Alien Evangelist 1

Neville had volunteered to be a missionary on another planet. He was sitting in a small classroom with a dozen other people. A man at the front stood in front of a computer screen that hung on the wall. The man looked like the engineer Scotty in the original Star Trek, except for one minor detail. Like most men in the 25th century who had an important position, he was wearing a ladies' suit. The tiny navy blue jacket matched his navy blue trousers and his tieless white shirt.
"The spacecraft is a ring structure built around a star," he said, pointing at a structure that looked like a ring of cobwebs that had appeared on the screen.
"Can I ask a stupid question, Magnus?" asked a woman wearing a pink boiler suit.
"No question is too stupid. Ask me. Plenty of other people are thinking the same thing."
"Wouldn't the spaceship melt if it was that close to a star?"
"The surface temperature of the star is very low," said Magnus. "It's only a few hundred Kelvin. It's the temperature of a small, portable electric oven. It's important to understand that or the rest of what I'm saying won't make sense. The star is a chocolate dwarf. It's at the end of its life. It is no longer blazing with heat, it is almost dead. It is the colour of a chocolate biscuit. We can build a spacecraft on a metal hoop that goes around the star. The gas from the star can be sucked through a pipe into the engine. The solar panels will then generate the electricity with which we can ionize the gas before expelling it through the spacecraft exhaust. The spacecraft will then be pushed in the opposite direction."
"If the spacecraft is right up against the star," asked an African man, "and it starts to move, can't you see a problem? It would crash straight into the star."
"Huge electromagnets are on the spacecraft to push the star forward," said Magnus, "to keep it moving in sympathy with the spacecraft."
"How big is the star?" asked Neville.
"Only three miles across the centre. This particular star was a big blue star of 7 solar masses which has now collapsed to form a tiny chocolate dwarf 3 miles across."
"What about the mass?" asked Neville. "An enormous amount of energy is needed to move a star of seven solar masses."
"It's in space," said the woman in the pink boiler suit. "Doesn't that mean it'd be weightless?"
"Weightless, yes, but it still has mass," said Magnus. "The mass makes a huge difference. The whole spacecraft would accelerate at the speed of a car on a motorway. In spite of all the power coming out of the exhaust and pushing it forward, it's still moving a star 7 times the mass of Earth's sun."
"At that speed it wouldn't go very far," said the African man.
"It accelerates constantly for years," said Magnus. "After 5 years of accelerating at the speed of a car on a motorway, it will reach the speed of light. It won't feel like 5 years. It'll feel like 5 seconds. You'll be frozen in time."
"Flying saucers are simple battery operated things," said Neville. "They fly around the local inhabited planets, Sirius, Proxima Centuari, Zeta Reticuli. This spacecraft can fly thousands of light years."
"No it can't," said Magnus. "It can fly millions of light years in what will only seem like a few weeks. We can reach planets on the other side of the galaxy or in the nearest other galaxies. Only a small local part of space, about 36 light years around Earth, has been evangelised. The rest of the universe has been waiting to hear the gospel for millions of years."

A few days later the same group of people were aboard a flying saucer. It flew for half an hour into deep space, where it must have been thirty light years from Earth. There was a huge star. The saucer flew up really close until it filled the whole of all the windows, as far as anyone could see. There were lots of little bumps on the surface. It looked a huge chocolate digestive biscuit. A ring of metal cobwebs seemed to stretch around it. This was the interstellar spacecraft. The saucer flew towards the cobwebs and then slowed right down as a door into the interstellar spacecraft slid up. The saucer hovered through the door and landed. Everyone got out.
"Wow!" said the woman in the pink boiler suit.
"You think it's amazing just because we did that?" asked Magnus. "You ain't seen nothing yet." They went into the interstellar spacecraft and sat in a viewing lounge. Out of the windows, they could see the stars moving past as if they were in a car and passing street lights.
"We must have accelerated to full speed," said Neville.
"Why is that, Neville?" asked the African man.
"Jonas, the stars are moving. Those stars are such a long way away. If you're going down the motorway in your car, you're doing 70 miles an hour, which is really fast, but the stars are just standing still. That's because they're so distant."
"I'll just take your word for it," said Jonas.
"Do you know what a car is?"
"Of course, Neville, they have them in the transport museum. You're from a different century. Have you ever been in a car?"
"I used to drive one."
"Wonderful," said Jonas. "That must have been really good." They sat in the viewing lounge for hours. There was something about the size of space. That endless stream of thousands of stars went on and on and the stars didn't run out. There were plenty more in the Milky Way. Then it was dinner time. They all went to the canteen. They sat down at a long table that was 30 seats long and 4 seats wide.
"What do you want to eat, Kelvin?" asked Magnus.
"Ham and cheese omelette with chips," said the girl in the pink boiler suit. A plate with the food on it and a knife and fork appeared right in front of Kelvin.
"Rice and lentils with cassava beans, red peppers and sliced mango in a mild chilli sauce," said Jonas. The meal appeared.
"Chips, steak pie and mushy peas," said Neville. A big pile of microchips appeared on Neville's plate. Next to it were some garden peas and a slice of steak. "Not those sort of chips."
"Those are chips from the twenty first century," said a computerised voice.
"How could I eat those?"
"Are you an android?"
"No. I'm Neville. I was born, not manufactured."
"Please clarify. What is meant by the term chips?"
"Potato chips. French fries. Like crisps but hot. What do Americans call potato crisps?"
"Fries. You want skin on fries." The microchips disappeared and American style potato sticks appeared on Neville's plate.

