Dawn floated down to Grel with a lazy, leaf-like despondency that synchronised perfectly with his waking mood. His mission here, he knew, was practically over and even the effort of moving seemed too challenging for him at that point.

Perhaps darkness was not the correct environment for instilling fear.   Perhaps it was the raw light of day, where every grotesque detail could be observed.   He figured it was a theory worth testing and the suggestion was all he needed to overcome his sloth.

Stretching up though, he oozed himself out of the gutter like so much rotten toothpaste. Trying extremely hard not to recall the experience at the ‘cinema’ (he had seen the word on garish display outside), he searched the street for targets.

Without warning, a yellow robot trundled by, battering him half to death with a fiercely rotating weapon that was all hard bristles and shooting him in the eye with a powerful jet of water.   He fell back into the sewer with a loud splash, just as he had felt the powerful suction from the tubing in the automaton’s side.

What was that thing? His brain shuddered.

Cautiously, he ascended to the street once again, peering right, then left.   The mechanical beast was some distance down the road from him now, still attacking the guttering with its baffling assortment of appendages.   Its swollen back indicated some sort of tank, and the ensemble rolled along on large, cumbersome wheels.   Grel could not be certain it had not been driven by humans, like many other vehicles on the road this morning.   Automated or not, the thing was a poor combat vehicle, indeed, with bright yellow camouflage in such a grey battlefield.

Ha! It was the humans’ first attempt to oppose him, to take him as a serious threat – and it had failed.   Grel’s faith in his ability as a scout was partially restored.   He hauled himself clear of the guttering and sprouted two sturdy legs so he might walk brazenly along the pavement.

This decidedly brash approach to invasion was destined for abject failure, however.   In all the varied reactions Grel earned himself, there was nothing approximating the horror he truly yearned.   Many simply walked by, as the policemen had done, diverting their eyes purposefully to some other point of inexplicable interest further up the street; boarded shop-fronts or discarded chocolate wrappers, perhaps.   An equivalent number pointed fingers and laughed, particularly mothers keen to show the ‘funny man’ to their infants.   Smaller numbers waved and made faces at a spot somewhere past Grel himself, as if addressing themselves to some hidden camera or observation device along his route.   There was even one supremely embarrassing moment when a sizeable group flocked around him and refused to let him pass until he had done some ridiculous tap-dance or other.   Still dissatisfied with this, his ultimate humiliation, they even hurled metal discs at him afterwards.

By the time he had once again bumped into Herbert Pottington, even agriculture looked like an attractive prospect.   And, to his shame, he found himself shrinking from the harmless box that the human aimed at him from just a short distance away.

 

***

 

Herbert hummed quietly as he awaited development of his Polaroid shot of Bem, as he had dubbed the alien visitor. In contrast to the invader, he had actually enjoyed a rather good night, eventually drifting off to sleep on the tide of a tremendous idea that had occurred to him on reaching home.

“So how’s it going?” he asked his reluctant model.

“It isn’t,” glowered the alien, his single eye visibly steaming. “Look at them.”

Herbert nodded, comprehending, at the milling crowd. The majority were too concerned with shopping to spare the unfortunate Bem the time to recognise his invasion spearhead. Even the kids exhausted huge quantities of their spare time and energy shooting horde upon horde of electronic creatures more fearsome than Bem.

“Well, you’re doing it wrong, you know,” Herbert said gently. “They think you’re some sort of publicity stunt. You can’t just stroll down the high street and expect results.”

“I can’t?” Bem gargled, struggling.

“No, no. You have to do it big – expensive! Land in the centre of Washington with a bloody great saucer and a gigantic silver robot.”

Bem spluttered ineffectually; indignation took over. “How is it you know so much about it?”

“Oh,” Herbert explained easily, “practically everyone has seen all those old sci-fi movies. From back in the fifties. They were all the rage then. It’s a matter of timing, you see. You’d have been more at home if you’d come along in that massive spate of saucer sightings back then. That was where it all began. Fifty years ago, you’d have – “

“What?!” Bem was spitting and hopping up and down; looking more ridiculous than ever. “But, I can’t have been that late! One faulty hyperdrive connector! You can’t have a spearhead arriving after the main force!” The alien’s head threatened to burst with the pain of revelation. “But, that means – our invasion failed. I mean, you weren’t invaded, were you? You’re not secretly dominated by – no, what am I saying? They’d have eaten you all by now!”

