The king rail touched down lightly with a flutter of white-striped wings, its streamlined head darting back and forth looking for predators before assuming the role for itself. The chicken-like bird scuttled secretively through the marsh grasses, seeking out the frogs, crayfish, and crabs that were its dietary mainstays. Its size indicated it was a male, and perhaps he was seeking something tasty for a female, since king rails were known to present food to prospective mates during courtship. If I was lucky, maybe I could catch the ritual for a bit of voyeuristic pleasure. I sat silently on my homemade stool, my body and gear camouflaged in a clump of cordgrass, and I had nothing on my agenda for the rest of the afternoon.
I watched the rail catch a few crayfish and gobble them down hungrily. He didn’t seem to be looking for a romantic offering, so I turned my attention to another king rail that had landed off to my left, announcing his presence with the harsh, staccato notes that distinguished the king from the similar clapper rail, much to my disappointment. Clappers were much harder to spot due to their tendency to stay concealed in the dense vegetation surrounding the shores of Back Bay, and it would have been a treat to watch one for a little while. As it turned out, it didn’t matter which species of rail I had spotted, since the leisurely activities of both bird and man were interrupted by a loud humming sound. I couldn’t tell from which direction the sound was coming, as it seemed to surround me and close in from all directions. I scanned the horizon with my camera binoculars, pivoting back and forth across my field of vision until I saw a disturbance in the treetops on a point of land that extended a few hundred yards into the bay. I started the recorder on my binoculars and stood to get a better view.
A dull, black object that looked remarkably like the giant silhouette of a 1976 AMC Pacer burst through the treetops and plunged into the water with an enormous splash, disappearing for a moment in the muddy spray, then bobbing to the surface like a plastic bathtub toy. Its momentum continued to carry it towards the shoreline, about fifty yards from where I was now standing. The king rails scattered, leaving me alone to watch the oddball craft drift slowly forward until it ran aground about thirty feet from the bank, near a spot where the loblolly pines extended to the water’s edge.
Those guys again.
I kept recording as I walked towards the crash, capturing the ship as it rocked lazily back and forth in the shallow water, wondering if anyone—or anything—was inside. My question was answered when the outline of a door began to glow on the side of the craft, a lime green light that grew so bright I turned my camera off and had to blink several times to readjust my eyes. When my vision had cleared enough to focus on the ship again, there was a human-like figure standing in the doorway. I can only describe it as human-like because although the requisite limbs and head were present, they were not in proportions I had ever seen, except for the crude renderings of the “Incredible Rubber Man” grotesquely painted on the side of the freak show trailer at the Virginia State Fair decades ago. The head, which seemed too small for the rest of its body, was turning back and forth, surveying the area. It apparently had not noticed me standing there with my camouflage clothing providing virtually no contrast to the natural background behind me. I wondered what kind of vision it might have, since my own sight was still adjusting and I was unable to see any real details of its face. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I called out “Hello!” and waved my free arm back and forth to get its attention. The diminutive head whipped around to stare at me, and a gangly hand with long, feeble-looking fingers rose to shield its face from the afternoon sun.
“Well,” it said in a voice that seemed unnaturally deep for the size of its head, “this is a bit awkward.”
It took me a moment to realize I had understood the man, and I did begin to think of it as masculine because, well, it sounded like a man. With my vision rapidly improving, I could now make out a leathery face so full of creases it made the slits of his eyes hard to distinguish. His oversized mouth was not quite open, and not quite closed, and his expression was that of a guilty man who had just been asked who ate the last piece of pie.
“You speak English?” I asked, genuinely surprised by this discovery.
“Well, you wouldn’t send someone to spy on the French, for instance, who didn’t speak French, would you?” he answered matter-of-factly.
“No, I guess not,” I said. “So, you’re a spy?”
“More of an observer, I’d say.”
“Sort of like my birding, then.”
“Exactly,” he responded, and I saw the corners of his wrinkly mouth turn upward in what I took for a smile.
Then there was silence. We just stared at one another for what seemed like ages, the spell unbroken until we heard a guttural issue from inside the ship, and the man shouted something in response. Then he put his hands on his hips, although saying he had hips might be a generous description of the midpoint of his lanky frame, and he said, “I have to say, you’re taking this better than I would have expected under the circumstances.”
“Oh, I’ve seen you around here before,” I said, truthfully. “Not face to face, but, you know, flying around the area.”
“Really?” he said, and even his deep baritone had the inflection of surprise.
“Yeah, the first time was about six years ago, I guess. Probably no more than a mile or so north of here.”
“The first time?”
“Oh yeah. But nobody believed me,” I added. “I told my wife, and some buddies at work, but I didn’t have any proof. In fact, after a while, I started to doubt it myself. Chalked it up to eye fatigue and an active imagination. But then I saw you again about two years later—I assume it was you, since the ship looks the same—and that time I was sure I wasn’t seeing things. I remember watching you bouncing around on the surface of the water, spraying rooster tails, right out there.” I pointed to the large, open body of water off the point. “That’s when I knew I had seen something for real.”
He sighed and raised a gaunt arm, burying his wizened face in an oversized palm and shaking his head slowly.
“That’s just embarrassing,” he lamented, and turned back towards the interior of the ship and shouted something I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand the booming response that came from within, either, but it sure had the cadence of an otherworldly “it wasn’t my fault!”
“And then I saw you about a year ago,” I continued, “just past the point there. You were sitting still in the water, but you had some kind of camo paint job. I walked right up on you before I saw you. I set up my gear and watched for a couple of hours, but nothing happened.”
