Character Dossier: Ford PrefectCopy Anchor Link

"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 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."

— The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 1

Ford Prefect is a seasoned, roving field researcher for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, dispatched from the high-energy Megadodo offices on Ursa Minor Beta to explore and chronicle the obscure, uncharted fringes of the Western Spiral Arm.

The Praxibetel Name, The Collapsing Hrung Disaster, and "Ix"Copy Anchor Link

• The Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster (Gal./Sid./Year 03758): Ford's original birth name is only pronounceable in an obscure Betelgeusian dialect now virtually extinct since the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster of Gal./Sid./Year 03758, which wiped out all the old Praxibetel communities on Betelgeuse Seven. The entire episode is shrouded in deep mystery: no one ever knew what a Hrung was, nor why it had chosen to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven particularly.
• Father, Uncle, and Death by Shame on Betelgeuse Five: Ford's father was the only man on the entire planet to survive the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster, by an extraordinary coincidence that he was never able satisfactorily to explain. Magnanimously waving aside the clouds of suspicion that had inevitably settled around him, he came to live on Betelgeuse Five, where he both fathered and uncled Ford; in memory of his now dead race, he christened him in the ancient Praxibetel tongue. Because Ford never learned to say his original name, his father eventually died of shame (which is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy).
• The School Nickname "Ix": At school on Betelgeuse Five, the other kids nicknamed him Ix, which in the language of Betelgeuse Five translates as "boy who is not able satisfactorily to explain what a Hrung is, nor why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven."
• Choosing "Ford Prefect": Prior to landing on Earth, Ford skimped a bit on his preparatory research, leading him to choose the name Ford Prefect as being nicely inconspicuous.

Fifteen Years Undercover on EarthCopy Anchor Link

Ford came to Earth intending to stay for a single week, but got stuck for fifteen Earth years:

