Here's the story:
It was green, but not a pretty green. It was green gone bad. Ralph said it was green like sphinx snot. Nobody disagreed. It was his truck, a 1972 GMC pick-up. He called it the Green Hornet.
It wasn’t much of a truck. It was rusty and falling apart. In fact it was the rust, to a large degree, which was holding the truck together. The heater didn’t work (there was a nest of mice who had colonized it a few years back and the brothers, particularly Ralph, didn’t want to disturb them because of what had happened during the notorious ‘squirrel incident’), the passenger door had to be opened from the outside, the driver’s window was pooched and wouldn’t roll up if somehow it had gotten rolled down, which it couldn’t, but that was O.K. because it wouldn’t sit on the track anyway and had to be wedged into place. But worst of all the radio wouldn’t work so Colin had to put up with Ralph singing (the closest approximation of the noise that emitted from his mouth) an old Stompin Tom song, just the one, the same one, over and over and over again. Tillsonburg.
In short, the truck was a mess, but the truck was the brothers’ only and mostly reliable source of transportation. It would run, usually, except when it was wet or cold, or on days with an ‘r’ in it it seemed. For once the block heater did its job and the Green Hornet had started. Just their luck.
It was also cold, damned cold that day. It was 40 degrees below, and it didn’t matter which scale you used, Fahrenheit or Celsius, it was all the same thing, damned cold.
Ralph was driving the Green Hornet up a treacherous incline from their de-base camp, along a piece of icy road that climbed a number of switchbacks. In the back of the truck’s box was a mini tank filled and sloshing away with their latest wine invention. A ‘sampling tube’ the brothers had installed led into the truck cab, and dangled in Ralph’s lap (his hands were full with driving at the moment). From it’s end escaping droplets formed a little wet spot on the seat between his legs that sort of steamed and smoked and dissolved upholstery.
In the cab of the truck it was stupid cold, which is way beyond just ‘damned cold’. In fact it was colder inside the truck than outside. It was so cold that the condensation from their breath froze on the windows and made it impossible to see.
Colin was using the cutting torch on the windshield, along with a scraper, trying to keep a patch of the window clear when the truck hit a major bump. The torch wand flew backward, hit Colin in the face, and then fell into Ralph’s lap. In a puff of smoke and accompanied by the smell of burnt denim and hair, the flame lit the little puddle with a whump, and then the fire, like a lit fuse, traveled up the hose to the source. It ignited the contents of the mini tank at the spigot, which then blossomed in ultraviolet fire.
The two brothers were thrown back into their seats by the acceleration. Ralph’s eyeballs were pushed so far back into his skull that he was able to see no one was home.
They figured that the truck would have broken the land speed record were it not for the fact that the tires had melted and then the vehicle had lifted off the ground and was heading due up, heading for the stars. Unbelievably the truck not only achieved escape velocity but was still accelerating due to the potency of the fuel, faster and faster away from the earth when suddenly, in Colin’s words, the whole of space started to look like dry heaves, from the inside, and the truck ripped a hole in the space time continuum, Ralph said it ripped itself another *hole, and the Green Hornet, the two Campbell brothers, and the nest of mice, vanished into another space.
What happened? It wasn’t a warp drive they had invented, although they were well and truly warped by the time it had occurred. It wasn’t the fabled ion drive, or the plasma drive, or any one of a number of possible cool sounding science-fictiony types of technologically advanced engines they had stumbled upon – and stumble is really a good choice of description when talking about anything the brothers did. There was only one possible name that you could attach to this remarkable propulsion device; there was only one reasonable thing to call it. The brothers had invented the drunk drive.
And they should have died, there’s no two ways about it. They should have died in a crash, from the crushing acceleration, from the lack of oxygen, from the vacuum of space, from the cosmic radiation, from a million other things, but they didn’t. Go figure.
So earth’s first intergalactic space ship ended up being this ugly green thing, in origin a terrestrial ground utility vehicle, actually an old pick-up truck, and it materialized in, as they say, a far away galaxy.
The life forms inside, two stunned humans and 5 confused rodents, were bundled all together in a tarp trying to keep out the deathly cold, trying to breathe from the trickle of oxygen coming from the cutting torch wand. It wasn’t easy. Colin had just farted.
Wrapped in the tarp they couldn’t see where they were going, which was O.K. because they couldn’t have said where they’d been, and they couldn’t have turned their ‘ship’ anyway, and they couldn’t have run if they wanted to. Once and again the Campbell Brothers were up the gravity well without any visible means of propulsion.
But something saw them, and tracked them, and reached out with an invisible force to draw them in. It was a ship, a gigantically huge, mind numbingly biggest ever kind of big cube thing, and it now had them.
Ralph and Colin Campbell, two brothers who until now resisted everything, were about to find where resistance was useless.
On the back panel of this brochure is the following:
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to person or persons who may or may not be brothers, whether they claim to be related or not, is expressly intended.
and
Ralph and Colin Campbell
Two men who have spent over fifty years,
both light years and the regular kind,
drunk.
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