Tangled Yarns: Failures

Zorble and blew. His cheeks puffed out and his eyes bulged, then his face went from a healthy green to an unhealthy pink. He put the trumpet down and inspected it. There was a cleaning rag stuck in the mouthpiece. The admiral pulled it out and raised the trumpet again but the planet lurched the other way and all the vast audience heard was a short 'peep' as the admiral fell backwards off the podium and landed in a crumpled heap on the roof of his Zorblemobile.

Not wanting to hang around any longer, the Zorbelites jumped into their space ships and took off. Most of them made it. The ones that didn't flew along the ground and got stuck in the sides of buildings.

And so the mighty fleet left the planet Zorble and headed for the galaxies far away. Their quest: to seek out new worlds which didn't wobble so much, and to go where no Zorble had gone before. At least, that's what they hoped, because they didn't know for sure whether other Zorbles had gone before because they weren't very good at keeping records.

Out of three million ships, half a million didn't make it off the planet. Another half a million broke down and had to be towed back because of faulty spark plugs. That left two million. Out of these, the following problems occurred: maps were lost or destroyed or eaten by accident, pilots went to sleep at the controls, the gafaffle beast swallowed quite a few, a fleet disappeared down a black hole and reappeared a million years before they started, a weird space warp turned several thousand inside out, homesickness, measles, and inter-galactic chicken-pox, stupidity, delusions of grandeur, madness, mutiny, hijacking, drinking parties and lack of fuel.

So it was that when the vast Zorbelite fleet finally arrived on the outer limits of planet Earth, a total of three ships pointed their noses at the landmasses and began to descend. Unfortunately, they forgot to take into account the fact that Earth spins, and two ships plunged into the ocean and were never seen or heard from again. The remaining ship bounced down a busy highway and came to rest in a public pond.

The earthlings gathered around, at a safe distance, and waited to see what the aliens would do. The army parked some tanks nearby and the air force hovered overhead. Press photographers filmed everything, moment by moment, as the president considered ways of gaining more votes by including the arrival of the alien space ship in his latest speech. Several shops opened up nearby, selling replicas of the space-ship.

The earthlings gasped as the door of the Zorble ship began to open. It grated as the big, metal wheel on it turned. The suspense was enormous. Slowly it swung