• Arrival via a Teaser: As he later explained to Arthur Dent, Ford originally got to Earth by hitching a lift with a teaser—rich kids with nothing to do who cruise around looking for planets that haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them, finding some isolated spot with very few people around, landing right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one is ever going to believe, and strutting up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their heads and making beep beep noises.
• Three Theories on Human Lip-Exercising: One of the things Ford always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very, very obvious (such as "It's a nice day", or "You're very tall", or "Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?"). At first he formed a theory that if human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a second one: if they don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned that one too as being obstructively cynical, deciding he quite liked human beings after all—though he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.
• The Guildford Alibi: To explain his eccentric mannerisms, Ford spent those fifteen years pretending to be an out-of-work actor from Guildford, an explanation accepted without question by his friends.
• Oddball Habits: He struck friends as an unruly boozer with oddish habits. He would frequently gatecrash university parties, get badly drunk, and make fun of any astrophysicists he could find until he was thrown out.
• The Skywatch: He would get seized with oddly distracted moods and stare into the sky as if hypnotized. When questioned, he'd grin and claim he was looking for green flying saucers (the livery of Betelgeuse trading scouts), lunge for the bar to buy an enormous round of drinks, get out of his skull on whisky, and wander the streets asking policemen if they knew the way to Betelgeuse ("I'm trying to, baby, I'm trying to").
• The Guide Revision: Earth's original entry in the Guide had consisted solely of the single word: "Harmless". After fifteen years of tireless field research, Ford submitted an extensive, encyclopedic revision. Following brutal sub-editing by Megadodo's editorial staff, the final entry was expanded to: "Mostly harmless".
• The Final Thursday: Awakened in the dead of night when his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic began winking beside his pillow—and gripped by cold sadness upon deciphering the signal in his small dark room and realizing that of all the races in the Galaxy who could have come to say hello to Earth, it had to be the Vogons—Ford rushed to Arthur Dent's House, negotiated Mr. L. Prosser into lying in the mud, explained to Arthur Dent that the end of the Earth was "about twelve minutes away", and ushered him to The Horse and Groom. There, he ordered six pints of bitter, baffled the dignified barman over Arsenal's prospects, warded off a hopeful drinker with a glare fit for an Algolian Suntiger (before eventually buying the man a whisky), slapped down a five-pound note with ten minutes left to spend it, and briefly attempted to explain to Arthur after five or six years of acquaintance that he was actually from a small planet near Betelgeuse rather than Guildford. When Arthur bolted back toward his demolished house, Ford bought four packets of salted peanuts for twenty-eight pence with a second five-pound note—emitting a subliminal stress signal across the bar communicating that he had been born 600 light-years away near Betelgeuse—and chased after Arthur, standing with rubber bungs in his ears and terrible sadness in his eyes as the Vogon ships tore across the sky while throwing away his copies of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Godspell from his satchel.
• Aboard the Vogon Flagship: Exploiting his knowledge that the Vogons now employed Dentrassi cooks—who love Vogon money, loathe Vogons, and happily smuggle hitchhikers aboard to annoy their employers—Ford used his Electronic Thumb to beam himself and Arthur into a small, dark Dentrassi galley sleeping cabin aboard Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz's flagship. Striking a match in the darkness, he fed Arthur salted peanuts to restore salt and protein lost in the matter transference beam, demonstrated The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry on Vogon Constructor Fleets on its three-by-four-inch screen, explained the Barnard's Star roundabout six light-years away and the thirty-Altairian-dollar-a-day hitchhiker lifestyle, and clapped a Babel fish from a small glass jar into Arthur's ear when Captain Jeltz began howling over the ship's Tannoy.
• Hyperspace & The "Mostly Harmless" Confession: After assuring Arthur that Vogons had "as much sex appeal as a road accident" and warning him that jumping into hyperspace was "unpleasantly like being drunk" ("You ask a glass of water"), Ford tossed Arthur the Guide, curled into a foetal ball for the jump to Barnard's Star, and sat in a corner humming to himself because he always found the actual travelling-through-space part of space travel rather trying. When Arthur demanded to see Earth's entry in the Guide, Ford pointed it out at the bottom of the screen just under Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six, excused the original one-word entry ("Harmless") by noting there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy and only a limited amount of space in the book's microprocessors, and admitted with a slightly embarrassed cough that after the editor trimmed his new submission, it now read "Mostly harmless"—just before recognizing the marching footsteps outside the cabin door as Vogon guards in steel-tipped boots come to throw them into space (or worse, read them Captain Jeltz's poetry first).
