by Ian Hutson
‘Oh possibly so, Rex, but our xenoscientibiozoologisters attributed their ill-temper to the Surrey T-Rex’s having short forearms in combination very itchy testicles – no chance whatsoever of a good scratch do you see? Hell on Earth I suppose, especially during the humid summer months of the Maastrichtian Cretaceous in the suburbs of Godalming. If only they’d learned to cooperate and to scratch each other’s they might have been alive today. Do you think they would have responded well to gifts of some Cambridge nellies?’
‘Some Cambridge nellies’ whats?’ replied Her Majesty, lifting The Crown to tickle a sudden itch that had developed right under the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
‘Absolutely, yes, of course. We might try that if a similar situation arises again.’ The ambassador waved politely to his procurement officer in discreet clack-clack-cligginoffham-squiggle-hiccough-roar-fart semaphore, meaning “go get some Nellie Swats immediately”. ‘Still, it’s all just so much flattened flora and fauna under the old landing struts now Your Maj – er, Rex.’
The fresh crumpets arrived and the Ambassador was relieved to be merely offered one rather than being required to perform some sort of Conservative political ceremony involving hot melted butter and naked skin contact.
The P.M., anxious to at least try to not look like a spare ram at a West Country wedding, moved the tea on towards practicalities and away from itchy dinosaur sweetbreads and putative hippie T-Rex naturist cooperatives. The memory of his own testicles made him uncomfortable. In particular he disliked the way they seemed to bob up and down in the jar on the tiled mantel in his “front room” at home, mocking him each evening as he smoked his post-fish supper cigar. Damn that tropical testicle rot, just damn it to Hell and back. If only he’d worn wool next to the skin as the guide books had all advised!
He stumbled out of his reverie and remembered his official duties. ‘Ambassador, if it meets with your approval ...’
‘Oh, please – just call me “Eek”, we can forget the formalities can’t we, for the moment?’ said the Ambassador, yet another of his brains tugging out the neckline of Her Majesty’s frock a little while swooping in with yet another eye-nose stalk, and raising his ear-brows suggestively. Fortunately, the anti-overfamiliarity circuits built into the royal bra and panties deployed and a little localised blue lightning crackled, rather discouragingly. The Ambassador’s exploratory stalks stiffened with involuntary muscle-cramps and decided unilaterally to withdraw and to explain to Central Brains & Overall Operations at some later date just why they had withdrawn.
‘Well, er ... Mr Eek, if it meets with your approval I wonder if you would care to address The House of Commons tomorrow - we can formally welcome you to Earth, that sort of thing. Bit of a parade from the Horse Guards – on Horse Guards’ Parade on horseback as a matter of fact! We should also make arrangements for the rest of your party. Scientisters to meet and greet, a little publicity, some photo opportunities, possibly a walk-about if you’d like, that sort of PR malarkey.’
‘Absolutely, Prime Minister Brownaughs, that all sounds quite splendid.’
‘Oh, please – call me Gordon; everyone else always does whether I want them to or not.’ The P.M. looked a little regretful but took a deep breath and got himself over it. In truth he would have preferred “Clan Chieftain Brownaughs” or “Emperor Brownaughs” but still, you can’t often have everything (except at a state banquet where it was positively expected and there was always a large car to take you home via a route without any bilious speed-bumps or antiperistalsis-inducing potholes).
‘Splendid, Prime Minister Gorgon. Maybe my little green people could...’
‘...arrange things with my green little people. Top notch idea!’
Ambassador and P.M. both waved discreetly to their little people who had been lurking separately in the nearby greenery, mostly scratching their own sweetbreads as they waited or occasionally, mostly in the case of the aliens, nibbling on aphids. Well, I say that both “waved”, and indeed the Ambassador did, but the Prime Minister – as was his wont – more sort of, well... twinkled his fingers in the manner of a Liberace tribute act trying to attract the attentions of a Sommelier.
A number of the Secret Policemen were especially grateful for the long arms of the law as they stood, also mostly quite lost in thought. Unfamiliar territory for Secret Policemen, you see; thought. Not called out there very often.
