A curious ball

What on earth is this ball that has landed here in the middle of town?

"What heaves there?" Johnno declared in his usual jocular fashion as he bellied his way through the crowd of onlookers and wastrels that had gathered like flies. They were milling about some unmoving item lying squarely in the center of the unpaved street that ran between the slack faced, hollow eyed brick and corrugated metal hovels that ran in a crooked line the length of the town.

"I said what do we have here, friends?" Johnno's rotund form bounced people off as if he were some sort of bowling bowl and they the pins set before him. The fact that he weighed some four hundred kilos and had the density of a small tank also helped things along.

Shoving through the final ring of dirty barely dressed natives of Fun-Town, Johnno stamped heavily through and came upon the subject of everyone's fevered attention.

It was a small colorfully painted ball with various branch like protuberances all over. It lay in a small depression in the road that it must have made on impact or landing. The protuberances spread all around it in some flower like arrangement. A few of them however, stood straight up from the ball appearing to all the world like stalks. Johnno half expected them to sprout eyes.

"Hmm, ok all of you back please, leave this to the expert now!" Johnno was the head fireman and police chief in the township and as such was entirely within his rights to make his demand.

"This could be a very dangerous device or creature." Johnno squatted down from his rather unimpressive five feet of height. His coveralls made an odd creak of protest as he finished the movement and then rather unceremoniously tore right at the split of buttocks. The tear revealed nothing because Johnno slapped one massive palm over it to cover the rent and then continued his examination as if nothing had occurred.

The milling denizens on the other hand all began to whisper to each other, observing Johnno's sartorial distress and a few even began to titter and chuckle to each other. One of them, a young woman in a dirty greenish shift snorted in delight and then squatted down herself in imitation of Johnno.

Unfazed by anything happening behind and around him, Johnno poked at the ball with his other hand. He maintained his balance on his haunches with an ease that belied his size. The ball did not respond to Johnno's poke, so he grabbed the stalks that were jutting up and gave them a tug.

Whether this was a scientific method for examining items of unknown origin did not really occur to Johnno who was a very big believer in addressing all problems with some form of direct action. So, a tug to the stalks followed by a quick twist of the same was very much in character.

And of course, after he pulled and then twisted the stalks this way and that way, suddenly the ball lit up. And from the ball there emanated an interesting ticking sound. The ticking sound was entirely monotonic in nature, the ticks about a second or so apart.

Frowning, Johnno manipulated the stalks further and discovered that a left twist caused the ball to light up and tick, but the opposite twist made it stop. A few more rapid left, right twists accompanied by truncated ticks and abbreviated light shows convinced Johnno that he had the thing figured out.

"Umm, folks this here is a Wazell. Must have been dropped from a passing ship." Johnno looked up for emphasis as he spoke. The crowd of onlookers followed suit, staring up at the gray midday sky with its triple sun.

"What's a Wazell thing boss man?" One of the onlookers, the woman in the greenish shift yelled at Johnno.