Blowed up good.


What the hell, man. Are you sure this is the way to Neptune? I mean, I don't remember all of these asteroids. For chrissake, I feel like I'm flying through an eighties-vintage arcade video game.

Oh, hi. Glad you decided to check in at this moment. Maybe you could help us with a little navigational problem we seem to be having. Our usually capable mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee seems to have gotten us a little off the beaten path between Saturn and Neptune. I think the explanation is relatively simple - Zenite snuff, helpfully provided by our perpetual sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn. As mentioned previously, Mitch is - while brilliant - not the best space craft pilot even when sober. With a nostril full of that hot stuff from the Small Magellanic Cloud, I doubt he could find his way to the zero-gravity can. Anyway, he appears to have followed the wrong lode star or something on that order, and we are now dodging some of the biggest, lumpiest, nastiest looking asteroids I've seen in a couple of weeks, bar none. (We're using all kinds of exotic evasive maneuvers, like the reverse double-back figure seven and the inverted stroke-six with change back from your twenty. Hey, look 'em up - I can't explain how they work!)

Okay, so here we are - threading our way between hunks of jagged stone en route to a planet that is probably in another direction entirely. This in the wake of a string of thrashing performances on the big planet, Jupiter, from which we were unceremoniously ejected when it became known that Mitch Macaphee had caused the big impact from a few weeks back. (Some kind of avionics test, I believe - Matt's talked to him about this kind of thing.) What went down? Well, our rented P.A. system, for one thing. The man-sized tuber had to abandon the mixing console when our Jovian patrons started tossing burning wads of methane gas at him. (Tubey simply isn't used to the plain-clothes club scene.) Marvin (my personal robot assistant) helped wheel the tuber out of harm's way, but that didn't keep the main speaker array from tumbling over into the orchestra pit. As a scholar once said, it blowed up real good. Oh, the horror... the horror.

In any case, the Jupiteranians (or Jovians or whatever the hell) drove us out at the point of a flaming pitchfork, as it were. Mitch's little avionics experiment produced a titanic 'splosion, we gather, and that has a tendency to piss folks off. There was screaming and gnashing of teeth, and that's just amongst the band members. Those extraterrestrials have a whole sockful of different ways to express their anger, many having to do with the emission of high-intensity radiation. We all got out alive, thank whomsoever, though I think the man-sized tuber may have sustained some minor psychological injuries. We may even be talking post traumatic stress disorder. He's been sitting in front of the only Web-enabled computer in our spacecraft, staring at the e-Bay listing for an enormous zucchini. (He has a kind of longing look in his "eyes" - it worries me, frankly.)

Hey, tubey - forget the zucchini of your dreams for a few minutes and man the navigation console. Tubey! Jesus H. Frankenberry... Is there a vegetable psychiatrist in the house?

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