The craft hovered some sixty kilometres above the planet, just a little beyond the atmosphere.
They had travelled far and wide on their quest for the precious substance. Their needs for this would be hard to explain to any life forms outside of the GN-z11 galaxy, some thirteen and a half billion light-years from their present location. Their home planet’s survival was entirely dependent on the success or failure of their mission. The complex substance they search for is made up mainly of the two ions, chloride and sodium, with far smaller amounts of sulphate and magnesium. Should they find this highly prized commodity, their ship is armed with a quelling device that can be used to subdue whatever species that inhabits the planet in question.
Now, it just so happens, as unlikely as it may sound, this alien species had mastered the technology required to build a spacecraft large enough to contain a storage capacity of liquid comparable in volume to that of a small planet, along with the sophisticated technology to project sonic waves capable of subduing life forms. However, far more unlikely is the fact that they are incredibly incompetent when it comes to simple electrical devices. For example, the method used to activate the sonic wave projector is nothing more than a crudely made tin box with two wires coming out at the side and a small red button on top.
This state of affairs is brought into sharp relief when considering the fact that their method of mass mind control is accomplished by sending out powerful electronic-protoplasm, that has the attributes to not only sense living matter, but to emit stimuli. This is applied by firing off an ongoing ripple of vast, far-reaching waves of super-sensory vibrations, transmitted through the atmosphere that surrounds any given planet. This promotes a feeling of joyous rapture in the living forms receiving it, lulling them into a state of noctambulatery stupefaction.
If these strange creatures were capable of feeling the human emotion of excitement, they would be jumping for joy over their discovery. The vast quantity of the greatly needed substance being openly available on the planet being scanned was a find far greater than they had dared to imagine and all on one world. Finally, their calculations for the operation of piping literally all of the liquid, known to those below as seawater, onto the ship, were completed and the red button was about to be pushed. With some sort of fanfare that those below were simply not capable of comprehending, pushed it was.
Nothing happened…
It took several long, local days for the visitors to figure out they had a blown fuse on their hands. With the back of the control box opened and the dead item removed, it was used to find a match. After a great deal of rummaging around in the ship’s storage section, it was discovered that they didn’t have a spare.
If any Earthling was capable of understanding what was going on sixty kilometres up, they would have let out a deep breath, knowing that the removal of the planet’s oceans was not going to happen anytime soon.
As for those on board the alien craft with their dead fuse, regardless of the fact that their sophisticated mode of transport was capable of speeds a touch over seven times the speed of light, it was still an awfully long way to go back for a replacement…