Herbert sympathised. “Ah, I’m sorry, I really am. They only seemed to hover around, abduct a few people for experiments – allegedly – and gradually disappeared from the news.” He sighed, discarding all of his foolish old dreams at last. “You could never exert authority over a world where you’ve been parodied in books, films, artwork and everything. You’d never be taken seriously.”

Bem nodded slowly, slumping and ready to run all over the pavement. “You are right, human.   I’m done for. My scouting time is over.”

Herbert smiled not unsympathetically, then inspected his photograph. A vague smudge loomed menacingly out of a misty street scene, reaching out with indistinct limbs in a predatory fashion. “Excellent!” He showed it to Bem.

“I could have told you that would have happened,” Bem complained. “We all emit a radiation that fogs your kind of photographic film.”

“Even better!” enthused Herbert. “I shall call it the Pottington Effect. They’ll have to run all sorts of tests. I bet it applies to all sorts of things. See, it all helps to preserve an enigmatic air. Ups my credibility rating several notches, I’d say.”

“What are you prattling about, human?”

“My book,” Herbert told him. “Of course, I never told you. It’ll be a best-seller. My true-life encounter with an extra-terrestrial. Why he chose me out of all mankind, how I finally persuaded him to seek conquest elsewhere; the whole story. Naturally, I’ll have to invent a few things, just to pad it out. Or you could stay and help me for a while. What d’ you say?”

Bem was very obviously insulted. “That’s exploitation! How dare you! That is the final disgrace! My career may be over, but I do not have to stay here and listen to this!” For a moment he was stuck for a suitably emphatic phrase, and by way of hurrying things along, settled for a curt, “Good-bye!”

Growing legs again, he stomped off in an elephantine sulk, leaving Herbert alone with the beginnings of an exciting career.

In later years, Herbert embarked upon a full scientific discourse on the Pottington Effect as his second massive project, after his highly popular (it made a bomb) factual account of this unique meeting of two highly different intelligences. That second undertaking would lead him all over the world, from Loch Ness to the Bermuda Triangle (wherever that was).

 

***

Extract from the log of the <Bloodhound>, Terran Pioneer Ship, 3124 AD:-

In all my days as a Captain of the Pioneer Corps, I have never encountered such a bizarre story as I heard today on this remarkably fertile world of Snappy Joe. (The crew objected to my naming the planet after my wife’s terrier, but having personally discovered no less than forty-seven habitable worlds, I am sure the Corps will understand my difficulty in coming up with new names.)

Our survey rocket put down in a wide, low basin which appears to have been a lake at some point, now drained by forces unknown. Our planetographer, Lewtun had extemporised on the possibility of some great irrigation project, but it was a theory we all dismissed.

Nonetheless, only three days later the patrol returned with evidence that the verdant surface of Snappy Joe was indeed the result of some ambitious agricultural project on the part of an alien race. According to Lewtun and Jaxxon, they had in fact stumbled upon a farm – and a farmer!

Jaxxon and Lewtun are both level-headed Corps officers and I had to lend at least a modicum of credence to their report. The little that is left of the alien corpse indicates a hideous creature, but is not nearly sufficient to divest me of my healthy scepticism as to its precise level of sentience.

Between myself and the log, I am not convinced that Lewtun and Jaxxon and the others didn’t just have themselves a riotous party and shot up an innocent example of the native wildlife.

The thing that really convinces me they’re having me on is the way they say the creature got itself shot. As they reported it, they neared a clutch of buildings with single holes cut in their roofs for the purposes of entry and exit, and Lewtun believed this apparently deserted community to be just another remnant of his lost civilisation.

Just then, they maintain, a movement stirred from behind the buildings and a creature squirmed its way timidly around the base of the hill to face them. After studying them with its single, bloated eye, the thing’s mouth seemed to tremble and Lewtun suspected it was attempting to communicate.

But then, horror of horrors, the alien beast charged at them, screaming rabidly and spitting a shower of quite disgusting liquids. Interpreting its actions as hostile, Trooper Jaxxon promptly whipped out his blaster and burned it in mid-snarl.

When asked what made him so sure the thing was hostile, Jaxxon insists that it was ranting at them to “Leave me the bloody hell alone!”

Honestly, that Jaxxon will be the death of me.

 

SAF Circa 1990