Arthur Dent and Ford prefect - Misunderstanding each other

Arthur Dent had absolutely no idea that one of his closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from South London 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 particularly 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 seem to 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 that he had made on Earth as an eccentric, but a harmless. For instance he would often gatecrash university parties, drink too much 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, and laugh wildly for a moment.

In fact what he was really looking 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 space fleet.

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.

Later that day Ford prefect popped round to see Arthur, who was currently lying down the ground outside his house trying to prevent it from being demolished by men with bulldozers from the local town council. The sun was just beginning to dry out the mud that Arthur was laying in. A shadow moved across him. "Hello Arthur", said the shadow.

Arthur looked up and squinting into the sun was startled to see Ford prefect standing above him. "Ford! Hello, how are you?" "Fine," said Ford, "look, are you busy?" "Am I busy?" exclaimed Arthur. "Well, I've just got all these bulldozers and things to lie in front of because they'll knock down my house if I don't, but other than that ... well, no not especially, why?" They don't have sarcasm on Betelgeuse, and Ford prefect often failed to notice it unless he was concentrating. He said, "Good, is there anywhere we can talk?"