No-one had much idea what the Secret Policewomen – or women in general - were grateful for since Mrs T-Rex of the Cretaceous Godalming and environs has not been researched very much by the scientific community and has not been referenced at all during the telling of this story - until now that is. However, now that she has been brought into the intellectual fray, so to speak, we should briefly digress in order to speculate wildly just for the sake of non-avian Cretaceous gender completeness. Extrapolating from pure hearsay and circumstantial happenstance, like any good copper with itchy Policeman’s Bits and an unsolved “crime” should, we find one theory that falls down the station stairs, Your Honour, better than all of the rest put together.
Consider if you will that the short arms of the female Surrey T-Rex might actually have been very handy indeed for hiding T-Rex lady-nipples while they were running or jogging in any serious hurry-up situation. Thus their primary purpose would have been the preservation of the nipular modesty of T-Regina dinosaurs while in screaming girlie flight from spiders, their poorly parked cars or tempting but calorie-laden fast-food. Not that it has been seriously suggested that T-Regina could achieve girlie flight, screaming or otherwise. Flight’s a damned difficult thing.
Obviously the clinching self-evident, pre-mentioned evidence is that their arms were far too short for any serious gliding and we’re surprised that the defence even brought it up - the leverage would have been all wrong. Plus, there would have been some serious safety concerns. How would they have got along with the early designs of parachutes when they couldn’t reach behind their backs for the secondary chute-release? One touch of cumulonimbus turbulence, a dodgy fold or two in the parachute factory and they’d be goners.
‘Pull the emergency rip-cord on the back-up silk, Lucy! Pull the rip-cord! Oh – Eek! Don’t look. Marjorie, don’t look! It’s all too, too horrible to watch, I shall never be able look through these binoculars again! I think she landed in the High Street somewhere near Marcosaurs & Sparcosaurs!’
Maybe that’s why the dinosaurs died out? Persistent sky-diving while still equipped with anatomy quite unsuited to the pulling of emergency or secondary rip-cords combined, fatally, with poor quality-control in the primary parachute packing area. Lousy origami combined with an overweening love of recreational free-fall? Given the number of accidents that still happen even after sixty million years of experience and development of the sport you’ve got to wonder – those early sky-diving days can’t have been pretty.
Anyway. Most dinosaurs are known to have been sensitive about their nipples even if all T-Rex remains found so far have been face down, legs and arms akimbo, jaw in the screaming position and showing signs of tangled suspension lines in the surrounding rock formations.
Still. Who knows? Who cares? There’s a reason, however obscure it may be, that Nature didn’t give the T-Rex wings so let’s just let sleeping dogs fly and get back to the aliens who landed under more controlled means.
‘More tea, Eek?’ Ambassador Eek-eek-wibble-squeak-growl-roar-fart mooted that he would much prefer – if there was time – to try his hands at a game of croquet instead please, Association rules of course. Prince Philip almost began an inter-species “embarrassment” by shouting ‘Splendid!’ and slapping Eek on what he had presumed to be his back. Eek, aware that Philip may not have had time yet to read all of the Concise Illustrated History, and certainly not the sections on mating rituals, diplomatically ignored Philip’s signal invitation to “please fertilise the preserved eggs of my late grandmother”, and just selected a mallet from those offered by Her Majesty’s Personal Trainer, Sebast
ian.
Some of the alien entourage decided on a few rounds of cricket instead of croquet, and a match between the Wibble-squeak-growl-fart-roar-eek-roar first-ever First Elevens and the one hundred and twenty-seventh Buckingham Palace-Whitehall-Westminster Irregulars was arranged. Cook, as is her wont, gleefully officiated as scorer. The P.M., citing rustiness in both sports and an old but unspecified non-testicle related war-wound, served as chief wristwatch and pullover keeper. He was swiftly buried under a pile of discarded clothing and could almost imagine himself to be in The House on Prime Minister’s Question Day. Her Majesty, naturally, opened for the Irregulars and did so very nicely with a century and her own pads. One then flipped One’s bat end to end and spun it vertically on the palm of One’s hand as One walked back to One’s pavilion to One’s applause from One’s subjects standing in One’s outfield in One’s shade from One’s Sun under One’s trees.
