-- o --
I suppose it was just my luck that the first alien expedition to come to earth should choose to land on my roses. I was lying on the sofa sipping a Lemsip and watching TV when it happened, a brilliant descending light shining through the curtains accompanied by a sound like a chorus of twenty mad elephants in labour. I had had trouble with my neighbours before and assumed that were trying out a new way of annoying me, but then whatever-it-was caused Wogan to disappear in a cloud of smoke as the TV exploded. This was going too far. I got up to see what was happening.
My first thought on opening the curtains was; my prize roses! Then I saw what was sitting on them and my second thought was; oh my god, they're re-making E.T.
I have long thought that a saucer is just about the last shape that an alien would choose for a space ship. Okay, so air resistance may help to slow you down on re-entry, but life would get mighty uncomfortable for the beings inside. And if you've got sufficiently powerful rockets to get such an unwieldy object into space, you might just as well stick them on a conventional pointed shape and use them to slow you down in relative comfort. But there was no avoiding it, the object sitting in my back garden was definitely saucer-shaped. Its underside was patterned with the meaningless flashing lights film designers always put on flying saucers to keep the special effects people happy. A metal ramp was extending smoothly from its belly to the ground.
I then did something which I will regret for the rest of my life. I went outside.
A gust of wind laden with charred petals blew in my face as I closed the back door behind me and stalked towards the machine. A panel at the top of the ramp slide upwards with a faint hiss to reveal a blinding white light. Outlined dramatically in the glare was a short humanoid with a large domed head, holding a quite exceptionally silly-looking ray-gun.
"Take me to your leader," it said.
As you might expect, I did not take this very seriously. As a result,
"Come off it, you're Noel Edmonds, aren't you?"
were man's first words to creatures from another world.
My reply seemed to cause some consternation in the alien. It gibbered rapidly into a communicator, then listened for a reply. I watched with interest to see what it would do next. The alien finally made up its mind.
"You will come with us," it said, menacing me with its gun. I refused to be menaced.
"You don't think I'm taken in by this, do you? I've seen that gun on Dr Who."
"Plan Nine from Outer Space, actually," said the alien, and zapped me with it.
* * *
I woke to find myself strapped down to a bunk with a variety of nasty-looking instruments pointed in my direction. Turning my head to the left, I could see what looked like a control room, its walls covered with flashing lights, odd-shaped knobs, levers, buttons and blank screens. The whole thing was painted in various shades of grey, giving it a strangely surreal air. The aliens moving purposefully around the room were, however, definitely green, and one of them was coming in my direction. My nose started to run. The alien looked at me impassively.
"Could I have a hanky?" I enquired faintly. The alien either did not hear me or did not understand. Instead it pressed a button in the wall and I was illuminated in a bright but otherwise entirely harmless light. My total lack of reponse to this torture puzzled the alien, if pursing rubbery green lips is the alien equivalent of looking puzzled.
"We have come to destroy the earth," it said. Its voice had a distinct American accent.
"Yes, yes, of course you have," I said sarcastically, still convinced that this was some sort of hoax perpetrated by Game for a Laugh. "Look, I'm not in the mood for playing games. Let me go or I'll call the police."
The alien pursed its lips again, and went into a sort of trance. Strange lumps appeared in its face and started to move about. Then the whole of the alien's body changed shape, the arms and legs retracting to buds and the head swelling to enormous size as I watched. It was a uniquely horrible sight.
"My god, you really are aliens," I said.
The alien resumed its previous shape. "Did you not realise'?" it enquired. "We were most careful with the detail."
"Yes, but I thought you were... oh never mind." A deeply unpleasant suspicion occurred to me. "Why did you say that you had come to earth?"
"To destroy it. You are our masters, and it is what you wish."
"What?"
"In your electromagnetic emanations concerning creatures from other worlds, they always want to destroy the earth. So, we have come."
"But the earthlings always win in the end!" I said, craftily.
"Of course. It is fiction!"
So much for defeating the aliens by fiendish earthling logic. I tried the skeptical approach. "So how are you going to destroy the world with one small spacecraft?"
The alien was obviously prepared for that one. "Watch," it said, and raised an arm. The unmistakable form of the Statue of Liberty appeared (in monochrome) on one of the screens. "Minimum power" ordered the alien, and dropped its arm. The Statue of Liberty shimmered and vanished. So did half of New York.
