Is this the emergency alert button? No? Okay – the red one. Gotcha. Now… which one is the emergency telephone? No, I’m not an idiot! It’s goddamn dark in here!
Well, we’re off. Off the bottom of the elevator shaft, at least. Whoever thought a space elevator to Aldebaran was a good idea? Oh, yes… Mitch Macaphee. Our mad science advisor. Creator of Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Winner of the coveted Igor prize for depraved experimentation. Yes… that Mitch Macaphee…. he is the guy who thought of this seriously under-engineered contraption. Hey, we fucked up – we trusted him. Not one of us (with the exception of Matt) has any familiarity at all with the concepts of mad science. If we’d done our homework in Mrs. Buehler’s class, we 
might have known better. But no, not us… we just read our comic books (most entertaining!) and traded our lunch money for second-hand smokes (cough!). In the meantime, geeky kids like Mitch were collecting the knowledge that would make them all-powerful later in life… if occasionally inept.
How did it all happen? Well… I’m gon’ tell yuh. We packed all of our gear into the space elevator. It was a tight fit, to be sure. Anti Lincoln insisted on bringing at least a representative sample from his anvil collection. Then of course there was the man-sized tuber’s terrarium – as necessary a piece of equipment for him as a breathing apparatus or twin-cylinder beer hat might be for us. (Don’t let anyone tell you not to breathe or drink in space.) I won’t even talk about how much kit old Mitch Macaphee hauls along with him. He needs a fully equipped electro-atomization laboratory everywhere he goes, including the goddamned bathroom. (I reached for a bar of soap the other day and ended up with a handful of plutonium dust. Fortunately, Mitch assures me it’s harmless.) I could go on, but…
…I will! Now Marvin needs to walk on stilts everywhere because of a bet he made with Big Zamboola. (He lost, apparently.) So he practically fills the room vertically every time he staggers in, and Zamboola fills it horizontally. Anyway… the bloody space elevator got so jam-packed with personal effects that the laser-beam cable it rides on actually started to fray. We couldn’t reach escape velocity because of the drag, and now we’re 
bobbing in orbit like an enormous yo-yo. (Look, ma… Earth’s walking the dog!) This doesn’t leave us with a lot of good options. I mean, we can’t carry news of our new album, International House, to Aldebaran in a bucket! So we’re left with a choice between:
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Bobbing pointlessly in space for the rest of eternity;
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Climbing back down to Earth on a fire rope; or
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Finding a used space craft… fast!
Fortunately for us, there appears to be one or two used capsule options up here. I can see one through the porthole right now – “Dimitri’s Pre-Owned Soyuz”. Sounds like the place for a deal.
