The Salmon of Doubt

Fax To: Sue Freestone From: Douglas Adams Re: The Salmon of Doubt description Dirk Gently, hired by someone he never meets, to do a job that is never specified, starts following people at random. His investigations lead him to Los Angeles, through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos. Jokes, lightly poached fish, and the emergent properties of complex systems form the background to Dirk Gently’s most baffling and incomprehensible case.

Chapter 1

He laid the thing down carefully and stood back to admire the effect. The shrine was just a small heap of rocks, really, with a little array of things that had got dug up from time to time. There was a remote-control garage opener, something that was probably part of a juice extractor, and a small, illuminated Kermit the Frog. The pool-cleaning lobsterish thing was a pretty good addition, and he arranged it so that its two feet of broken ribbed plastic tubing hung down like an elephant’s trunk over Kermit.

His morning trips up to the shrine were partly just to amuse himself, but also a chance to be alone and reflect on things. This whole place had started just as somewhere to fool around by himself, but it had rapidly turned into something kind of bigger than he meant, and he needed somewhere to get away from it all and think about things. Sometimes he’d even worry. When he was worried he would start to giggle slightly, and when he was really worried he would start to hum old Carpenters tunes till the worry went away.

But today he wasn’t going to worry. Today he was going to have fun. He unslung the canvas bag he’d brought up with him and dropped it on the ground for a moment.

From up here, the view was stupendous. Lush forest surrounded DaveLand in every direction, forest of extraordinary richness and diversity, teeming with life and colour. Through it wound the river Dave, which then meandered on through the hills till it met, five hundred miles away, the immense ocean which, until recently, he had called the Dave Ocean, but which in a fit of modest embarrassment he had now renamed the Karen Ocean. He had always thought that Pacific was a really dumb name. He had been on it. It wasn’t Pacific at all. He’d fixed that.

DaveLand itself was now a pretty impressive affair. Astonishing, really, when he thought about it. He brushed his hand through his lank hair and stared out at it, suppressing a very very small giggle.

DaveLand lightly covered about ninety acres of hillside with new outcrops already beginning to appear on nearby hills. Beautiful homes. Much more beautiful than any of the ones that his imaginary St. Clive would have sold or even understood. None of your split-level ranch-style crap with stupid conversation pits that anyone with half a brain would probably kill themselves rather than converse in. Dave’s houses of a different kind altogether. Apart from anything else, they were smart houses. Just simple stuff, like they faced the right way. They had glass in the right places, stone in the right places, water in the right places, plants in the right places, so the air moved through them properly and was warm where you wanted it and cool where you wanted it. It was just physics. Most architects didn’t know any physics, he decided. They just knew dumb stuff. In Dave’s houses, prisms and fibres moved sunlight where you wanted it. Heat exchangers took heat from the food in the fridge and gave it to the food in the oven.

Simple. People went into Dave’s houses and would say, “Hey! This is really neat! How come other people don’t build houses like this?” Answer? Because they’re dumb.

And telephones. Dave had given people here much neater, smarter, altogether more fabulous telephones than they’d ever had before. Now they wanted television as well, which Dave thought was pretty dumb in the first place, and monumentally dumb in the circumstances; but that in turn had been a pretty interesting problem and Dave, of course, had solved it. But Dave had solved so many problems that he had inadvertently created a new one. DaveLand was now a community of nearly a thousand people, which made him kind of responsible. He hadn’t expected to be responsible.

Just beneath Dave’s Place, on the same hillside and contained within the same security compound (he couldn’t believe he had to have stuff like security compounds now; and forty—forty—of the nine-hundred-plus inhabitants of DaveLand were now lawyers) was The Way of the Nostril.