Douglas Adams - The Salmon of Doubt

He said the same thing as they passed holds containing chemical weapons so powerful that a teaspoonful could fatally infect an entire planet. He said the same thing as they passed holds containing zeta-active compounds so powerful that a teaspoonful could blow up a whole planet. He said the same thing as they passed holds containing theta-active compounds so powerful that a teaspoonful could irradiate a whole planet. “I’m glad I’m not a planet,” muttered Zaphod.

“You’d have nothing to fear,” assured the official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration,

“planets are very safe. Provided,” he added—and paused. They were approaching the hold nearest to the point where the back of the Starship Billion Year Bunker was broken. The corridor here was twisted and deformed, and the floor was damp and sticky in patches. “Ho hum,” he said, “ho very much hum.”

“What’s in this hold?” demanded Zaphod.

“By-products,” said the official, clamming up again.

“By-products ...” insisted Zaphod, quietly, “of what?”

Neither official answered. Instead, they examined the hold door very carefully and saw that its seals were twisted apart by the forces that had deformed the whole corridor. One of them touched the door lightly. It swung open to his touch. There was darkness inside, with just a couple of dim yellow lights deep within it.

“Of what?” hissed Zaphod.

The leading official turned to the other.

“There’s an escape capsule,” he said, “that the crew were to use to abandon ship before jettisoning it into the black hole,” he said. “I think it would be good to know that it’s still there.” The other official nodded and left without a word.

The first official quietly beckoned Zaphod in. The large dim yellow lights glowed about twenty feet from them.

“The reason,” he said, quietly “why everything else in this ship is, I maintain, safe, is that no one is really crazy enough to use them. No one. At least no one that crazy would ever get near them. Anyone that mad or dangerous ring very deep alarm bells. People may be stupid but they’re not that stupid.”

“By-products,” hissed Zaphod again,—he had to hiss in order that his voice shouldn’t be heard to tremble—“of what.”

“Er, Designer People.”

“What?”

“The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were awarded a huge research grant to design and produce synthetic personalities to order. The results were uniformly disastrous. All the “people” and

“personalities” turned out to be amalgams of characteristics which simply could not co-exist in naturally occurring life forms. Most of them were just poor pathetic misfits, but some were deeply, deeply dangerous. Dangerous because they didn’t ring alarm bells in other people. They could walk through situations the way that ghosts walk through walls, because no one spotted the danger.

Zaphod looked at the dim yellow lights, the two dim yellow lights. As his eyes became accustomed to the light he saw that the two lights framed a third space where something was broken. Wet sticky patches gleamed dully on the floor. Zaphod and the official walked cautiously towards the lights. At that moment, four words came crashing into the helmet headsets from the other official. “The capsule has gone,” he said tersely.

“Trace it,” snapped Zaphod’s companion. “Find exactly where it has gone. We must know where it has gone!”

Zaphod slid aside a large ground glass door. Beyond it lay a tank full of thick yellow liquid, and floating in it was a man, a kindly looking man with lots of pleasant laugh lines round his face. He seemed to be floating quite contentedly and smiling to himself.

Another terse message suddenly came through his helmet headset. The planet towards which the escape capsule had headed had already been identified. It was in Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.

The kindly looking man in the tank seemed to be babbling gently to himself, just as the co-pilot had been in his tank. Little yellow bubbles beaded on the man’s lips. Zaphod found a small speaker by the tank and turned it on. He heard the man babbling gently about a shining city on a hill.

He also heard the Official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration issue instructions that the planet in ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha must be made “perfectly safe.”

From The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book, 1986

Excerpts from an Interview conducted by Matt Newsome D.N.A. The thing with Dirk Gently was that I felt I had lost contact with that character, I couldn’t make that book viable, which is why I said, “Okay, let’s go off and do something else.” Then, looking back at all the ideas that were there in Salmon of Doubt, I looked at it again about a year later and suddenly realised what it was that I’d been getting wrong, which was that these are essentially much more like Hitchhiker ideas and not like Dirk Gently ideas. So, there will come a point I suspect at some point in the future where I will write a sixth Hitchhiker book. But I kind of want to do that in an odd kind of way because people have said, quite rightly, that Mostly Harmless is a very bleak book. And it was a bleak book. The reason for that is very simple—I was having a lousy year, for all sorts of personal reasons that I don’t want to go into, I just had a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book against that background. And, guess what, it was a rather bleak book! I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number. I think that a lot of the stuff which was originally in Salmon of Doubt, was planned into Salmon of Doubt, and really wasn’t working, I think could be yanked out and put together with some new thoughts.

book. The reason for that is very simple—I was having a lousy year, for all sorts of personal reasons that I don’t want to go into, I just had a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book against that background. And, guess what, it was a rather bleak book! I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number. I think that a lot of the stuff which was originally in Salmon of Doubt, was planned into Salmon of Doubt, and really wasn’t working, I think could be yanked out and put together with some new thoughts.

Yes, because certainly some people have heard that Salmon of Doubt was now going to be a new Hitchhiker book.

D.N.A. Well, in a sense, because I shall be salvaging some of the ideas I couldn’t make work within a Dirk Gently framework and putting them in a Hitchhiker framework, undergoing necessary changes on the way. And, for old time’s sake, I may call it Salmon of Doubt, I may call it—well, who knows!

[Editor’s Note: The version of The Salmon of Doubt presented here has been assembled from various versions of this work-in-progress. Please read the Editor’s Note at the beginning of this book for a detailed description of how this was put together. On the next page I have placed Douglas’s fax to his longtime London editor, which describes his overall scheme for the novel, giving us some inkling as to where the story might have gone from here.]

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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.