 |
 |
|
The Ambridge Abduction
By Brian Whitby
illustrated by Nick Ellwood - check out our drawing
competition
 Avtar
sighed and absent-mindedly scraped all three of his spindly fingers across
his bare, bulbous grey head. "Has it all been in vain?" he asked, more
to himself than to his companion.
"You want to watch it" said Azad. "That head-scratching's another habit
you've picked up from the humans."
Avtar nodded. "We've both been here too long."
For the past thirty years, he and Azad, along with hundreds of other Small
Greys, had been orbiting this small, wet, blue-green planet in their saucer-shaped
spacecraft, invisible to the primitive Radar devices invented by the planet's
most advanced occupants, a humdrum race of bipeds known as 'humans'.
Their mission was to prepare this race for admission into the Galactic
Federation by gradually conditioning them to the reality of intelligent
life outside of their small, miserable world.
A few unidentified flying lights here, some abductions and close encounters
there... When the expert from Contact had explained it to him, it had
all seemed so straightforward.
But he hadn't been to Ambridge.
* * *
 "Hmm, Helen, dear" he murmured, "that was lovely.
But maybe you could use a little more cheese next time..."
It was to have been the start of the Final Phase.
The first mass abduction of an entire rural community, intended to evaluate the success of the Contact Programme to date. He and Azad had, at random, selected a small settlement near the place that, in the local human dialect, was called 'Borchester'. The initial pick-up, stunning the inhabitants and beaming them up to their spaceship, had gone without a hitch. But then the strangeness had started.
Standard procedure required that at least one of the abductees was to be strapped to a table and subjected to a series of bizarre, painful and pointless sexual experiments.
Azad had selected the subject, a morose-looking male in early middle age, and Avtar had disinterestedly performed the experiments. It was not a part of the job he enjoyed.
At the climax of the experiment, when the human was deliberately awakened and allowed to realise the full horror of the degradation that had been visited upon his helpless body, the selected victim stirred.
 "Hmm, Helen, dear" he murmured, "that was lovely. But maybe you could use a little more cheese next time..."
Then suddenly, the health monitor attached to another human, this one a young male notable for the alarming way in which the hair on his head had been shorn, began to bleep out a warning.
Glancing at the screen, Avtar noted that brain activity was dangerously low, scarcely enough to sustain sentient life. Fearing that the human had somehow been damaged by the stunning process, he instinctively began to awaken the subject. All too quickly, however, the young man leapt up, uttered an incomprehensible oath and ran off.
"It appears," said Azad softly "that this apparently low intellectual level was actually the creature's normal condition."
On the monitors, the two Greys watched as the young human stumbled through the corridors of the spaceship, until, unexpectedly, he came up against the door of the Control Room, which was of course locked.
"Don't worry" said Avtar, "he'll never get through that."
As if in response, the young male swiftly drew a sharp metal implement from his clothing and jammed it into the lock of the door. As if by magic, it opened and he ran into the spaceship's control room.
"Wicked!!" he yelled, and immediately squeezed himself into the driving seat.
"Oh my... Surely he isn't actually going to try and fly this thing?" gasped Avtar.
Visit The Archers Message Board>>
<< Back
|
|
 |