• The Poetry Appreciation Chair & Counseling the Vogon Guard: Strapped into a Poetry Appreciation Chair on the bridge with electrodes on his temples wired to imagery intensifiers, rhythmic modulators, alliterative residulators, and simile dumpers, Ford was racked by violent spasms during Captain Jeltz's poetry recitation until the electronic enhancement of the final line caught him full blast across the temples and left him limp. Following Arthur's lead in praising the poem, Ford hazarded that its rhythmic devices "counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor", hissed "Vogonity" when Arthur said "humanity", and yelled "Into whatever it was the poem was about!"—only for Jeltz to order them thrown out of number three airlock anyway despite Ford's protest ("You can't throw us into space, we're trying to write a book"). Clamped under the rubbery armpit of the huge young Vogon guard down the steel-lined corridor while the guard bellowed "Resistance is useless!", Ford asked how anyone could maintain a positive mental attitude and nearly talked the guard into an existential crisis by questioning whether stomping around, shouting, and pushing people out of spaceships gave him a full, satisfying life (discovering the guard only did it because his aunt said spaceship guard was a good career for a young Vogon with the uniform and low-slung stun-ray holster, and because keeping it up could get him promoted to Senior Shouting Officer). Flung into the cylindrical airlock chamber, Ford desperately hummed the first bar of Beethoven's Fifth ("Da da da dum!") through the reclosing hatchway, admitted his neat escape idea rather involved being on the other side of the airtight hatchway, explained that taking a lungful of air lets you last for up to thirty seconds in deep space, stuck his hands behind his back to hum an old Betelgeusian battle hymn, and briefly fooled Arthur by lunging at an imaginary switch before the outer hatchway opened and they popped out into space like corks from a toy gun. Twenty-nine seconds later—against odds of $2^{276,709}$ to 1 (matching the telephone number of the Islington flat where Arthur had once met Trillian and Zaphod Beeblebrox)—Ford and Arthur were rescued.
• The Third Reach of the Unknown, Penguin Transformation & The Improbability Drive: Spewed up onto a pavement racing through the Third Reach of the Unknown by five wild Event Maelstroms while gulping like a half-spent fish, Ford scrabbled for a fingerhold and boasted to Arthur, "There you are, I told you I'd think of something... Bright idea of mine, to find a passing spaceship and get rescued by it... Don't knock it, it worked." Opening his eyes to the hallucinated seafront at Southend, Ford was relieved to hear Arthur say it looked like Southend too, debated whether they were both mad, dismissed a passing five-headed maniac carrying an elderberry bush full of kippers as "Just someone", and pointed out how the sea stayed steady as a rock while the buildings washed up and down before Southend split into six lewdly dancing segments. Fleeing the ten-pence road doughnuts and sky-storming fish, Ford skidded down a beam of light when a girl's voice announced "Two to the power of one hundred thousand to one against and falling", got drenched by a million-gallon vat of custard, and at $2^{75,000}$ to 1 turned into a penguin—waddling around his pond in a furious circle and quacking/squawking in avian fury at the voice ("The point is that I am now a perfectly safe penguin, and my colleague here is rapidly running out of limbs!"). When they materialized inside a small luminous pink cubicle as the voice welcomed them to the Heart of Gold at $2^{20,000}$ to 1, Ford was wildly excited to realize that the officially denied rumours were true and someone had actually built the Infinite Improbability Drive—just as Arthur warned him about the infinite number of monkeys outside wanting to discuss their script for Hamlet.
• The Sales Brochure & Hearing of Zaphod Beeblebrox: Stepping out into the smart embarkation area (number two entry bay) as the pink cubicle dissolved, Ford discovered the ship was brand-new after finding a discarded Heart of Gold Sales Brochure on the floor. Reading through the technical specs with astonishment, he marveled at how Galactic astrotechnology had surged ahead during his fifteen-year exile on Earth, praising the ship's Infinite Improbability Physics and its new Sirius Cybernetics robots with Genuine People Personalities. When the abject steel android Marvin arrived and revealed that no government owned the starship because it had been stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox, at least five separate and distinct expressions of shock and amazement piled up on Ford's face in a jumbled mess, leaving his left leg suspended in mid-stride as he struggled to process that his semi-cousin had pulled off the heist of the century.
• Reunion on the Bridge & The "Martin Smith" Outrage: Entering the bridge, Ford greeted his semi-cousin warmly ("Zaphod, great to see you, you're looking well, the extra arm suits you. Nice ship you've stolen"), introducing Arthur as the lone Earthman he rescued when the planet blew up. When Arthur calmly announced that he and Zaphod had already met, Ford was gripped by furious incredulity: "What do you mean you've met? This is Zaphod Beeblebrox from Betelgeuse Five you know, not bloody Martin Smith from Croydon." Hearing Arthur identify Zaphod as "Phil"—who had crashed an Islington flat party six months earlier disguised with two arms and one head—Ford was incensed that Zaphod had visited Earth for fun while Ford had spent fifteen grueling years trapped there, until Trillian entered and confirmed the surreal story.
• Insomnia, the Vogon Article, & The Horsehead Nebula: During the ship's artificial night on conventional photon drive, Ford found sleep impossible, electrified by the ecstasy of being back on the road after fifteen years of terrestrial exile. In the corner of his cabin, he sat before a computer terminal and attempted to draft a new entry for the Guide on the subject of Vogons, but gave up when he could not conjure prose vitriolic enough to do them justice. Wrapping a robe around himself, he wandered to the bridge, where Zaphod tested him with a blank external monitor screen. Bemused by the darkness, Ford learned they had arrived in the Horsehead Nebula and watched with astonishment as the 180-degree camera rotation revealed the binary red suns Soulianis and Rahm and the legendary ghost world of Magrathea.
• Orbital Scepticism & The Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden (Chapter 16): As the Heart of Gold entered orbit three hundred miles above Magrathea, Ford vehemently dismissed the legendary world as a bedtime fairy story parents tell children to make them grow up into economists. When Zaphod cited the shipboard computer's calculations, Ford dryly retorted that he wouldn't trust Eddie to speak his weight. Watching the stunning binary sunrise, Ford felt the pure, unadorned thrill of exploring a strange new planet, irritated by Zaphod's need to dress reality in childish fantasy—prompting his famous rationalist maxim: "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
• The Weight of Time & Unmasking Zaphod: Gazing down at the bleak, crypt-cold, wind-smoothed grey surface, Ford felt the crushing immensity of time as a physical presence. Convinced that any ancient wealth would have long since crumbled to meaningless dust, he interrogated Zaphod on what they were doing there if not for "sheer industrial archaeology." Watching Zaphod's heads look in opposing directions before offering a glib line about fame and money, Ford's sharp instincts recognized immediately that Zaphod had not the faintest conscious clue why he had come to Magrathea, before flatly declaring: "I think it's just a dead planet."
