Down Under Crater Billy

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It began with the office routine of Binkovitch telling me, “C’mon, Dave, this baby’s absolutely foolproof.”

Then the schmuck laughed at this several hundredth-odd iteration of a joke that was stump stupid the first time he told it. As usual, that aggravating, annoying, sludgeforbrains haw! haw! haw! made me wish I could reach through the commscreen and whack him one on the top of his pointy head. Preferably with something like a nice big hammer in my hand.

Once again I vowed to actually take one of my unused leaves, venture the hundreds of klicks north to Copernicus Down, visit the UN level, casually drop by UNNTSTOA’s section, pop into his office for our first face to face ever, and proceed to beat the living crap out of him. Since I had no plans to ever risk the ride back to Earth and then visit some tropical paradise like Tahiti, that was—and is—my dream vacation.

I took another look at the invoice inset at the bottom of the screen under Binkovitch’s ugly ferret face. Half a dozen different new items were listed, but one in particular was giving me the sort of sinking feeling the mammoths must have felt when they visited sunny La Brea.

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