I paused to think, somewhat frantically. This sort of thing only happened in Flash Gordon re-runs, and I wasn't Flash Gordon. Mucus started to run down the side of my face. I finally decided how I would face up to this terrifying alien menace. I would beg.
"But... but you're making a horrible mistake! We are an ancient, noble race, millenia old. We have so much to offer the galaxy - Plato, Mozart, Mrs Thatcher..."
"I know. We are truly sorry to have to blow you to bits, but it is what you want."
"You're sorry?"
"Sure. You have been of great value to the Grrobobl. You are so much more evolutionarily advanced than us. We have seen your newscasts as well as your movies. You have managed to out-evolve the instinct to survive itself!"
At that moment there was a lurch and the interior hum of the spacecraft changed to a lower pitch. A door slid open.
"What are you doing now?" I asked.
"We go to find a screaming female earthling to hold captive." The alien turned to leave.
"Wait!" I babbled. "An alliance! Man and alien, hand in tentacle..." I trailed off as I realised it was ignoring me.
I could have saved my breath. The alien got as far as the door before deliquescing into a pool of green slime. The colour on the heads of the other aliens drained away, leaving them a pale yellow hue.
"What's wrong with him?" I asked, stupidly.
"She is dead," said an alien.
I sniffed, remembered H.G. Wells, and thanked my lucky stars.
"Um, I hate to mention it, but I don't think you're going to have time to destroy the Earth," I said, wriggling out of my bonds. "You've probably all got my cold." I stood up carefully. The aliens didn't move. "Well, nice meeting you and all that, must dash."
I raced for the door, stepping rather unkindly in the puddle that had been my interlocutor. The door hissed shut behind me as I hurried down the ramp and from a safe distance I watched the space ship take off. A day later, I understand that there were reports of an unusually bright sunflare. I didn't see them as I was unconscious at the time.
* * *
I woke up attached to a drip. The doctors told me that I had acute anaemia and that the reason I couldn't feel my toes was that the nerves had gone. They also suggested that I didn't move because the nurses had broken both my legs when they turned me over. Of course, they didn't believe me when I told them where I had got the disease from, but they had to a few days later when I started growing silver hair and nails and an interesting metallic rash previously unknown to medical science.
It was from this rash that the alien bug was isolated, and christened, with the microbiologists' usual knack for memorable names, XT1. In form and function it is rather like an earth virus, with the hereditary material packaged inside a coat, and it is the coat that is the problem. At some point in its evolution XT1 must have been knocked around a bit, because it protects itself - literally - with armour plating. The coat consists of a sort of sandwich, the bread being protein-like material and the filling a lattice of metal ions. Not unnaturally, its requirement for metals in immense, which is why the aliens had no bones and I had anaemia, rickets and no nerves. By the time the scientists had discovered this they, too, had the disease.
And that's why the earth is dying. XT1 is air-bourne and can infect all living material. No doubt the scientists could have cooked up a molecular sieve or a monoclonal antibody or something, but that would have taken months and we don't have months. Ironically I shall be one of the last to die - they're keeping me alive with blood transfusions and bone marrow transplants because I am the only one to have seen the aliens that gave us the plague.
Which brings me to why I am writing this account. Partly it's to assuage the guilt I feel for my unwitting part in the spread of the plague, but mostly it is because I wish there to be a true, uninflated account of what happened after I am gone. When I finish this description, I am going to put it into an airtight plastic container, seal it, and put it where you, the visitor to this dead planet, can find it. Perhaps you have detected the ending of our electromagnetic emanations and were curious. Maybe you have arrived here after a journey of many years, or perhaps you have found a way to travel faster than light and it has only taken a day or two. I like to think of you finding my box, opening it oh so carefully, and finding these ancient sheets inside telling what really happened. I expect that it has taken you much of your homeward journey to decipher the language and to understand some of the references; you may even have arrived at your home planet by now.
A couple more things about XT1. Like some earth RNA viruses, it injects both its hereditary material and the enzymes needed to express itself into the cell. It's incredibly versatile - all it needs to reproduce is a source of organic material and metal ions, a pH in the range 1 to 12 and a temperature between 260 and 38O K. Our scientists also estimate that its life-time is about half the length of the universe. It reproduces like wildfire. And it's on the piece of paper in your manipulatory appendage.
So, Mr. Alien, have I got some bad news for you...
Mark Tolley June 1986
Revised 12/11/93.
1959 words.