Another Alien
A sci-fi story idea that came to me while walking on Lancaster road recently. This story was Not selected for publication by dailysciencefiction.com .
The flashing lights were the first sign of trouble.
Not the emergency light bar on the state patrol car behind her. Long before that she saw her own car lights flashing on and off, sometimes together, sometimes independently. It started with just the turn signals, then the headlights. Pretty soon they were all twinkling like a Christmas tree. That’s when the patrolman turned on his lights. She reached for her registration and drivers license as he came to her window.
The officer is sergeant Joel Rikard attached to the northeast precinct of the Vermont State Patrol. This is Joel’s first post after graduating from the academy, thus the late night shifts. If he plays his cards right and doesn’t cause any trouble, he can switch to early am patrol with weekends off.
“Are you having car trouble, Mam?”
“No officer, I was just confused with the light switch. It’s all ok now.” (Fortunately, the lights had gone out when the key was turned off. Under the circumstances, this wasn’t a given.)
The second time he pulled her over for the same reason, only a mile further down the road, he wasn’t so easily persuaded.
“It appears that there is a problem with the operation of your vehicle, Mam.”
Since it was after midnight and there wasn’t an obvious way to talk her way out of it she decided to level with him.
“Actually, officer, it is the alien in the trunk. He’s messing with the electrical system of my car.”
“May I see your license and registration please”
She hands these to officer Rikard as he begins taking notes.
Name: Mariam Johnson
Address: 5611 Norwich Meadows, Norwich VT 05055
Occupation: Resident Biologist, Montshire Museum of Science
Vehicle: White 2005 Ford Taurus sedan, no obvious body damage
Vermont License plate: ACR 324, Vehicle tabs and registration up to date.
Bumper sticker: “I brake for aliens” with a picture of a little green person waving a hand with 3 fingers.
Given the extraordinary explanation, Officer Rikart is concerned that Mariam Johnson may not be fit to operate the vehicle. His line of questioning doesn’t get him very far in determining the nature of the problem.
“So you say you have an alien in the trunk of your car, is that correct?”
“Not an alien from another country. This life form is from another planet!”
Officer Rikart stares at her for a moment thinking that this report is not going to help him get off of the late night shift.
“Can you open the trunk please?”
Mariam removed her key from the ignition and gets out of the car. As they walk to the back of the car, she cautioned him: “I must warn you, not all aliens look like the cute squat characters with big ears that you see in movies.”
At this point, Officer Rikart is seriously concerned that he is dealing with a certifiable mental case and that this trunk could contain anything. The class on “Suspects Exhibiting Delusional Personality Traits” was clear on the unpredictable behavior of a person who has detached him/herself from standard norms of society. There were examples of people hauling around the body of family member that has been missing for years in their trunk. Or it could contain dozens of cats. There is no way to predict the mentally distressed person’s next action. With this in mind, Officer Rikart discreetly released his sidearm and handcuffs.
When the trunk was opened he barely checked his gasp reaction but he stood speechless for a good 15 seconds staring at something resembling a sea slug curled into a circle about the size of a large truck tire lying in a plastic tub half full of, for lack of a better term, slug gravy. For once, Officer Rikart wished he had elected to wear the optional body-cam uniform attachment.
Oddly, there was not a stench as you might expect from a decaying marine invertebrate. The smell was more of a waft of warm, slightly bitter air such as might be emitted from an oven when removing freshly baked sourdough bread.
It was this discontinuity between the sight of something completely unearthly with the aroma of something familiar but which you can’t quite put your finger on that caused a sense of revulsion boarding on terror.
As a trained biologist, Mariam had abandoned the normal preconceptions of what flora and fauna should look like. It is an occupational ontology that you will encounter life forms that defy description until they have been fully catalogued and recorded in the encyclopedia of life. Space aliens were just extreme cases of such.
On the other hand, officers of the state patrol were trained to generalize any and all situations into a fairly straight forward taxonomy as defined in the legal statutes. This thing in Mariam’s trunk did not render into any legal or practical policy taught in the State Patrol Academy.
What followed was a short lesson in inter-galactic relations with a science museum biologist.
“I warned you.”
“Please close the trunk” After a pause, “What is…it?”
“There really is no definition for this kind in our scientific literature. Based on a few discernible characteristics such as body mass and density, surface salinity, life span (in our atmosphere), etc this one is somewhere between a mollusk and a fungus.”
“This one. There are others?”
At this point, Officer Rikart had abandoned his first thesis that Mariam Johnson was a potentially dangerous psychopath. Nor had she violated any state traffic ordinances. She may be guilty of transporting an illegal…something, but he wasn’t clear on the laws protecting the rights of unidentifiable species”
“This is the only one today. They make an appearance about once a year. See, at the museum lab we setup radio controlled traps and place them in the local streams to track when certain fish begin to swim upstream to spawn. Every once in awhile these creatures get caught up in a trap and trigger the alarm. As resident biologist, it’s my job to go out and extract them from the nets, reset the traps, and try to help them get back home.”
“Where is home?”
“Who knows? I think we can safely assume it is outside of our solar system, possibly outside of our galaxy. There is just no data, no transport tracking or residue. We just try to keep them comfortable until their rescue party retrieves them. At least that’s what we assume is happening as they tend to disappear a few hours after we bring them into the lab.”
“Have you reported this to NASA or the National Science Foundation or SETI or someone with the resources to research this further?”
“Yes, Hello NASA? We have a space alien that keeps fowling up our fish traps here in upstate Vermont then disappears in a matter of hours after being taken into captivity. Could you come research this please? Hello???”
“Pictures?”
“Sure, there is a freak show on the boardwalk at Coney Island that would really like to make a model of it and call it a real petrified space alien. No, there are some mysteries that need to wait until the right time to be explained. Now is not their time.”
“But why here and nowhere else?”
“Can’t answer. But there is an interesting angle to this story. These creatures began showing up on January 31st, 1986, three days after the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger and the same day that we had a memorial for Christa McAuliffe, the first women in NASA’s Teacher in Space project. There were three arrivals that day, all within a few miles of the museum. I was busy retrieving them and trying to not disturb the crowds of mourning school children, teachers, and parents. At the time, I was excited to have discovered a new species right here in our own backyard. It wasn’t until they started disappearing that I realized we were dealing with something else entirely. It’s almost as if, once they get in proximity to the McAuliffe memorial that they settle down and dematerialize.”
“So, you suspect that these are space pilgrims on a mission to pay tribute to a fallen comrade, a fellow teacher astronaut.”
“Those are your words. Feel free to put them into your report. I hope you have a backup career in mind.”
After a moment, Officer Rikart concluded the investigation with “Well, I’d better give you an escort back to the museum and give this guy some peace. Follow me at a safe distance”
After delivering the space mollusk to the museum, Officer Joel Rikart bid a good evening to resident biologist Mariam Johnson and called it a night. There would be nothing to report on in this shift.