First Contact
by Francis Mont
We have only one TV set in the lounge of the hospital’s closed ward and, usually, we bicker about what to watch. The last few weeks, however, we had no arguments; everyone was glued to CNN, watching the alien spaceship over one city or another.
It appeared one day, hovered over New York, hung motionless in the air for a week. Nobody saw or heard it coming; it just appeared suddenly and obscured quite a lot of the sky. It resembled nothing science fiction writers had ever invented. It had a rectangular shape, like a floating breadbox, not something built for speed.
It did not land, did not respond to hundreds of attempts at communication by private and military agencies. Then, one day, it simply disappeared from the New York sky, only to appear at the same moment over Rio de Janeiro, then Cairo, Moscow, Berlin, Tokyo. At each place, it spent a few days and then moved on.
It seemed to enjoy the spectacle of a bull fight, hovering over Spain, it visited all the famous walls on the planet: the Great Wall of China; the wall between the Gaza Strip and Israel; the new wall under construction between the US and Mexico; the remnants of the Berlin wall.
It appeared fascinated with the Tokyo night, with the city ablaze with light. Then we watched it as it made a visit to the oil extraction sites in the northern Alberta tar sands, then hopped over to the calving Childs Glacier in Alaska where some thrill-seekers were surfing the huge waves created by the melting and collapsing ice blocks.
We laughed our heads off, watching it over Vatican City, where the terrified Easter Sunday pilgrims threw themselves on the ground in a frenzy of prayer. It was a different scene over Jerusalem, where pilgrims at the Wailing Wall greeted it as the long awaited Messiah.
I have always heard voices in my head, random thoughts from people around me, but there was nothing menacing in the glimpses I experienced of these alien minds, nothing suggesting evil intentions. My fellow inmates guessed wildly about the purpose of the visit. Some thought it was a survey mission for possible invasion, others were convinced that it meant to unite humanity by drawing fire against a potential common enemy.
That idea gained some credence when we observed the spaceship hovering over Kashmir, above the raging war between India and Pakistan. It did not interfere with the barrage of missile and artillery fire the two armies were raining down on each other’s heads. Some frightened idiots from both armies tried to shoot it down, but the missiles simply disappeared halfway along their trajectory. The aliens did not retaliate or respond; they stayed a few more hours and then resumed hopping from continent to continent, metropolis to metropolis.
They never revealed themselves, nobody discovered what they looked like; nobody had any idea what they wanted. And then, one day it was gone without a trace, without any attempt to communicate.
This last statement is not entirely true.
I heard their farewell telepathic message, apologizing for the intrusion and thanking us for our matchless entertainment value. They said they would be back to get more video footage for The Galactic Comedy Show, which specializes in irrational species and their hilarious behaviour.
================================
This is a companion story to the one I posted earlier, taking a different view of the same subject. If you like it, take a look at the short story collection, "Meandering", Vera and I published recently. Now available both in Kindle and in paperback edition.
See at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/099...
We have only one TV set in the lounge of the hospital’s closed ward and, usually, we bicker about what to watch. The last few weeks, however, we had no arguments; everyone was glued to CNN, watching the alien spaceship over one city or another.
It appeared one day, hovered over New York, hung motionless in the air for a week. Nobody saw or heard it coming; it just appeared suddenly and obscured quite a lot of the sky. It resembled nothing science fiction writers had ever invented. It had a rectangular shape, like a floating breadbox, not something built for speed.
It did not land, did not respond to hundreds of attempts at communication by private and military agencies. Then, one day, it simply disappeared from the New York sky, only to appear at the same moment over Rio de Janeiro, then Cairo, Moscow, Berlin, Tokyo. At each place, it spent a few days and then moved on.
It seemed to enjoy the spectacle of a bull fight, hovering over Spain, it visited all the famous walls on the planet: the Great Wall of China; the wall between the Gaza Strip and Israel; the new wall under construction between the US and Mexico; the remnants of the Berlin wall.
It appeared fascinated with the Tokyo night, with the city ablaze with light. Then we watched it as it made a visit to the oil extraction sites in the northern Alberta tar sands, then hopped over to the calving Childs Glacier in Alaska where some thrill-seekers were surfing the huge waves created by the melting and collapsing ice blocks.
We laughed our heads off, watching it over Vatican City, where the terrified Easter Sunday pilgrims threw themselves on the ground in a frenzy of prayer. It was a different scene over Jerusalem, where pilgrims at the Wailing Wall greeted it as the long awaited Messiah.
I have always heard voices in my head, random thoughts from people around me, but there was nothing menacing in the glimpses I experienced of these alien minds, nothing suggesting evil intentions. My fellow inmates guessed wildly about the purpose of the visit. Some thought it was a survey mission for possible invasion, others were convinced that it meant to unite humanity by drawing fire against a potential common enemy.
That idea gained some credence when we observed the spaceship hovering over Kashmir, above the raging war between India and Pakistan. It did not interfere with the barrage of missile and artillery fire the two armies were raining down on each other’s heads. Some frightened idiots from both armies tried to shoot it down, but the missiles simply disappeared halfway along their trajectory. The aliens did not retaliate or respond; they stayed a few more hours and then resumed hopping from continent to continent, metropolis to metropolis.
They never revealed themselves, nobody discovered what they looked like; nobody had any idea what they wanted. And then, one day it was gone without a trace, without any attempt to communicate.
This last statement is not entirely true.
I heard their farewell telepathic message, apologizing for the intrusion and thanking us for our matchless entertainment value. They said they would be back to get more video footage for The Galactic Comedy Show, which specializes in irrational species and their hilarious behaviour.
================================
This is a companion story to the one I posted earlier, taking a different view of the same subject. If you like it, take a look at the short story collection, "Meandering", Vera and I published recently. Now available both in Kindle and in paperback edition.
See at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/099...
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