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hitchhikersguide

Dataset card Data Studio Files
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with at least three hefty spears protruding from his back. Mr
Prosser was often bothered with visions like these and they made
him feel very nervous. He stuttered for a moment and then pulled
himself together.
"Mr Dent," he said.
"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.
"Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much
damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight
over you?"
"How much?" said Arthur.
"None at all," said Mr Prosser, and stormed nervously off
wondering why his brain was filled with a thousand hairy horsemen
all shouting at him.
By a curious coincidence, None at all is exactly how much
suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his
closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact
from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from
Guildford as he usually claimed.
Arthur Dent had never, ever suspected this.
This friend of his had first arrived on the planet some fifteen
Earth years previously, and he had worked hard to blend himself
into Earth society - with, it must be said, some success. For
instance he had spent those fifteen years pretending to be an out
of work actor, which was plausible enough.
He had made one careless blunder though, because he had skimped a
bit on his preparatory research. The information he had gathered
had led him to choose the name "Ford Prefect" as being nicely
inconspicuous.
He was not conspicuously tall, his features were striking but not
conspicuously handsome. His hair was wiry and gingerish and
brushed backwards from the temples. His skin seemed to be pulled
backwards from the nose. There was something very slightly odd
about him, but it was difficult to say what it was. Perhaps it
was that his eyes didn't blink often enough and when you talked
to him for any length of time your eyes began involuntarily to
water on his behalf. Perhaps it was that he smiled slightly too
broadly and gave people the unnerving impression that he was
about to go for their neck.
He struck most of the friends he had made on Earth as an
eccentric, but a harmless one -- an unruly boozer with some
oddish habits. For instance he would often gatecrash university
parties, get badly drunk and start making fun of any
astrophysicist he could find till he got thrown out.
Sometimes he would get seized with oddly distracted moods and
stare into the sky as if hypnotized until someone asked him what
he was doing. Then he would start guiltily for a moment, relax
and grin.
"Oh, just looking for flying saucers," he would joke and everyone
would laugh and ask him what sort of flying saucers he was
looking for.
"Green ones!" he would reply with a wicked grin, laugh wildly for
a moment and then suddenly lunge for the nearest bar and buy an
enormous round of drinks.
Evenings like this usually ended badly. Ford would get out of his
skull on whisky, huddle into a corner with some girl and explain
to her in slurred phrases that honestly the colour of the flying
saucers didn't matter that much really.
Thereafter, staggering semi-paralytic down the night streets he
would often ask passing policemen if they knew the way to
Betelgeuse. The policemen would usually say something like,
"Don't you think it's about time you went off home sir?"
"I'm trying to baby, I'm trying to," is what Ford invariably
replied on these occasions.
In fact what he was really looking out for when he stared
distractedly into the night sky was any kind of flying saucer at
all. The reason he said green was that green was the traditional
space livery of the Betelgeuse trading scouts.
Ford Prefect was desperate that any flying saucer at all would
arrive soon because fifteen years was a long time to get stranded
anywhere, particularly somewhere as mindboggingly dull as the
Earth.
Ford wished that a flying saucer would arrive soon because he
knew how to flag flying saucers down and get lifts from them. He
knew how to see the Marvels of the Universe for less than thirty
Altairan dollars a day.
In fact, Ford Prefect was a roving researcher for that wholly
remarkable book The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Human beings are great adaptors, and by lunchtime life in the