A little more to the left. I said LEFT! (Schmucks…) Little more…. little more… good. Okay, now we need another one for the north wall. Hurry… I think I hear the sound of bricks crumbling.
Oh, hi. Didn’t notice you there on the other side of the computer screen. Greetings from the abandoned Cheney 
Hammer Mill, just one week after our triumphant return from the great beyond (where we do nearly all of our performances). Did I say triumphant? Wrong word. Ignominious is a better fit to the circumstances. What can I tell you? Broken down spacecraft (nothing new there). Problematic re-entry (nearly a burn-up, as it happened). Crash landing on solid ground (ouch!). Limping home in disgrace (with the exception of the man-sized tuber, who had to be wheeled in a cart… being a vegetable and all…). Being met at the Hammer Mill door by virtually an entire police department (investigating an abandoned space vehicle complaint… and yes, it was down to us). So that thing about “triumphant?” Yeah…. just forget it.
Okay, well… it took a couple of days to clear up that whole police thing. They took us down to the station, fingerprinted us, scanned our retinas, etc. Keen to unpack from our long interstellar sojourn, we scraped together enough bail to 
get the human contingent out of there – that left Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the tuber, and Big Zamboola behind bars for a few hours while we called the local bail bondsman. As it happened, they set a pretty stiff bail for Zamboola, mainly because of the impracticality of keeping a celestial body (with its own gravity) in a holding cell. Marvin they let go on his own recognizance. (He was talking to them while they worked and, well… it got kind of annoying, I think. He started telling them about his anvil collection. Sheesh.)
Once the bribe… I mean, bail was paid and we had a chance to re-acclimate ourselves to positive gravity, it became obvious that things hadn’t been going very well at the Cheney Hammer Mill in our absence. No, those mongooses (mongeese?) hadn’t come back, though that remains a very real possibility. No, it wasn’t once again occupied by 
either pirates or space creatures, nor by denizens of middle earth…. nor cavemen. (Did someone say mimes? No, no mimetic infestation as of yet.) No, it was more in the way of general dilapidation. Frankly, the place is falling to pieces. No great surprise, right? I mean, the foundation is literally crumbling beneath our feet. (Especially Mitch Macaphee’s feet. He’s been putting on a little weight lately… not from good eating, you understand, but from some arcane experiment he’s running on himself… something to do with increasing his specific gravity to nearly five times its original value. We now call him “titanic man” behind his back.)
So anyway, we’ve been down in the catacombs, the arches, the basement… whatever, shoring up the beams with spare timbers. Not a lot of those left…. we may need to use something else. Oh, tubey! Got a job for you!
