She popped into his office. “How’s it going?”
“The board wants the revised strategic plan by end of day, but I just can’t make it work. It’s just…” He took a deep breath. “It’s impossible to maintain the element of surprise in a campaign of galactic conquest. I mean come on-”
He jazz-handed: “‘Surprise! Galactic conquest!'”
He rolled his eyes. “People are bound to see it coming. Eventually.”
She considered this for a moment. “You’d be surprised,” she said.
Captain Alistair Tullett was the first to circumnavigate the flat Earth, or so he claimed. When his patron asked how the crew had fared during the voyage, Tullett is reported to have replied, “They were on edge the whole time.”
The patron is reported to have missed the joke.
When the round-Earth theorists later exposed Tullett’s operation as a fraud, the disabused unamused patron sought to bring the conmen’s captain to justice, but Tullett was nowhere to be found. It was as if he had simply dropped off the face of the Earth.