The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read Online Free Page A

looking for all these years.
    The only place they registered at all was on a small black device called a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic which winked away quietly to itself. It nestled in the darkness inside a leather satchel which Ford Prefect habitually wore slung around his neck. The contents of Ford Prefect’s satchel were quite interesting in fact and would have made any Earth physicist’s eyes pop out of his head, which is why he always concealed them by keeping a couple of dogeared scripts for plays he pretended he was auditioning for stuffed in the top. Besides the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic and the scripts he had an Electronic Thumb—a short squat black rod, smooth and matt with a couple of flat switches and dials at one end; he also had a device that looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million “pages” could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor—
The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.
    Beneath that in Ford Prefect’s satchel were a few ballpoints, a notepad and a largish bath towel from Marks and Spencer.
    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
has a few things to say on
the subject of towels.
    A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can
wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of
Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of
Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it be
neath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon;
use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use
in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious
fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
(
a
mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it
can’t see you—daft as a brush, but very very ravenous
);
you can wave
your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself
of with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
    More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For
some reason, if a
strag (
strag:
nonhitchhiker
)
discovers that a hitchhiker
has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in
possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc.,
etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of
these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have
“lost.” What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the
length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a
man to be reckoned with.
    Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in
“Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (
Sass:
know, be aware of, meet, have sex
with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.
)
    Nestling quietly on top of the towel in Ford Prefect’s satchel, the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic began to wink more quickly. Miles above the surface of the planet the huge yellow somethings began to fan out. At Jodrell Bank, someone decided it was time for a nice