Count sideways.


Well, great day in the morning... I was wondering where I left that freaking thing. Who might have thought it would turn up in the rock garden? What's next, eh? (Well, the next thing you know, old Jed's a millionaire...)


I don't have to tell you - when you start packing your bags for an extended trip beyond the bounds of our solar system, that is when things start turning up... things you haven't seen for months, maybe years. Just yesterday I found a pair of sneakers I'd misplaced during last year's election. The day before that, Matt stumbled across the remains of his first kazoo (the one he'd used to record the theme from our never-completed sci-fi epic, "Destination: Space"). John has been turning up all sorts of remnants of past lives, such as an ancient banjo labeled simply "The Gibson". And I'd rather not get into what Mitch Macaphee has been dragging out of the depths of his makeshift studio in the old forge room of the Cheney Hammer Mill, our humble squat-house. Half-human cyborgian experiments. Beakers of nameless goo, glowing five colors at once. A bald unicycle tire. (How did that get in there?) What did the man-sized tuber find in his terrarium? Some old plant food... that's about it.


It's always hard to know what you'll need on this kind of journey. Big Green's last interstellar tour required a great deal of ingenuity on our parts, and that's mostly because we didn't have the proper supplies. This time, that's not going to happen. In fact, we've given Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the responsibility of being our quartermaster. He has, as I'm sure you realize, a machine-like memory. (I don't mean a computer kind of machine... more like a desk stapler or tape dispenser.) In addition, he has the strength of ten ordinary men (like the cartoon Hercules), so he can load whatever he requisitions. Now that is what I call efficient use of humanoid resources. Now if he could only convince the man-sized tuber to put his little push-cart to use loading the spacecraft. (Though that degree of efficiency might be considered borderline obsessive. Scratch that.)


How are the Lincolns helping us? Good question. Anti-Lincoln is still billeted in the hoosegow, the crowbar hotel, the pokey... whatever you call it where you come from. Trust me - the biggest help he can be is by staying right there until launch date (or launch date plus one, even). Posi-Lincoln, for his own part, has been keeping to himself of late. I think he's working on an address of some sort. He keeps poking his head out and asking Marvin to find him some used envelopes and a spare bottle of India ink, then he disappears again, scratching away. Another Gettysburg address in the works? No man can say. Not sure what the occasion would be. Maybe he's working on his memoirs... though they are likely to make a very strange read at this juncture. (I'll look with interest for the chapters describing his transit to the 21st Century via Trevor James Constable's orgone generating device.) And then there's Mitch, who... who.... Oh, bloody hell! He's blown a hole in the side of Jupiter! Nice going, Mitch! They're going to love us in the Big Red Spot!


With all this going on, of course, we've had to... well... hold up the countdown. Or something close to that, anyway. (We're counting sideways, in point of fact.)

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