"Well, here's hopin' I don't run into it. Might be too easy to put a bullet in it." Mal was mostly sarcastic, though if the thing did appear and caught him off guard, the possibility of shooting it was quite real.

Mal folded up the coat, the gun still in one hand as he replied, "2518. Things ain't changed that much, far as I can tell." Well, unless you counted the fact that the Earth had been "used up" and made uninhabitable some fifty years earlier, give or take a few years.