The party blundered helplessly across the sky like a man leaning against an unexpectedly open door. It spun and wobbled on its hover jets. It tried to right itself and wronged itself instead. It staggered back across the sky again. For a while these staggerings continued, but clearly they could not continue for long. The party was now a mortally wounded party. All the fun had gone out of it, as the occasional broken-backed pirouette could not disguise. The longer, at this point, that it avoided the ground, the heavier was going to be the crash when finally it hit it.