• The Magrathean Missile Crisis, Manual Flight, & The Bruised Upper Arm (Chapter 17): When Magrathea's ancient automated defence council broadcast its third recorded announcement—cheerfully informing them that two thermonuclear guided missiles were converging as a "courtesy detail"—Ford tapped Zaphod on the shoulder and pointed out the rear screen: "I think they're going to have a very good try at applying to us."
  • Manual Flight Frenzy: With the ship's guidance system jammed by Magrathean ECM, Ford pleasantly asked Zaphod and Trillian if either could fly the ship manually; upon discovering that nobody had the foggiest idea, he leapt to the freshly unboxed manual flight consoles, which sprayed the bridge with packing cellophane and expanded polystyrene balls.
  • Guidance Rocket Aerobatics: Following Zaphod's incoherent navigation orders ("full retro thrust and ten degrees starboard. Or something..."), Ford pulled the few levers that made immediate sense, sending the ship into a screaming convulsion until he released half of them, spinning the Heart of Gold directly into the teeth of the oncoming missiles.
  • The Guide Smashing & The Upper Arm Bruise: Pinned breathless against wall-mounted emergency air cushions, Ford watched Zaphod kick and snap off the manual guidance lever. Hurled violently across the cabin as the ship dropped out of the sky like a stone, Ford's copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy smashed into a control console—inadvertently blaring aloud instructions on smuggling Antarean parakeet glands past telepathic customs officers. During this violent freefall, Ford sustained a nasty, agonizing bruise to his upper arm—fulfilling the narrator's ominous Chapter 16 prophecy.
  • Stranded on the Ceiling & The Improbability Gamble: Pinned to the ceiling after the ship flattened out upside down while Eddie whined "You'll Never Walk Alone", Ford shouted at Arthur to stop repeating that they were definitely going to die (while grimly conceding that they were). When Arthur suggested activating the unprogrammed Infinite Improbability Drive, Ford looked on as Trillian backed the plan, allowing Arthur to scramble up the moulded wall contours and detonate the drive at impact minus five seconds.
• The Spiral Staircase & The Chilled Gargle Blaster (Chapter 18): When the Improbability jump safely subsided, Ford materialized seated casually on a wrought-iron spiral staircase that led nowhere in particular amidst ferns and yellow flowers, holding a nicely chilled Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in his hand. Bewildered by the garden conservatory decor, he asked "But where are we?" before inspecting the reflective mirror readouts and doubtfully reporting the miraculous fate of the thermonuclear missiles: "They would appear to have turned into a bowl of petunias and a very surprised-looking whale..."
• Counting to Ten & Marvin's Inclusion (Chapter 19): Preparing to disembark onto Magrathea:
  • Scepticism Toward Marvin: Gazing with distaste at Marvin standing hunched under a small palm tree, Ford questioned Zaphod on what they could possibly achieve by dragging a manically depressed robot across an alien world.
  • The Aggression of Counting: When Eddie's matriarchal persona locked the exit hatch, Ford slumped against the bulkhead and quietly counted to ten. The narrator reveals Ford was desperately anxious that sentient beings would one day forget how to count—the only way humans could demonstrate their intellectual independence from computers—and noted that counting at a computer is the ultimate provocation, equivalent to walking up to a human and whispering "Blood... blood... blood... blood..."
  • Entering Magrathea: Stepped down the ramp alongside the crew into the biting, sub-zero gale of the Magrathean desert.
• The Cat Litter Comparison & The Locked Brain of Zaphod (Chapter 20):
  • Mounting Irritation: Wandering the blighted, dullish grey and brown terrain, Ford felt mounting exasperation at crossing thousands of light-years after fifteen years of being a castaway on Earth only to end up in a barren dump without even a hotdog stand in evidence ("Desolate hole, if you ask me... I could have more fun in a cat litter").
  • The Whale Impact: Inspecting the outer rim of the 150-yard crater, Ford realized with horror that the wet, rubbery black and red lumps were fresh whalemeat from the exploded sperm whale.
  • Descending into the Catacombs: Reluctantly followed Zaphod and Trillian down into the cracked subterranean passages, leaving Arthur behind on guard duty with Marvin (thoughtfully lending Arthur his copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).
  • Interrogating Zaphod's Motives: Stepping past dark tiles and bright mosaic patterns, Ford hauled Zaphod into a side chamber full of derelict computers and demanded to know how Zaphod had located Magrathea and why he had stolen the Heart of Gold.
  • Skin Crawling at 'Z.B.': Listening with growing unease to Zaphod's confession that his entire life felt like an unexplainable freewheel—and that his mind locked up whenever he attempted to understand why he did things—Ford stared aghast as Zaphod explained the encephalographic scan viewed through a green filter. When Zaphod revealed that the cauterized synapses were branded with the initials "Z. B.", Ford's skin began to crawl in horror.
  • Overcome by Gas: Before he could press Zaphod further, a steel shutter slammed shut and knockout gas poured into the room, knocking Ford out cold alongside Zaphod and Trillian.

Ford Prefect's Leather SatchelCopy Anchor Link

Habitually worn slung around his neck, the contents of Ford's leather satchel would have made any Earth physicist's eyes pop out of his head:

1. Dog-Eared Play Scripts: Kept stuffed in the top to conceal his alien hardware—specifically copies of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Godspell, which he pretended he was auditioning for and discarded just before Earth's demolition.
2. The Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic: A small black device that winked quietly to itself to register approaching spacecraft.
3. The Electronic Thumb: A short, squat black rod, smooth and matt, with a couple of flat switches and dials at one end for flagging down passing starships.
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A micro sub-meson electronic component resembling a largish electronic calculator with about a hundred tiny flat press-buttons, a four-inch-square screen capable of summoning a million "pages," and a snug plastic cover printed with DON'T PANIC in large friendly letters.
5. Terrestrial Essentials: Beneath the Guide lay a few biros, a notepad, a largish bath towel from Marks and Spencer, and a pair of rubber ear bungs.