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Man from Botan
UFO's and aliens, it would seem, have got popular. Especially saucers that come leaping down to pre-appointed spots, removing the small band of faithful off to the appointed stars.
This alien visitors business has been all through the movies, of course, from Close Encounters down to Alien itself. A week doesn't go by but some friend of mine (usually an intellectual I thought quite “safe”) suddenly drops a hint that, oh yes, he too is a “believer”.
Or I discover grown girls (can't call them women) up in strange states like Illinois who eschew sexual relationships with men, saving themselves instead for their future alien abductors who, in a detail apparently so much more sexual than any man could possibly hope to match, look an awful lot like amphibians or big-toed reptiles.
A day hardly passes (yes, the grapevine runs close to my house) that I don't overhear news of secret underground tunnels, or suchlike, connecting everywhichway the seven continents. They converge, according to the latest word, not far northeast of us, near Cornelia, I believe. This is apparently big news in the UFO world, for these are the tunnels the aliens will use to overcome us. A psychic in North Georgia has said so; it must be true.
UFO's, Bigfoot, funny-looking invaders, amphibian abductors, Star Trek movies, Black Holes, Battlestars—are we then to be overwhelmed? And if so, by what—these outsiders? Or by the trickeries of those mysterious insiders, our imaginations?
All I can say is that I find it perplexing. But not, I might add, for the reason you think.
I myself, you see, am an alien transfer from another world.
You're going to have to take me seriously, I'm afraid. Put all your imaginative wonder and T.V. effects and UFO movies to the side, please, because, lo, I am the genuine article. So butt your cigarettes and listen.
My name, my real name, is FYKIJV NAOCP, and I am what we call sac-human, born about 14,000 years ago your time. (Not that it means much, but it sounds impressive.) The point is, I am no human (of whom there are enough running around); I am a real-McCoy alien. I unveil this fact because I know that not for a milli-second will anyone believe me. Well and good.
Where do I hail from? Mars, of course (doesn't everyone?). Actually, I come from Botan, third moon of Mars. You needn't look it up—earth hasn't found Botan yet, and I dare say you won't either, not for some time in the sun.
We are of course superior to you. That is to be expected. But—here is the irony—you earth ones are lucky to have the young planet. Botan, like Mars before it, went dead on us, and in the last trans-revolution was rather disagreeable, even to a native Botanite.
Basta then! Exodus, of course. And not in spaceships, either, which are so crude. By a process of transgenesis, to put it briefly, we transferred a few of our number. And there I was, suddenly, plopping out the stomach of a human mother in a hospital in Tallahassee, Florida—and was she surprised!
She claimed me, however. More than that, she loved me (and seeing that she was already married, I experienced none of the problems of my uncle a few thousand years before in Palestine).
Botan—dreamland, homeland from which I come. Misty-mazed wonderland of my youth—where there never were mosquitos.
Squirrels, yes, that chattered a fast language of their own, and butterflies ten times the size of yours, we had. Botan was a true child's home to me.
I want to tell you, though, your own planet is not bad. Let me go this far, let me admit, after so many years here, I have kind of got your earth into me, into my fingernails and sinews and blood. I like it. I may not be quite at home here, but I've got no home left anyway.
Really, your earth and your odd sky that moves its mouth like a thing breathing and your heavy, erie crawl of vegetation and trees is appealing. After a while one becomes, in a way, addicted, pulled into that strange old consciousness that is like love in the lap and darkness of another being. Which is what I call addiction. Like a face and nose nudging at good smells.
No, I've no desire to be deprived of this body of yours. Even were brave Botan brought somehow back to life—if it were possible!—perhaps I would not choose to return. Perhaps I would even refuse to return.
It is precisely here that you humans perplex me.
At the drop of a stick—or a spaceship—almost every one of you would beg for escape from this planet you wish wasn't your home. You don't really like your earth. You are all eager for a chance at every Botan or Battlestar or Heaven (there are several) the universe knows.
This I find difficult to understand. It is as if you all have a hatred for yourselves. Or for your earth.
You are strange—I would even say queer, if your newspapers will allow that word to have its perverse taint (not sure what your newspapers allow). Humans have odd wants, let me say that. If not for some fleet of UFO's to carry you off into the void, then for some big God. If not for God, then to be busy little bees building spaceships for rocketing yourselves away. If not that then for some existentialist to send you off to the farther worlds of philosophy—which is a long way indeed.
Why?
You don't think your earth is a dying planet, do you? You have not seen the beginnings of a dead planet, if you think that. Put beside Botan's last days—spare me that sight—your earth is but a child, marvelous.
You have got a miracle here. Only a dying species, the dinosaurs maybe, would want to escape it.
Human shoulders are so wonderfully alive; how did the brains get to be so dead?