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"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 coexist in naturally occurring lifeforms. 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.
"The most dangerous of all were three identical ones -- they were put in this hold, to be blasted, with this ship, right out of this universe. They are not evil, in fact they are rather simple and charming. But they are the most dangerous creatures that ever lived because there is nothing they will not do if allowed, and nothing they will not be allowed to do..."
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 toward 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 approached the two remaining tanks. A quick glance showed him that each contained an identical floating body. He examined one more carefully. The body, that of an elderly man, was floating in a thick yellow liquid. The man was kindly looking, with lots of pleasant laugh lines around his face. His hair seemed unnaturally thick and dark for somone of his age, and his right hand seemed continually to be weaving forward and back, up and down, as if shaking hands with an endless succession of unseen ghosts. He smiled genially, babbled and burbled like a half-sleeping baby, and occassionally seemed to rock very slightly with little tremours of laughter, as if he had just told himself a joke he hadn't heard before, or didn't remember properly. Waving, smiling, chortling, with little yellow bubbles beading on his lips, he seemed to inhabit a distant world of simple dreams.
Another terse message suddenly came through his helmet headset. The planet toward which the escape capsule headed had already been identified. It was in Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.
Zaphod found a small speaker by the tank, and turned it on. The man in the yellow liquid was babbling gently about a shining city on a hill.
He also heard the Official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration issue instructions to the effect that the missing escape capsule contained a "Reagan" and taht the planet in ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha must be made "perfectly safe".
Guess the short story.
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