Six-eleven. Hell, that’s 9-11 turned upside-down, isn’t it? Spooky. Strange coincidences abound in the land of the paranoid – a foggy and foreboding place if ever there was one… and there WAS one. Six-eleven. Our fodder who art in heaven.
Guess we’ve got that old travelin’ blues. Ain’t that how the song goes? (There seem to be a lot of old songs on my mind these days, I must admit. Please forgive me.) Anyway, you’d have them too if somebody blew a big hole in YOUR squat-house. Crikey, the whole place smells like charcoal and old hammer-stock splinters. Old anti-Lincoln can’t even make himself a plate of anti-matter toaster waffles without nearly yakking all over his stew. Intolerable, I tell you. Just the sort of situation that would drive normally reasonable derelicts such as ourselves to thoughts of the road… of performing before throngs of adoring fans (many of which have two or even THREE heads)… of visiting exotic ports of call in undiscovered galaxies. Of… of…. of escape, damn it, escape!
Turns out that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is
not all that keen on the idea of being left behind to handle little tasks like… oh…. rebuilding the mill, buying off the constables, dodging any stray shells from Gung-Ho’s proving grounds (I believe the Cheney Hammer Mill may now be listed as a legitimate practice target). Minor stuff, but he’s balking… at least to the extent that his programming will allow. 
Robots of Marvin’s general classification don’t frown, exactly, but they do have subtle ways of letting you know that they are not too pleased with what you’re demanding of them. Lookit — when professor Mitch Macaphee builds a robot, it’s bound to be more than just a soulless servo-mechanism. Our Marvin has feelings, you know? And opinions, lots of opinions. Only thing is, he’s programmed to be somewhat reticent, in an automatonic sort of way. (I keep thinking one of these days he’s just going to EXPLODE. Or join “Captured By Robots” for real.
Hey, you can’t make everybody happy. Neither should you try, in my book. (I have a book? News to me.) Still, Marvin is an important part of our ludicrous entourage, and as such, he is due more than a minimum of consideration. Truth be told, he has a substantial fan base in his own right. It certainly rivals our own, particularly in those out-of-the-way corners of the galaxy run entirely by robots, cyborgs, or the like. I don’t think it’s entirely clear to them that Marvin is not a 
musician, as such, though he does pick up an instrument every once in a while – banjos, guitars, drums, the occasional bagpipes, etc. As you might imagine, out in the great beyond there isn’t always a whole lot of difference between holding an instrument and actually doing something with it. (Yeah, that’s right. It’s a lot like planet Earth.)
Anyway, so once we’ve got the rent-a-spacecraft in shape, we can start thinking about little details like, where the hell are we going? and what the hell are we going to do for money? One thing at a time. Don’t ask more than that of us, my friends. Too damn taxing.
