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Dirk GentlyТs Holistic Detective Agency
Douglas Adams (1987)




to my mother,
who liked the bit about the horse


[::: AUTHORТS NOTE ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

The physical descriptions of St CeddТs College in this book, in so
far as they are specific at all, owe a little to my memories of St
JohnТs College, Cambridge, although IТve also borrowed indiscriminately
from other colleges as well. Sir Isaac Newton was at Trinity College in
real life, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at Jesus.
The point is that St CeddТs College is a completely fictitious
assemblage, and no correspondence is intended between any institutions
or characters in this book and any real institutions or people, living,
dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment.
This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh Plus
computer and LaserWriter Plus printer using MacAuthor word-processing
software.
The completed document was then printed using a Linotron 100 at The
Graphics Factory, London SW3, to produce a final high-resolution image
of the text. My thanks to Mike Glover of Icon Technology for his help
with this process.
Finally, my very special thanks are due to Sue Freestone for all her
help in nursing this book into existence.

Douglas Adams
London, 1987


[::: CHAPTER 1 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

This time there would be no witnesses.
This time there was just the dead earth, a rumble of thunder, and
the onset of that interminable light drizzle from the north-east by
which so many of the worldТs most momentous events seem to be
accompanied.
The storms of the day before, and of the day before that, and the
floods of the previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulged
with rain, but all that actually fell in the gathering evening gloom
was a dreary kind of prickle.
Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered through the
low hills and gusted across a shallow valley where stood a structure, a
kind of tower, alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning.
It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusion of