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I agree this made much more sense, but it made me realise that when Zaphod and Ford meet on the spaceship, Zaphod should not know him as Ford. Since Zaphod didn't know he was there and the name Ford Prefect was one he chose specificly to blend in on Earth.

Adams writes somewhere (the radio scripts book?) that he wrote an explanation of how Ford paid lots of money to a name-unpicking service for them to go back in time and patch all the places he'd used his earlier, pre-Hrung name, so that they now said "Ford Prefect" instead. But apparently he couldn't make it sound interesting enough to put in the book, even as a footnote.

Peter