John: I don’t suppose there’s any point in me asking where I’m going?

Anthea: None at all.

The Guide: By a strange coincidence, “None at all” is exactly how much suspicion the ape descendant John Watson had 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 London as he usually claimed.

John Watson had never, ever suspected this.

This friend of his had first arrived on the Earth 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 a consulting detective, 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 “Sherlock Holmes” as being nicely inconspicuous.