A dull whine, just high-pitched enough to be irritating, echoed over New York as the alien craft sank gracefully towards the ground. Dogs started howling and scrambling away as the sound tore into their far more sensitive ears. The band played louder as the alien craft touched down, the whine fading away to a duller note before it finally vanished. There was a dull clunk as the alien craft reached the ground, suggesting that their shuttle, for all its tiny size, was actually quite heavy. Jason felt excitement spinning through his mind. The complete lack of wings on the shuttle suggested that the aliens could control gravity itself; they might even be able to produce an antigravity generator. It would revolutionise spaceflight if the human race mastered the same technology. The bottleneck had always been lifting a cargo out of the Earth’s gravity well, a task requiring extremely powerful boosters which had to be capable of boosting the mass of their fuel into space along with the cargo in the nose cone. If the aliens taught humanity how to develop antigravity… nothing, absolutely nothing in the entire world was too high a price.
The crowds surged against the lines of policemen holding them back from the alien craft. On the surface, there was something oddly mundane about the alien ship, despite its origins. A second whine echoed through the air briefly as a hatch began to open, rising up like an aircraft hatch and revealing an illuminated interior. The aliens seemed to like similar lighting to the human race. And then a figure began to step out into the bright sunlight…
Jason stared, forgetting everything, but the alien. Even the band had stopped attempting to play a suitable tune for the first meeting of humans and aliens. And as soon as he saw the alien, he knew that it was no hoax. The alien was very alien. The similarities between his — or her; there was no way to tell — physical form and the human form only added to the sense of unreality. It was almost surreal. The silence grew longer, as if no one — human or alien — dared to break it.
Jayne Rowling watched from the press pool as the alien stepped out into the light. She’d been trained to observe and report on what was actually happening — as opposed to what people thought was actually happening — and even as part of her mind gibbered in shock, the rest of her focused on the monumental event in front of her. The alien was humanoid, yet utterly inhuman. Her mind couldn’t quite process the surreal scene in front of her.
Television producers had faced inevitable logistical problems when creating aliens for the hundreds of science-fiction shows produced for the domestic and international markets. An utterly inhuman alien was hard — and expensive — to produce. Mr Spock had been little more than pointed ears and tinted skin, a tribute to the skill of the actor who’d played him. No matter how optimistic or pessimistic the TV serial, the vast majority of the aliens had been almost human. Even Babylon 5 had been forced to use humanoid actors for most of its vast array of alien life. The number of non-humanoid aliens could be counted on the fingers of two hands.
The alien was humanoid, but there the resemblance ended. He — she decided to think of the alien as a male until proven wrong — was tall, standing almost two meters in height. His skin was a mass of green scales, almost like a snake’s skin, which seemed to move and flex over his weirdly-angular legs. No human could have worn such a costume; there simply wasn’t room for human legs. The alien’s legs appeared weak, almost spidery, flexing oddly as he moved forward, down the ramp and onto the soil of Earth. His eyes reminded her of the pet hamster she’d owned as a kid, but the alien’s eyes were a dark red, almost seeming to glow. He moved with a gait that almost suggested a bird, hopping forward on the ground and preparing to peck seeds up in its beak.
He wore a white tunic that covered his chest and upper arms, leaving his legs bare for human inspection. There were no decorations, apart from a single glowing device just below his inhumanly thin neck. His mouth opened into what might have been intended as a smile, but it was immediately clear that his mouth was nowhere near as flexible as any human mouth. Behind the half-smile, sharp white teeth glittered in the sunlight, suggesting that the alien was used to eating meat — perhaps even suggesting that they were as omnivorous as the human race. That made sense, according to the science-fiction writers who had been writing blogs about their creations and how aliens might exist in real life. The human race was the most adaptive species on Earth — with the possible exception of the cockroach — and it was only logical that any other intelligent race would be equally adaptable. She doubted that the aliens would possess superpowers — unlike Superman and other comic-book aliens — and it was quite possible that they were, on average, just as intelligent as the average human.
A second alien appeared at the hatch, followed by a third. Jayne almost winced as they inched their way down the ramp and onto the soil of Earth, watching their legs bend and flex in a manner that would have resulted in broken bones if any human attempted to copy their mannerisms. She found herself glancing at their chests, wondering if the slight bulges she could see under their tunics were breasts, suggesting that the aliens were actually female, before abandoning that train of thought. There was no way to know for sure. Human societies tended to be male-dominated — men were, on average, stronger than women — but the aliens might be female-dominated, or they might have more than just two sexes. There were just so many possibilities.
The first alien stopped in front of the small welcoming committee. Jayne had heard reports that the United Nations had practically turned into a war zone over who should greet the aliens first. There had even been a suggestion that the Pope should join the greeting party, a suggestion that had been howled down by representatives from almost every other religion on Earth. Some of the Witnesses — she could see them at the far edge of the field — had suggested that the aliens would inform the human race that their religions were nothing more than nonsense, dreamed up by men who had wanted power over their fellow men. She could just imagine the social upheaval that would be caused by the aliens discrediting the world’s major religions.
In the end, seven people had been chosen to greet the aliens first. The Secretary-General of the United Nations had taken the lead as the only person with even a tenuous claim to represent the entire human race. Beside him, Mayor Hundred had bullied his way onto the greeting committee by fair means and foul, having waged a skilful media campaign that had won the support of New York’s population and the backing of the Federal Government. A representative from the European Union, the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States, the African Union, the Organization of American States and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation completed the welcoming committee. The Arab League had wanted to put forward their own representative, but infighting over which country should have the honour of sending the representative and vigorous opposition from Israel had defeated the proposal.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kareem Choudhury of India, stepped forward. He was an elderly man with a neat goatee, wearing a simple black suit; an experienced diplomat holding down a job that required nothing, but diplomacy. Jayne was familiar with the fears that the UN was somehow a supranational organisation that was bent on subverting freedom and democracy, yet common sense proved that the UN was nothing more than a talking shop, a forum to air grievances and issue largely-unheeded resolutions that were rarely enforced by concentrated military action. And without force backing up the resolutions — and the absence of will to use military force — the UN was useless. It was something that galled those who believed in international development even as they sought to raise more and more money for development plans that went nowhere.