“Trust is good,” I say, but I can’t help myself. I have to know. “So what are we doing?”
“You’ve convinced Mark,” she says, picking up the pace slightly. “I’ve been saying we should trust you humans more, but Mark wanted to stick to the mission, running things by the book. The last few days, though, he’s seen a different side of you crazy Earthlings.”
“And?” I ask, wondering where this is leading.
“And he thinks we should trust more of you.”
“That’s great,” I say. “I agree.”
Sharon urges me on, quickening her pace.
“So you’re going to reveal yourselves?” I ask, wanting to be sure I’ve got this straight.
“Yep. But only to world renowned scientists.”
“But what if they won’t keep your secret?” I ask. “What if they expose you to the public?”
“I’m betting they won’t,” Sharon says. “Firstly, they’re going to love being on the inside, and secondly, it would be professional suicide to go public with such a crazy, convoluted story. I think they’ll keep our little secret. Besides, we’ve always got a dose of alien space tentacle porn if anyone gets too vocal.”
“Ha,” I say, quietly reminding myself not to become too outspoken.
“We’re following one of them now.”
“We are?”
I knew there had to be a catch. I don’t mean to, but I can’t help but peer around, looking past the heads in the crowd, trying to pick out who we’re following.
“Oh, you won’t see him,” she says. “He’s behind us.”
“How can you follow someone if they’re behind you?” I ask, genuinely confused. “Don’t you have to be behind them to follow them?”
“No, silly. If we were behind them, they’d know we were following them. By staying in front of them, they’ll never know we’re following them.”
“Because we’re not,” I say, still trying to wrap my head around Sharon’s alien logic.
“But we are,” she says, pointing at a store front window in front of us. The glass on the recessed entrance provides a brief glimpse behind us, and I catch a glimmer of a tall African American dressed in a suit about five yards back.
“Who is he?” I ask, starting to turn my head.
“Don’t look,” she says, squeezing my arm.
“See that bus?”
“Yes.”
“He’s about to get on it. We can’t let him.”
I don’t ask why. I’ve given up trying to figure out why aliens do anything, it’s enough just to follow along and figure it out after the fact.
“I need thirty seconds,” she says as we walk up to a line of people boarding the bus. “Distract him.”
I spin around, almost bumping into a jovial, older African American man with a neatly groomed mustache and a warm smile.
“Neil?” I ask, astonished to realize I recognize him from TV.
“Yes,” he answers in a suave, deep voice that has an unusual air of elegance. Somehow, Neil makes that one word sound refined.
“Neil van Brahe?” I say as my eyes go wide in surprise.
“I don’t give autographs,” he says, apparently reading my mind.
Damn, that’s not going to work.
With a wave of his hand, he signals for me to get out of his way. How the hell can I stop him from getting on this bus? I have only fractions of a second to come up with something. What could possibly stop this giant intellect in his tracks?
I blurt out, “Star Wars is the most accurate science fiction movie ever made. You can’t argue with that.”
I’m not sure where that idea came from, but it works. Neil looks at me as though he’s staring at a child.
“That is ridiculous,” he says. He waves with his hands, making as though his fingers are the wings of an airplane banking through the air. “You think spaceships move like Tie-Fighters and X-Wings? Swerving as they turn? There’s no air in space. No air means no aerodynamics.”
“What about the Force?” I say as though I’m getting one up on him.
“Pfft,” he replies, almost spitting on me. “I’ll take the electromagnetic force over your imaginary force any day. The electromagnetic force is what gives atoms all their characteristics, including their size. Without it, we’d be squashed into nothingness. The whole Earth and everyone on it would be squished into a blob the size of a football stadium, with temperatures and pressures like those in the heart of a neutron star.”
His words are majestic, evoking a sense of awe. Neil clearly relishes the challenge, even if it means he might be a little late wherever he’s going. A gauntlet slapped across his face could not have worked better.
“And there goes my bus,” he says, his hands dropping to his side, but he still has a smile on his face. Neil is irrepressible.
Sharon joins me, stepping in beside me and saying, “Look, here comes another bus.” And I watch as a 1950’s style coach with highly polished chrome and an immaculate paint job pulls up to the curb. The door opens and old Joe smiles.
“After you,” I say. I can’t believe we’re about to kidnap Neil van Brahe, one of the world’s leading astrophysicists and science communicators.
Neil steps onto the bus, still laughing at our Star Wars banter, saying, “And don’t get me started on the Millennium Falcon doing the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs.”
Sharon can’t help but giggle as she follows me onboard, whispering in my ear, “This is going to be fun.”
“It sure is.”
A Word from Peter Cawdron
Thank you for taking a chance on Alien Space Tentacle Porn.
The first chapter of this novella originally appeared as a short story in The Alien Chronicles, an independently produced anthology that has lots of great stories by a dozen other awesome indie writers.
UFO sightings and alien abductions are modern folklore. Thousands of people claim to have been abducted, and abduction stories are remarkably precise and share many common characteristics that have turned them into something of a cultural phenomenon. This novella explores a silly but semi-plausible angle to these stories, that these abductions could be a deliberate cover story designed to discredit those that get too close to the truth.
Yes, bananas really are slightly radioactive.
Yes, you really can produce x-rays with sticky tape.
Yes, NASA really did use aluminum foil on the Apollo docking hatch.
Yes, Michelson and Morley observed that the speed of light never varies almost two decades before Einstein figured out why.
Yes, Charles Darwin really didn’t notice which island each of his famous finches came from and had to piece that together long after the fact by talking with other crew members from the HMS Beagle.
Yes, Darwin sailed to the Galapagos, but he discovered natural selection in his own backyard, digging up plots of dirt and watching how weeds grow, looking at the differences between wild and domesticated ducks, considering the role of earthworms in ecology, observing how breeders varied pigeons, and watching ants fight on his garden path. Darwin even opened On the Origin of Species with a detailed discussion on “variations under domestication,” presenting artificial selection as the basis for understanding natural selection.