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- A towel
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- is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it
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- has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the
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- cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of
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- Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars
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- which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow
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- heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off
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- noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a
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- mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a
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- bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and
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- of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
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- More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag
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- (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will
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- automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of
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- biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc.,
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- etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other
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- items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any
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- man who can hitchthe length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against
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- terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned
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- with.