Civilised extra-planetary inter-species first contact was thus fully initiated with croquet bats and cricket mallets but without recourse to firearms, nucular [SIC] weapons or the F.B.I., the C.S.I., the Chicago I.R.A. and Miami Vice or even the National Association of Acronyms Properly Indicated As Such by Full Stops.
Gifts had been exchanged (avoiding the cliches of aerodynamic Uranium and homosexual postgraduates; lessons having been previously learned), and hands and hand-analogues had been shaken, gently, in white gloves. Tea had been poured. Toast, scones, crumpets and biscuits had been nibbled and polite conversation had been engaged in without a single shot being fired or so much as a friendly fart being lit, let alone any LPG explosions.
Teams of humans and of aliens who all ended in a reasonably mutual “ology” or “ism” of some sort were busy swapping anecdotes and samples and fresh, moist datum. Grey chaps in even darker-grey bowler hats were busy making sure that the bottom-feeding tabloids didn’t refer to the alien guests as “invaders” or “Martians” and the world, le Monde, el Mundo, was regularly tuning in to the wireless in the hope of more detail being released by the E.B.C. [The English Broadcasting Corporation.] The Six O’Sundial televisual news led with the optimistic note delivered in properly estuarial tones of the official confirmation that Elvis was indeed never coming back and that, furthermore, Sir Clifford Richard was likely to be disappearing soon too.
Dog-walkers on Horsell Common skirted lightly around the parked alien entourage support-craft, mostly successful in their attempts to avoid the vulgarity of actually noticing anything out of the ordinary. Naturally only the Mother-ship had been parked in a hover over Buckingham Palace, all of the smaller vessels had been more discreetly directed to overnight facilities on the Common where toilets, showers, a site shop, power-points, mains water and suchlike had been made available.
As the Japanese so correctly say; like nakedness, aliens are often seen but rarely noticed.
All in all it turned out to have been a splendid day.
The morning following first contact, The Morning after the Day Before, so to speak, when the world was no longer standing quite so still, a large alien boiler-stoker wearing a new E.H.S. [English Home Stores] dressing gown and three pairs of slippers from the Markus & Spencerus ,clomped down the ramp from his alien craft. He’d been sent to collect the two bottles of red-top, six strawberry Ski yoghurts and a thick-sliced white Mother’s Pride that the Milkman had left there at dawn, rattling across the heath in an eclectic milk-float. A paper-boy (of the new disposable kind, made from recycled copies of The Dandy, The Beano and, occasionally for those destined to be artistic, Jackie) cycled up with the morning newspapers, some nice comics and a Wireless Times magazine, all of which the stoker tucked under a coal-dusted tentacle as he stretched, yawned and looked at the new day through alien eyes.
A little summer night-time ground mist was clearing quickly leaving just dew-damp grass and the distant sound of sparrows encouraging their chicks to get up and get ready for school. Red squirrels in wristbands, headbands, amateur rock bands and knee-length shorts were hanging upside down from oak and chestnut tree branches, doing stomach curls. Hedgehogs were waxing off their School Crossing Patrol lollipops and rabbits, all careful to not be seen by humans or aliens, were getting an early start on giving their lawns the once-over with miniature mowers and shears.
Various very relaxed Pressure Groups were setting out their folding seats, placards and tartan flasks of tea for another day’s hard protesting outside their respective embassies in England, demanding the freedom to protest outside their respective embassies in England, a freedom that they explained that they needed in order to be able to protest about the lack of freedom in their own, abandoned countries where the word “embassy” was usually synonymous with the phrase “pile of smoking rubble”.
Most of the protest placards and warm-up chants seemed to indicate that the very nature of imperialist English politics and of Anglo-Saxon post-Empire society in general was absolutely to blame anyway for their having to be in England to wave placards and chant about things they would otherwise be slightly killed for protesting about in the various non Anglo-Saxon ex-Empire republics, states or fiefdoms that they loved so much and would return to if only bastard England would take responsibility to do more to make it safer for them to do so, using gunboat diplomacy if necessary. Or something. Whatever the message was, it was usually presented in a font laced with irony.
