Don't call me Ishmael!

     I, Captain William A. Stoner, of the British Navy, just did something very wrong.

     You see, I am out in bleak space near parsec 12-E, that newest-mapped region off the shores of the Belts of Orion, which is basically in the middle of a vacuum-less void, in such galactic emptiness it would come close to me being the man farthest from his home planet, Earth.  I'm the chief pilot of a galactic super-ship, the big daddy of them all, the “Cadillac of the Galaxy”, a 2000-mile-long space tanker, the biggest man has ever made.  PARSEXXON has a whole fleet of them.  We traverse and crisscross and plumb space, we basically sit above some barren but ore-rich planet where through giant magnetic cannons crude pitchblend-type stuff is sucked up and pounded into a super-toxic hazardish radioactive sludge and is then impacted into the belly.

     I would say we had enough gunk to spackle the craters on any craggy moon smooth, or are big enough to plug up the giant black hole they think is sucking this bleakness of our Universe faster than a keno android pleasure-model in Marsport could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch before you could hit your first Martian hot-dog stand.

     And now through faulty calculations thanks to Shorty Hawkins, 2000 miles on the end of this hunk of rusty iron we are in trouble.  He was trying to figure out the aero-braking for this space guppy—now I am watching us fishtail into the backside of a small moon circling Kershell 23.431, like a cue-stick hitting the eight-ball, and I just scratched and lost the game.  We smashed it into pieces, there is no more moon, it will soon be an asteroid belt I guess.  But that is the least of my problems.  Shorty Hawkins and Toolroom Johnson were pounded into moondust before they could even switch the channel on the Spinrad Box.

     And you see, we thought we were alone in this vast bleakness.  That's what we thought.

     I'm here in a small module I called my “office”.  I look behind me as the interior stereo is playing Brahms' 3^rd Symphony.  We were plowing along at a snail's pace at about 4 mps (we were clipping along this ocean of nothing at 200 before this grievous aero-braking), but in space that doesn't matter.  There's an incredible amount of space in space, that's the funny thing, especially in the humorous situation I find myself in.

     My two friends, the other people on this 2000-mile-long space tomb, were supposed to be able to calculate the correct position and course we were taking.  They are dead men now, as I said.  I see a blazing twin sun system below the ship, and am watching rain sludge (precious cargo indeed) on this fourth planet out, Kerschel 23.431.  I always thought it was amusing that just for the hell of it, the guy who invented the planet classification system was a big Mozart fan, and named the planets the way Mozart's work was codified.

     Understandingly, I can't get it out of my mind that I just ran into a moon of this planet or Jupiter Symphony (it doesn't matter what you call it now).  The tail end of this huge thing that you can't even see the end of (and I have never seen more than a few miles of it before it diminishes and curves into a horizon that vanishes into a point, there's something gravely wrong that a Captain never saw his whole vessel), the tail end, you see, dragged around and pounded into that little thing that used to be a moon before.  I doubt a man has ever seen that wondrous a catastrophe before, ever.  A drunk man tends to repeat himself, but I'm never aware enough to prove that at the time.

     Now it's nothing but fragments that now I see will inevitably become a ring around this planet, and this stuff we are carrying (how much stuff would you think we can hold in this giant two liter bottle of Coca Cola?) is raining its debris down on a planet.  Yeah I know I am drunk.  And I am about to have another one.  That will be the reason they say why this thing crashed.  It's still crashing as I am speaking to you.  I don't have much time.

     Good, here is another slug of 12-year-old scotch.  I am looking out and I see the gravity of Kershell 23.431 pulling toxic ore slush down on what I believe to be a primitive, but promising, people.  They probably don't realize with their ancient customs that it's really me up here, their Zeus, Vulcan, some mythos god if you will (I could never see Shorty Hawkins or Toolroom Johnson as gods, you know, those boiler room beasts), that's the reason why they are all dying at the moment.  “IT WAS WRITTEN” their survivors, if they had any, would say.  But a 2000-mile-long spaceship tanker can hold quite a bit of Strontium 26 red clay, a super-radioactive sludge that kills humans quite slowly, but surely, AND VERY WANTONLY AND CRUELLY.

     And because I am imagining that I can feel every single soul of each barbarian dying down there, I am having another drink, here.  In a wicked sense I am more grieved by my two buddies and a robot named Theobald who were on the back end of what was once this trawler, and now I am sure they perished in the blink of an eye while they were probably playing ping-pong, or watching a sitcom on the Spinrad Box, and Shorty was messing with Theobald's head.

     Yes, this is probably the worst disaster that ever happened and there will be tribunals, but I won't be going there to explain why I was drunk and pushed a button wrong about three hours ago.  It wasn't my fault, why didn't they let us use the old shipping lanes that wouldn't have come near any planet systems?  But we've got to be able to swing around the larger planets and save fuel.  Well, we saved fuel, all right.  And now I can see the end of the ship, as I have another slug of twelve year old scotch.  Have you ever seen umpteen gallons of sludge explode, well not really, and then start raining debris because of a little thing called gravity?

     I have dipped the planet in 30-weight, that's what it looks like, and this thing is one giant can of “Quaker State”.  Disposable, because that 2000 mile length of this freighter has taken this long to bend and twisted its corrupted metals and whatever reinforced metal with momentum to reach me as it crumples like a beer can, on the tip of this ship in the front—where I once would listen and am now listening to the finale theme of the allegro movement.  I wish it were Mozart's Requiem, I guess that would be fitting.  A Kershel got destroyed with probably about forty million promising inhabitants, and I will live in infamy as the space captain that got drunk and swung too close around a big planet and fishtailed into an ugly, one-cratered moon, and killed who could have been our allies—friends—playmates, because we don't know anyone else to play with and we've been looking long and hard since ramjets were invented.  We were supposed to make unobserved visits last I heard to what could have been a great people.

     Well, I don't even have time to fix another scotch (and I can't go out for any, except in the hereafter).  We are all out of soda and ice anyway, and in a few seconds I won't feel a thing.  I am signing off the black box recorder now, maybe they will play this for aeons to come.  The blasting exploding end of the ship is coming closer, now, and the 2000-mile-long ship is only about five miles long now.  It's collapsing in on itself.  I'll say a prayer, now.  So long, everybody.  I am sorry for being drunk on the job.  But the corporation that owns a fleet of these ships will go on, they will promise that this never happens again.  Their wealth is beyond anyone's wildest dreams and they will atone for this accident by establishing more endowments for the arts, some silly space operas, hah!  They won't feel a twinge of corporate guilt, the cruel twist is there is no insurance to be paid off.  I guess our governments need to legislate some new rule.

          (As the finale crashes and crescendos in his office as he

             looks at a photo of the Cathedral in Milan and sheds a

             tear and then stares out into the blackness of the huge

             bay window fifty feet across…)

     It is only a few seconds now.  I have seen a lot of things, Brewster's Ridge Uprising, the Crab Nebula up close, but no life forms.  And what a cruel trick it is that I am to be sent to the same hell as Stalin and Hitler and Colonel Green just because we were all responsible for genocide.  At least mine was unintentional.  Goodbye….cruel Earth!!

            (In a soulful aching pain, the ship is now part of the new

            Man-made asteroideal belt, not a single sound in the vacuum

            except a small crying bleat from the casualtous brunt of

            40,000,000 unsaved souls melting and sobbing on the brown

            desert planet below, muffled now and silent…..)