A few hours later everyone was sitting in the lounge looking at the stars through the windows. A voice came over the intercom.
"This is your captain speaking. We are receiving a radio signal from a planet a few hundred light years away. We believe this is a signal from a radar system, probably the only kind of signal that would penetrate such a long distance out into space. It is a clear sign that there is intelligent life on the planet. We are heading towards the source of the signal into the constellation Canis Major. We expect to arrive at this planet in 900 years which, at our present time dilatation setting, will feel like 15 minutes." No one was really excited by this announcement. They had not been on the spacecraft long and thought they would be able to spend the rest of the evening gazing out of the windows at the rapidly moving stars. It was a fantastic experience.
"We'll have to get into a flying saucer," said Neville.
"Why is that?" asked Kelvin.
"We can't bring something as massive as a chocolate dwarf right into their star system. It would disturb the orbit of their planets."
"We'd be best to park the starship a few light days away from the centre," said Jonas, "then get into one of the saucers so we can land there." The entire class of 13 people, including Magnus, got into the flying saucer. The door of the starship lifted up and they flew out, travelling a distance which was actually 5 light days at a hundredth of the speed of light but which, with time dilatation making a year seem like a second, felt as if the saucer had flown out of the starship to a planet that was just on the opposite side of the yard next to the bins and the bicycle store. They hovered down through the atmosphere and landed. Standing outside a small apartment, staring into the sky at the saucer, was a man with pointy ears and big green eyes. His face was covered with fur the colour of a black and white tortoise shell cat. Neville was the first to get out of the saucer and decided to introduce himself.
"We come in peace." The cat creature burst out laughing.
"You watch too many films."
"We come from another world far, far away."
"You are hilarious, Neville," said the cat creature, laughing so much that he almost fell over. "You didn't use a spaceship with a range of 30 light years to visit me from the other side of the street."
"How do you know my name?"
"Reading your thoughts is very easy, Neville. That's also how I understand your language. Neither your thoughts or your language are very complicated. Welcome to the dwarf galaxy, Canus Major."
"Dwarf galaxy?" said his wife, who looked like a ginger cat. "How can this be a dwarf galaxy? There must be a hundred thousand planets here, and some of them are quite civilised."
"By astronomical standards, that is still a dwarf galaxy," said Magnus.
"Well I never," said the ginger cat creature. Jonas decided to be the first to evangelise someone on this planet.
"Do you know my friend Jesus Christ?"
"I know about him," said the black and white cat creature. He pointed out a huge bright green circle in the sky. "Down that wormhole are all the planets that never sinned. We were quarantined. They are in a different dimension. Your scientists call it dark matter."
"Do you know Jesus in a personal way?" Jonas asked the cat creature.
"I've known him since I was a child."
"Are you saved?"
"Saved from what?"
"Have you repented of your sins?"
"I don't think I have any to repent of. I'll let my wife be the judge of whether I'm sinlessly perfect."
"Well," said the female cat creature, "all I can say is that l've been married to that cat for five hundred years and I've never seen him do anything wrong."
"Not even tell a lie or use a rude word?"
"I've never heard him do that either." Unfortunately Jonas remembered that he was a Trained Evangelist.
"If we say we are without sin, we make him out to be a liar, and his word has no place in our lives. Listen, Mr. and Mrs. Cat, you're going to wake up one day and find yourselves dead."
"No we won't," said the male cat creature. "The people on this planet are immortal. We won't ever die."
"We don't expect to," said his wife, "unless the universe ends or this planet is completely destroyed in a cosmic accident. If the sun exploded in a supernova, I don't suppose we'd survive that. But my great gandmother is 70 million years old."
"God deals with different civilizations in different ways," said the male cat. "People on this planet have sinned but not on the same scale as people in the Bible or people on Earth. A significant number of people will sin once in a lifetime. Then the priest will deal with them, or the really persistent sinners will be dealt with by the town magistrate."
"The people on this planet have an awareness of God," said his wife. "On Earth people were blinded by the devil. Here, they're not. Adults believe in God the way they did when they were children. No blindness. No rebellion. Just occasional drifting. Perhaps you'd like to come to our church." Jonas looked disgusted and bored. He hadn't come here to be evangelised by aliens.
"Yes, of course, we'd love to," said Neville, smiling because he meant it.
"You can come right now," said the female cat. "The priest is always in his house. They don't have a set time for church services. Just call and see the priest." The two cat creatures led the missionary astronauts across the other side of the street to a big house surrounded by trees. It was a summer's night. The setting of the sun had turned the sky a beautiful shade of green and the window of the house was open. The priest could be heard talking to someone.
"Bless me Father, for I have sinned."
"What have you done?"
"My mother gave me ten credits to buy a book. The book was only seven credits. I told her that it cost ten credits and then went and spent the rest on a big bar of chocolate."
"That is a wicked thing to do to someone," said the priest, crossly. "You wouldn't like it done to you."
"I beg you Father, please don't report me to the magistrate. It would damage my reputation. For the rest of my very long life, people would say I was a thief."
"Have you still got the bar of chocolate?"
"Yes Father. I put it in the bedroom drawer."
"Give it to your mother. Then you haven't stolen anything. No need to say what happened."
"Thank you, Father. That's a huge weight off my mind." The man left the house. His face was covered with black fur with beautiful yellow stripes. The priest opened the door. He had long ginger fur on his face with a beautiful white streak down the centre of his head.
"Good evening Mr. and Mrs. Ball. Who are these people?"
"Father Salmon," said the female, "these people have come a very long way to visit our world."
"I can see they are Reticulans."
"Reticulan?" asked Neville.
"What we call anyone from the Zeta Reticuli system."
"But I'm not from Zeta Reticuli, I'm from Earth."
"A mere 36 light years away. Part of the same local group of planets," said the priest. "You know where you are now? You're 25,000 light years out. Jesus has come back again, to your world, so it's pointless warning us about that. God was never so angry with this planet that he limited our mortality or came down on us in terrifying judgement. Noah's flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the seven years of great tribulation after Jesus' second coming. All parts of Earth's history. We don't have any equivalents of those events."
"But sin is just sin," said Jonas.
"It depends on your attitude to it. If you have a feeling for God, if you haven't ever rejected him, your eyes are still open."
"If you commit one tiny little sin, that's enough to keep you out of Heaven," said Jonas.
"Is it? I'd say you will go to Hell if you harden your heart so much that God can't get through."