“You didn’t tell anyone?” the man asked curiously. “Didn’t call your police, or your news people?”
“Why? By that time, I was enjoying the occasional surprise, and since you never bothered me, I decided I owed you the same. Who would believe me, anyway? I really didn’t want to be known as the ‘crazy alien guy.’ My guess is that anyone in the government who needs to know about you probably already does, so what’s the point?”
The man nodded in understanding.
“I am a little surprised you look so similar to us, though,” I said, not able to suppress my own curiosity. “Is that typical?”
“More than you would think, actually. The universe is a big place, but there are certain consistencies that you find throughout, like the need for liquid water. Oh, there’s a ton of diversity to be sure, but over billions of years we all tend to settle into a statistically homogeneous soup.”
“I never considered that,” I said, and I hadn’t, until just now. Then I changed the subject. “Is everyone okay in there? That was a pretty hard landing.”
“It wasn’t very graceful, was it?” he answered, shaking his head yet again. “Had a bit of a mechanical breakdown. The stabilizers went out. We’re okay—thanks for asking—but we might be stuck here for a while waiting for some parts. Landing without stabilizers is enough to make your blowhole pucker; you don’t dare try taking off without them. That’s just suicidal.”
“How long will that take?” I asked, wondering what the average wait time might be for interstellar roadside service.
“Two or three of your days,” he replied, “depending on whether or not the parts are in stock.”
“That’s impressive,” I said. “They must be reasonably close, then.”
“It’s all relative. To paraphrase your Doctor Who, space is a lot bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.”
“I see,” I said. But I didn’t, really. “Well, if you’re going to be here for a few days, you might want to hide the ship a little better.”
“Good point.” The man shouted some instructions into the ship. “My experience is that your people have become remarkably unperceptive, but no need to take unnecessary chances.”
“Unperceptive?” I asked.
“Well, yes,” he said. “There was a time when you would do little else than stare into the sky, building shrines and starting entire religions after so much as a glimpse of us. Now, less than a thousand orbits around your sun later, you have so much going on you barely notice us, and even then, as you say, nobody believes you. It’s getting quite ridiculous, really. Not much of a challenge anymore.”
“Yet, here we are. The two of us, and that,” I said, pointing to the ship.
His shoulders slumped and he let out a sigh. “Indeed,” he said, and he pounded on the side of the ship with the palm of his spindly hand, eliciting a response from inside that reminded me of a ring announcer at a boxing match yelling out a contender’s name with lots of hard consonants.
“So why bother, then? And why here?” I extended both arms to emphasize the vast wilderness surrounding us. “Not counting myself, there’s not much here to observe other than the birds.”
“It’s sort of a vacation spot, actually. About halfway between Florida and New York. Plus, I can always work in a little recon at the naval base when I’m here,” he said, and as he did, the ship suddenly took on its camouflage paint scheme with an audible foomp.
“Wait, you can actually hear that out here?” he asked, turning to look at the ship. “You heard that, right?” There was another exchange of unintelligible shouts between the man and the interior of the ship before he said to me, “Yeah, that’s not good. I’m going to have to get that looked at.”
“New technology?” I asked.
“Not really, but I’ve never been outside the ship when we turned it on. That could be problematic.”
I nodded in agreement and asked, “Anything I can do to help, or do you have everything under control?”
“I think we’re good,” he replied.
“I guess I’ll be heading home, then. I don’t think the birds will be back for a while.” I turned to pick up my gear, but stopped and faced the stranger again. “You guys aren’t planning to, you know…” and I let the rest of the sentence hang in the air between us.
This time his smile was undeniable.
“Do you come here to conquer the birds?” he asked in response.
I returned his smile appreciatively. “I have some footage of the crash, but I’ll delete it. I wouldn’t want anyone to start nosing around and ruin my birdwatching.”
“We already took care of that,” he said apologetically. “A little EMP burst. I’m afraid anything on your equipment was wiped clean. With all of you going digital now, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”
“I didn’t even feel it,” I said, looking down at my hands and arms as if there would be some tell-tale glow as proof.
“We’ve gotten better at that,” he said. “Bringing people back with all those awful sunburns was a public relations problem. But like most things, you fiddle with it until you get it right.”
“Will you be the ‘crazy alien guy’ of your people because of this?” I asked him.
“Oh, this little tête-à-tête is off the record. Hell of a lot of paperwork, actually. That reminds me, by the way,” and he paused, drumming his slender fingers against the metallic body of his ship, “you shouldn’t come back here for the next few days. I can’t say exactly when the other ship will show up, and they might not be quite as chatty. We should probably be a little more discreet for a short while,” he said, stepping back into the doorway, “and then, I think, a little less—when the opportunity presents itself.”
I waved goodbye and turned to pick up my gear. I could see the eerie lime glow of the door frame reflecting off the pines along the shoreline, and when I turned back around, I could barely make out the edges of the ship as it sat bobbing quietly in the marsh grass. I thought about the encounter as I hiked along the trail back to my truck, and drove the twenty minutes home contemplating his parting words.
“You’re back early,” my wife said when I walked in the house. “Nothing worth seeing today?”
“A couple of king rails,” I answered, hanging my cap on the peg inside the door, “and a new friend.”
“The kind that flies, or the kind that walks?” she asked, not looking away from the television.
“Both,” I said.
- End
Tim Ellington 