The Day Shift truncheon, whistle and little notebook inspection parades in Police Station yards everywhere from Mablethorpe to Hove practiced formation formal direction-giving, old-lady assisting, corrective clip around the ear application and minor-offence blind eye turning. Chief Constables in every county settled down in modest, dusty offices and reached for well-thumbed volumes on the practise of pragmatic institutional honesty, accountability, integrity and the control of the uniformed ego. Do please excuse me for a moment while I check in with reality. Thank you.
Primary, Junior and Secondary School kitchens (as opposed to peculiar, risible and very foreign “kindergarten”, “lower” and ersatz “faux-college” and “academy” kitchens) echoed to the sound of diesel-powered industrial gravy-stirrers, pneumatic potato mashers, chocolate concrete mixers and custard skin recycling centrifuges.
Hospitals slopped, steamily mopped and positively ran corridors-awash with the heady scent of barely diluted Domestos, with concentrated old-fashioned Ward Sister sweat and with experienced, local, sensible, intelligent, basically-educated and oops-I-actually-just-gave-a-professional-shit permanent not agency Nursing Staff who were all secure enough in their jobs to know that they would still be there the next day (on a fresh shift after sleep as opposed to still working the same one).
Her Majesty’s Coast Guard checked that the coast was all still present, correct and safe, from Beachy Head to the sands of Southport, from Holy Island to Morecambe Bay, from Happisburgh to Land’s literal and quite unnerving End.
From inside the alien craft came the clatter of crockery and the inviting aroma of tea, scrambled eggs, properly made toast and thick-cut lime marmalade.
As he clomped back up the ramp Stoker First Class Eek-eek-wibble-growl-growl-teehee-fart almost tripped over the ship’s cat and snapped at it, not entirely un-seriously, with his extendable second jaw, before putting on his new tortoise-shell framed varifocal N.H.S. optics to read the headlines.
The tabloids were on top form. Hollywooden President shot at as Hollywooden Air Force One II returns. Hollywooden Senate proclaims that since Space is Hollywooden, aliens are Hollywooden property too. Westboro Baptists say Alien’s Hollywooden snub is God’s punishment for letting Bastard Gays into Nice God-Fearing Family Outer-Space. Russia bombs all of its Independent ex-USSR neighbours for peace. Putin’s face voted least threatening of last two Russian Presidents. China continues to build another environment-improving coal-fired power station every minute. OPEC increases price of oil to help rest of world through recession. India vows to tackle population growth when it becomes necessary. African leaders meet in George Cinque H
otel in Paris to discuss hunger. French Farmers not sure if they’re on strike or not and, if they are, what it’s all about but burn a few of les moutons alive on les camions anyway just in le case. Standard stuff.
The Times headline said simply that the aliens finally knew now that they were not alone in the universe. Editorial content centred on how much of a relief it must be for them.
The Guardian ran a feature written by a putative “Professor” from something called a “Reading University” on an “M4 corridor” in Berk Shire theorising about the possible effects on the structure of alien society of making contact with intelligent terrestrial life. The professor concluded – as far as anyone could tell from his rather slap-dash paper – that with extensive Human support the aliens might come out of it alright.
The Hollywood Washington Post, the Hollywood Boston Globe and the Hollywood Chicago Tribune all ran some quite nice cartoons along with the shrill Hollywood Homeland Insecurity, Hollywood Central Integillence Agency, Feral Bureau of Instigation, Fearless Emergency Management Agency and Sheriff’s Department advice that Hollywooden citizens should stockpile beans, grits, ammunition and Holy Bibbles. Travel, they said, should only be undertaken if absolutely fabulously necessary, and only then in either offensively armoured Army-led convoys or in massive civilian-vehicle stampedes in which latter case velocities should be kept below fifty-five miles an hour to avoid unnecessary mass carnage, driver-passenger stress or vehicles spontaneously bursting into flame. The editorial undertone was that serious first contact would only take place once there had been a few explosions and a few aliens had been cornered in corn crops grown by baseball players.
Punch ran an issue lampooning the lamentable lack of bunting supplies in the Home Counties and its deleterious effect upon street parties welcoming the aliens. Apparently no-one could find the stuff that had been used on V.D. Day. It had probably been boxed up and tucked into a forgotten corner of the loft at Downing Street.