The Ufonauts (Part Three)

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

Just as Alan expected a large, fuzzy looking orb the same orange hue as old-fashioned street-lights glided lazily over the hawthorn and sloe hedge at the bottom of the pasture and landed behind the clump of trees surrounding the pond, which was fed by a little brook. The object always landed in the same place, and though the area around the pool was a sea of churned mud because the cattle used it as a watering hole the flying machine, if it was a machine, left behind no traces of its presence, and its occupants never left a single footprint. There was a quarter moon in a sky scattered with wispy clouds, and by its light Alan could see his ninety strong herd of Highland cattle leisurely moving away from the object as it touched down. They were used to the intrusion, and so far the Ufonauts hadn't harmed the livestock or taken any particular interest in them.

Alan fiddled with his phone, trying to put it into video mode. He wasn't very good with technical gizmos, he had never used a computer and he had only owned a mobile phone for a few months. Brett and Sophie had showed him how to use the baffling array of features on the phone no end of times, but like a lot of folk born before the technical revolution he still struggled. He didn't know why he was bothering because the intruders rarely showed up on stills or videos apart from an occasional shadowy, indistinct figure that could be just about anything.

Even if he managed to capture any decent footage, what was he supposed to do with it - hand it over to the police or the Ministry of Defence? Email it to some TV news crew to giggle over and never transmit? Give it to the local four or five strong UFO group, who were a bunch of misguided nut-cases? Ask Sophie to post it on YouTube with the myriad of other blurry or obviously fake efforts to be derided by all and sundry and drooled over by a handful of fanatics who were prepared to believe more or less anything?

Just then there was a scratching sound from the roof, followed by the pitter-patter of tiny feet. The bastards had arrived.....

*************************

Just outside the bedroom window a little man appeared, one minute there was nothing there and the next he was staring into the dark interior of the room. He wasn't the silver suited creature you would expect, though Alan had seen plenty of them and other, more outlandish creatures besides. He was a vaguely oriental fellow a smidgen under five feet tall. He was dressed in his regulation crumpled black suit, a white shirt and a dark coloured tie, and he wore the usual tinted, thick lensed glasses that, Alan guessed, were purely to disguise his eyes, which were the most inhuman part of him. Alan had seen the little man many times before, and he reminded him of an oriental doctor that had been his GP a few years back, a doctor Min. “Invite me into your humble abode, Alan Connor,” the being said in his usual dry, raspy voice, “or I'll come in anyway.”

“I don't want you in here, Frubert,” Alan said (oddly enough that was what the little man reckoned his name was – Frubert Frumpling, of all the names he could have chosen). “I don't like you, you know that. In fact I detest you, you make me want to puke. Why don't you fuck off and bother somebody else. Or go and play in the mincer in the meat processing plant behind the barn - I promise not to turn it on.....”

“There's no need to be unpleasant, Alan Connor,” the little man said. “You ought to know by now that we're not going to hurt you. We just want to talk, we just want to study your physiology and your behaviour. If you refuse to comply I'll bring a posse of utterly compliant Ufonauts to hold you down, and you know you don't like being restrained.”

“No way. You're deceitful, you can't be trusted..... You ought to know by now that if you insist on interfering with me you're going to have to bring your ugly midget army in, because I won't come quietly, I won't submit without a struggle.

Actually I might allow you to come in without any trouble if you agree to answer a few questions that have been bugging me, if you promise to answer them honestly without any fuss and without trying to fob me off with the bull-shit you usually come out with. And I want you to promise to take those silly glasses off, Frubert, for what your promises are worth, because I want to see your eyes. Maybe I want to see what you really look like under your disguise, because I'm convinced that the face you choose to show me isn't anywhere near the grisly truth.....”

“Very well,” Frubert said. “I'll do my best to tell you the truth, or as much as I'm permitted to tell, and maybe I'll reveal my true visage as well. Whatever I tell you won't be believed if you choose to share it with your fellow humans, Alan Connor. Funnily enough not many humans choose to blabber about their experiences with us for fear of ridicule, not even to their close family – I know you haven't told your son and daughter in law, who are both blissfully asleep in their room, my associates are monitoring them very closely as we always do when we pay you a visit.”

“You leave them alone!”

“We're not particularly interested in them, it's you that fascinates us, my friend. I'm coming in now, by the way,” Frubert said, walking straight through the locked French windows and making himself comfortable on the edge of the single bed that Alan bought a couple of weeks after he lost June, because their king-size bed seemed big enough to lose a galaxy in without her. He switched on the bedside lamp, which was shaded and of a very low wattage, because he knew that his visitor didn't savour bright lights. “Kindly put that weapon down, or I'll be forced to take it from you or render it useless – and make sure you put the safety catch on, we don't want any accidents, do we?” Grudgingly Alan did as he was told and propped his shotgun in the corner of the room.

“What do you want from me, little man? I must have asked you dozens of time before, but you've never given me a straight answer, and I'm sick of your lies.”

“I've told you before that we come from a planet on the edge of your solar system, but you stubbornly refuse to believe me. Or our solar system, I should say, because we've been around a while longer than your kind, We're not here to invade the Earth or farm its denizens as livestock, Alan Connor, though we do mine certain minerals from your planet that are unavailable or very rare closer to home. Beside that we're interested in unravelling your numerous mysteries – which is why we needed to take a number of blood and tissue samples from you against your will.”

“Bollocks. There is no mystery here any more apart from you sneaky lot, our science is coming on in leaps and bounds and most of the enigmas that baffled folk in past centuries have been solved or they're well on their way to being solved.”

“Nonsense! Your science is rather amateurish, and you have a long, long way to go before you reach even a basic understanding of the way, or should I say the many possible ways that things are. Your species itself is the greatest mystery of all.....”

“Don't bother trying to blind me with your freaky scientific theories, Frubert, I'm a simple man and I barely understand what you're talking about.”

“You asked me a question, and I'm trying my best to answer it. Many races from many different planets, as well as countless other beings from other dimensions visit this Earth, they have done for thousands and in some cases millions of years. We have spoken to some of them, but by no means all because a lot of species are very, um, self-sufficient, I think we should say, and they rarely if ever communicate with outsiders, never mind share information. None of the beings that we have conversed with have the slightest clue where the human race came from – your kind certainly didn't originate here, so you can forget the shoddy evolution theory your scientists preach, because humans have little place in it.

Well actually it's a whole lot more complicated than that, because half of your genetic material is terrestrial, it came from various hominids, which in real terms means upright apes; and the other half, well, who knows who implanted their seed here, or why? Maybe there really is a God out there who worked His sublime magic at some difficult to pinpoint time in the probably distant past. And you can discard your primitive notions of God being an ethereal, omnipotent and omnipresent know-it-all, because it simply isn't so – your creators were most definitely flesh and blood beings.”

“Take those ridiculous glasses off, I want to see your eyes.....”