Next Time Send Captain Kirk

So Krodor and me are sitting around his backyard tossin' back a few when all of a sudden I look up and see it coming.

"Say, is that a meteor or something?", I ask Krodor, who turns his attention from flicking the foam off his Ligurian Ale to this tiny fiery speck in the sky.

"Oh jeese, they sent another one," he mutters and before you know it he's on the line to the folks at Alien Counteraction.

Well these government guys come rushing down to Krodor's place, and without saying as much as "Hello" or anything they start putting up every piece of equipment you can imagine. They've got stage lights, background scenery and all these red rocks and sand and pretty soon Krodor's backyard starts looking like some weird kind of desert.

Krodor just starts moaning and groaning, cause he put a lot of work into his backyard. I know `cause he borrowed most of my stuff to do it. (And it'd be nice to get it back sometime)

"You'd think those folks up there on Earth would have figured by now we've got nothing to say to them," he mutters.

Those government guys must have had the Earth space ship's trajectory reckoned pretty close `cause as it got closer, it was pretty clear it was landing right where they set up everything. Some big parachutes billowed above it as it dropped while rockets spouted flame from under it and it landed smack dab it the middle of Krodor's backyard after spouting a big puffy pillow for itself to drop on. The pillow deflated real fast and then these panels unfolded to form a pad on top of the flattened pillow.

The pillow was about as deflated as Krodor's hopes for a restful weekend in the backyard.

"I was gonna put a nice garden there," whimpered Krodor.

Then this guy, I guess he was the head guy, comes over and finally talks to us. "It's just a matter of time now," he says. And no sooner does he say that, than this little table on wheels appears on one of the pads and just sits there.

And sits there.

And sits there.

I got pretty bored and went home. Krodor told me later that the little roller thing eventually came down off the pad and kind of squatted over a little rock and did some stuff to it that he didn't want to describe publicly.

Those folks from Earth must be pretty weird.

Everybody started to go over to Krodors' place over the next couple of days to see what was going on. There was a lot joking about Earthlings and a lot of talk about finally sending someone to Earth to ask them to please stop slinging junk at our planet and leave us alone.

But eventually everybody figured it was best just to let them go on thinking we were a desert planet and maybe they'd get bored and go back to curing diseases and stopping wars on their own planet.

I doubt it. From what little I've seen, Earthlings may be pretty stupid, but they are an inquisitive bunch. And being curious is the first step toward intelligence.

You'd think that they'd know by now, however, that the one true sign of intelligent life in the universe is the fact that nobody out here wants to have anything to do with them.