home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
-
-
-
- How to survive on Earth
-
-
- It was a beautiful July night. The birds were singing and the wind was hissing.
- High, among the clouds, a spaceship was soaring downwards.
- Inside the spaceship was one creature, Bluk. He had come from the planet
- Alpha Pavonis III on an investigation mission to Earth.
-
- Bluk saw that his ship's fuel was on the edge of ending. The ship's speed in
- the atmosphere was getting higher and higher. He started to sweat as his ship's
- steel hull was glowing white. At the last moment he saw a kind of fenced castle
- down below with a smaller castle inside its fences. Bluk quickly ejected in
- front of the smaller castle while his ship was smashed to smithereens.
-
- When Bluk regained conciousness, he found himself standing in front of a giant
- hairy beast. It was panting and making strange noises. Had the castle's owner
- not imprisoned it with a thick chain, it could have eaten Bluk. "I guess they
- don't like beings from Alpha Pavonis III on Earth", thought Bluk to himself.
- Bluk noticed the door was opening. Out of it stepped a creature, whose
- anatomy was like his, only he had a curious reddish tone of skin and had only
- four limbs. The being appeared to be wearing skins of other beings. Bluk had
- seen those objects in his picture books.
-
- The being yelled "Down!" to the beast who was harassing Bluk. This indication
- of knowledge of coordination impressed the beast so much, that it sat down,
- walked into its castle and calmed itself.
- It was only now that Bluk made out the strange black hieroglyphs on the door
- of the castle. The first was just like a ribbon-creature from Athena, who rose
- up, then curved downwards touching itself, and stopped down a little distance
- from its starting place.
- The next one looked like an oval steel ring, with which he too had played
- when he was a child. The next was an obvious moonplant, which in its great
- desire for ultraviolet light had split into two and was reaching its sprouts
- into two diagonal directions simultaneously. All three were difficult to
- understand for Bluk.
-
- The being said something so utterly incomprehensible, that Bluk couldn't
- undrestand it. He switched on his intergalactic translator and managed to have
- some idea about the being's speech. It said: "Oh my Goodness (it must be some
- kind of Earthern god, thought Bluk), what have we here? Isn't it a cute little
- Martian! What's your name? My name is Michael."
- Bluk's first cause of amazement was the being's uncertainty. He would have
- recognised a being from another planet when he saw one, and would have no need
- to ask confirmation from it. The name was also peculiar. According to his
- galactic book of first names it meant: "one who has become the object of
- admiration of a light blue bread container." Bluk was, however, completely
- assured of the fact that the being remembered its name right. Maybe there
- indeed were light blue bread containers on Earth.
-
- Michael stepped behind a strange sight blockage in front of his door, and
- seemed to jerk his way onwards to the door. Bluk thought there must be some
- kind of malfunctioning turbolift there. When he came behind the sight blockage
- he was surprised. There wasn't any turbolift, but three large stone slabs each
- one and a half time Bluk's height, lying on top of each other.
- Maybe they were for keeping uninvited guests away. Bluk had grown used to
- pass obstacles, so he agilely climbed to the door. It opened, letting him
- inside.
-
- It was curious inside. Giant furniture abounded in all places, along with
- ancient tungsten lights, and plates with pictures painted with organic pigments
- both sensible and otherwise hung from the walls.
- Bluk's greatest cause of amazement was a box standing in a room, showing a
- picture of a man on its screen. The man moved and talked about completely
- incomprehensible things, like how hunger causes trouble in a place called
- Africa and how things were broken in an unified government, mostly because of
- black things. What black things, was left unclear.
-
- The box seemed to be some kind of galactic transmitter. The man on the screen
- seemed to tell Michael things, but due to some mysterious reason he didn't do
- anything to reply to the man, but stared at him as though he was worshipping
- the box as a god.
- "This is called a television", said Michael to Bluk. To show some further
- samples he fingered a little device, which seemed to have effect on the
- function of the television. Many other men tried to make contact with Michael,
- only to remain completely void of replies.
- However, when a man dressed in war-paint, who seemed to have no sense in his
- way of dressing, greeted "all children" with exaggerated excitement, Michael
- greeted him. For a reason unknown to Bluk the man didn't notice Michael.
-
- In the evening Michael and Bluk went to sleep. Michael clambered under a giant
- thick cloth. Apparently the skins he wore on him didn't warm him enough. Why
- didn't he wear that cloth all the time, was left unclear for Bluk. To his
- amazement, just before falling asleep, Bluk heard Michael clearly groaning
- angrily to something. Maybe he can't distinguish between dream and reality,
- thought Bluk.
-
- In the morning a funnily-dressed man arrived holding to pieces of paper with
- some kind of writing on them. They also had two little pictures like the ones
- hanging in Michael's room. "Michael Williams, I have a letter for you!"
- "Williams?" wondered Bluk. "Are there two people living here?"
- Michael snapped the piece of paper from the man and tore it open. Inside was
- another piece of paper. Michael read the writing on it, said something about
- cursed females, the weather, some long journey, and why the female in question
- couldn't come to him instead.
-
- In a couple of minutes Michael took Bluk with him and started driving in a
- strange Earthern vehicle towards the female in question. Bluk was amazed by the
- strange tricoloured lights, which only had one lamp lit at a time. Everybody
- was interested in the red light, since they stopped in front of it, staring at
- it with great concern. They didn't care anything about the green light,
- however, but drove straight past it.
- After arriving at their destination Michael and Bluk stepped out of their
- vehicle and the female human greeted them. With her were two humanlings, who
- were very excited about Bluk and asked him all sorts of things. The discussion
- made Bluk homesick, so one of the children said he had found a spaceship in a
- package of food. "A spaceship in a package of food?" thought Bluk. "Don't these
- humans watch what they are eating?"
- The child brought the spaceship to Bluk. It was completely different from his
- ship, clearly rounder and with a strangely big glass dome. It had some weird
- blinking lights, for which he couldn't find any use.
-
- After accomodating himself with his new ship Bluk bid the humans farewell and
- started the engines of his ship. It was strangely weak, apparently its battery
- wasn't poweful enough. In any case it rose to the air and Bluk set course for
- Alpha Pavonis III.
- At home he stepped out of his ship into a turbolift, rode on it home where he
- sat in his armchair and told his uncle Blak and sister Belk about how one can
- survive on Earth.
-