The team returned to the starship and travelled back into deep space. This time they had time to sit beside the window and watch the stars moving past for hours.
"What time is it?" asked Neville.
"50,008 years since we left Earth," said Kelvin, looking at her watch.
"No, what time is it really?"
"Neville, that is the real time."
"But what is the time in our frame of reference? What is the time on board the ship?"
"Half past eleven," said Kelvin.
"That explains why I feel tired and I need to go to bed. Good night Kelvin."
"Good night Neville." Neville had a good night's sleep. The alarm on his mobile phone woke him at eight o'clock, in his frame of reference. He dressed and came into the canteen for breakfast. He couldn't believe what he could see on the screen. An old episode of Doctor Who. Someone had a darlek and was keeping it in a zoo.
"Have you many people in this city?" asked the doctor.
"About half a million."
"They're all dead when that thing gets out."
"Magnus," Jonas asked Magnus. "Where are these pictures coming from?"
"The Sagittarius constellation," said Magnus.
"If you can see the pictures that clearly they must be transmitting them at really high power," said Neville.
"Eat up your breakfast quick," said Magnus. "They're a thousand light years away. We'll be landing there in a quarter of an hour."

The saucer carried the evangelism team over a huge crater a mile across that seemed to be full of wire mesh.
"What's that?" asked Magnus.
"It's a radio transmitter," said Neville. "It's probably responsible for all those old science fiction programmes we've been watching." The saucer headed to the city centre and landed in the town square.
"Hello," said a woman who looked like a huge budgerigar as she was covered in colourful feathers. "Could we sit somewhere a bit more comfortable? Fancy a hot drink?" Neville, Jonas and Kelvin sat down with the woman in the market. She bought each of them a cup of green soup and a bowl of seeds about the size of peanuts. The seeds and the soup tasted delicious.
"The Thaarg are a war like people," said the woman.
"Why are they war like?" asked Neville. "They have very advanced technology. They don't need anything."
"They got bored with not needing anything. Should I do another university course or should I join the army? That's why we broadcast science fiction films. We want them to think Sagittarius is full of dangerous aliens. They would be exterminated by the darleks or assimilated by the Borg."
"Wouldn't they expect Starman to come and rescue them?" asked Neville, "overpower the Borg with his marshall arts or confuse the darleks with his supernatural powers?"
"I didn't transmit any films in black and white. Didn't want them to think that Star Man would come along. We were persecuted for being Christians on Thaarg. We were thrown to the big dogs. I have scars. My friend was killed."