Tourward.

Electrodes to power, turbines to speed. Flag the commissioner, Alfred, we’re ready to roll! Hope you fixed the sticky hinge on the bat cave door. You did, didn’t you…. ? DIDN’T YOU??

Wha-at? Oh, man… what an awful dream! Not that you asked me what it was about, but… I dreamt I was an MBA in the accounting department at Enron, and… Oh, no, wait. That was Thursday night’s. Last night’s was a bit more blood-curdling (if that can be imagined). But I won’t go into that in detail. Suffice to say that it resembled something from mid-sixties television, populated by big pointless-looking computer consoles covered with flashing, multi-colored pin-sized lights. (They made whirring sounds. It was terrifying!) Lucky to get out of that particular sojourn alive. Thank uncle Jebus our tours are nothing like that. When we do interstellar travel, we tend to avoid whirring sounds…. at least, the evil, low-pitched ones. Uuuhhhllll….

Enough about me. Glad to be able to say that we’ve finished provisioning our interstellar tour bus. By which I mean, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has finished loading the un-spaceworthy crate we’ll be taking to Jupiter and parts beyond. Now I know what you’re going to say… and stop me if I’m wrong, but I think you were going to caution me on embarking on interstellar journeys in a forty-year-old rust bucket. (You weren’t going to say that? Bugger.) In any case, I’ve asked Marvin to work with the man-sized tuber in bondo-ing up all the panels that have rusted-through on the J-2 spacecraft since our last tour. About 4 dozen spots. More than I’d imagined, actually. (We put it up on blocks all winter, too. Go figure.)

Yeah, so our ship whistles when we fly…. so what? We’ve got that can-do spirit that put Armstrong, Aldrin, and… uh… that other guy on the moon forty years ago. (Actually, Collins had his own one-man party in lunar orbit, as I remember. Judging from the footage, that would have been the job for me.) What the hell…. we live in an abandoned hammer mill, for chrissake. We haven’t had anything beyond basic cable in, like, five years. Mitch Macaphee rides a bicycle that doesn’t even have fenders on it. Seriously…. we can handle anything deep space can dish out. As long as it isn’t on fire. Or radioactive. I hate radioactive stuff. (It makes my fillings glow.) Besides, Mitch (our mad science advisor) has assured us that the J-2 replica is perfectly safe to fly, so long as we stay away from that massive swarm of comets circling menacingly just outside the orbit of Pluto. We told our agent in no uncertain terms – by no means book anything within the deadly comet belt!