I told it to compute the moves necessary to get the sofa out, and it said there aren’t any.  I said “What?” and it said there aren’t any.  I then asked it, and this is the really mysterious thing, to compute the moves necessary to get the sofa into its present position in the first place, and it said that it couldn’t have got there.  Not without fundamental restructuring of the walls.  So, either there’s something wrong with the fundamental structure of the matter in my walls or,’ he added with a sigh, ‘there’s something wrong with the program.  Which would you guess?’
    ‘And are you married?’ called Reg.
    ‘What?  Oh, I see what you mean.  A sofa stuck on the stairs for a month.  Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girl that I’m not married to.’
    ‘What’s she like?  What does she do?’
    ‘She’s a professional cellist.  I have to admit that the sofa has been a bit of a talking point.  In fact she’s moved back to her own flat until I get it sorted out.  She, well...’
    He was suddenly sad, and he stood up and wandered around the room in a desultory sort of way and ended up in front of the dying fire.  He gave it a bit of a poke and threw on a couple of extra logs to try and ward off the chill of the room.
    ‘She’s Gordon’s sister, in fact,’ he added at last.  ‘But they are very different.  I’m not sure she really approves of computers very much.  And she doesn’t much like his attitude to money.  I don’t think I entirely blame her, actually, and she doesn’t know the half of it.’
    ‘Which is the half she doesn’t know?’
    Richard sighed.
    ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s to do with the project which first made the software incarnation of the company profitable.  It was called Reason, and in its own way it was sensational.’
    ‘What was it?’
    ‘Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program.  It’s funny how many of  the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front.  You see there have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly ordering and analysing all the relevant facts so that