Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Read Online Free PDF Page A

family?’
    ‘Er... no,’ said Reg, quietly.  ‘But tell me.  After “Three Blind Mice”, what then?’
    ‘Well, to cut a long story short, Reg, I ended up working for WayForward Technologies...’
    ‘Ah, yes, the famous Mr Way.  Tell me, what’s he like?’
    Richard was always faintly annoyed by this question, probably because he was asked it so often.
    ‘Both better and worse than he’s represented in the press.  I like him a lot, actually.  Like any driven man he can be a bit trying at times, but I’ve known him since the very early days of the company when neither he nor I had a bean to our names.  He’s fine.  It’s just that it’s a good idea not to let him have your phone number unless you possess an industrial-grade answering machine.
    ‘What?  Why’s that?’
    ‘Well, he’s one of those people who can only think when he’s talking.  When he has ideas, he has to talk them out to whoever will listen.  Or, if the people themselves are not available, which is increasingly the case, their answering machines will do just as well.  He just phones them up and talks at them.  He has one secretary whose sole job is to collect tapes from people he might have phoned, transcribe them, sort them and give him the edited text the next day in a blue folder.’
    ‘A blue one, eh?’
    ‘Ask me why he doesn’t simply use a tape recorder,’ said Richard with a shrug.
    Reg considered this.  ‘I expect he doesn’t use a tape recorder because he doesn’t like talking to himself,’ he said.  ‘There is a logic there.  Of a kind.’
    He took a mouthful of his newly arrived porc au poivre and ruminated on it for a while before gently laying his knife and fork aside again for the moment.
    ‘So what,’ he said at last, ‘is the role of young MacDuff in all this?’
    ‘Well, Gordon assigned me to write a major piece of software for the Apple Macintosh.  Financial spreadsheet, accounting, that sort of thing, powerful, easy to use, lots of graphics.  I asked him exactly what he wanted in it, and he just said, “Everything.  I want the top piece of all-singing, all-dancing business software for that machine.”  And being of a slightly whimsical turn of mind I took him literally.
    ‘You see, a pattern of numbers can represent anything you like, can be used to map any surface, or modulate any dynamic process -- and so on.  And any set of company accounts are, in the end, just a pattern of numbers.  So I sat down and wrote a program that’ll take those numbers and do what you like with them.  If you just want a bar graph it’ll do them as a bar graph, if you want them as a pie chart or scatter graph it’ll do them as a pie chart or scatter graph.  If you want dancing girls jumping out of the pie chart in order to distract attention from the figures the pie chart actually represents, then the program will do that as well.  Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of each division of your company.  Great for producing animated corporate logos that actually mean something.
    ‘But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well.  Well, I thought it was silly.  The corporate world went bananas over it.’
    Reg regarded him solemnly from over a piece of carrot poised delicately on his fork in front of him, but did not interrupt.
    ‘You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be expressed as a sequence or pattern of numbers,’ enthused Richard.  ‘Numbers can express the pitch of notes, the length of notes, patterns of pitches and lengths.’
    ‘You mean tunes,’ said Reg.  The carrot had not moved yet.
    Richard grinned.
    ‘Tunes would be a very good word for it.  I must remember that.’
    ‘It would help you speak more easily.’  Reg returned the carrot to