Illegal Alien

Frank spoke firmly. "I’ll make that determination, Captain."

"But—"

"Captain, shut up." Frank stepped closer to the lander. His heart was pounding in his ears.

An alien.

An actual, honest-to-God alien.

It didn’t have the big head, the large eyes, the tiny body, or any of the other characteristics associated with UFO sightings, of course. Frank nad always taken such unimaginative descriptions of alien beings as proof that UFOs had nothing to do with extraterrestrial life, Packwood Smathers’s ridiculous contentions notwithstanding. No, this was clearly something that had evolved somewhere else.

The creature was not humanoid.

It stood about five and a half feet tall and, at a wild guess, probably weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. It had four limbs, but all four of them seemed to be attached at the shoulders. The left and right ones were long, and reached down to the ground. The front and back ones were shorter, dangling freely. The head was a simple dome rising up from the shoulders, and on top of it there was a topknot or tuft of white tendrils that seemed to be waving independently of the gentle breeze. Positioned near the front of the dome were two mirrored convex circles that might have been eyes.

Below them was an orifice that could have been a mouth. The being’s hide was blue-gray. It wore a dun-colored vestlike affair with many pockets.

Clete had moved to Frank’s elbow. "No space suit," he said. "It’s breathing our air, and it’s standing in our gravity."

The alien began to walk forward. Its left and right limbs were jointed at three places, and its stride length was close to six feet. Although it didn’t seem to be hurrying, it managed to close half the distance between itself and Frank in a matter of seconds — then it stopped, dead, still about fifty feet away.

The meaning seemed plain enough: an invitation to come closer. The alien wasn’t going to invade Frank’s territory, and it clearly wasn’t looking to grab Frank and steal him aboard the lander. Frank walked forward; Clete fell in next to him. The Russians began to move as well. Frank turned around.

"Just one of you," he said. "We don’t want it to think we’re ganging up on it."

Korolov nodded and spoke briefly to Pushkin and Danilova. They both looked disappointed, but they obeyed the order and moved back to stand next to Captain Raintree.

The three humans closed the remaining distance. Clete held up a hand when they got within eight feet of the alien. "Better stop here, Frankie," he said. "We don’t know what it considers to be its personal space."

Frank nodded. Up close, he could see that the creature’s skin was crisscrossed with fine lines, dividing it into diamond-shaped scales or plates, and — Frank couldn’t help smiling. There was a small adhesive strip, perhaps three inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide, attached to the side of the alien’s domed head — apparently a bandage, as if the alien had bumped its head on something. Somehow, the small sign of fallibility made the alien seem much more accessible, much less formidable.

The alien was presumably studying the humans, but there were no visible pupils in the mirrored lenses — no way to tell where the alien was looking.

How to proceed? Frank thought for a moment about making the hand sign from Close Encounters — and that thought gave him a better idea. He held up one finger, then two — he was conscious that he was making peace sign — then three, then five. He then brought up his second hand and added two fingers from it, for a total of seven.

The alien lifted its front arm and raised the hand attached to it, which ended in four flat-tipped fingers, equally spaced around the circular end of the arm. The fingers seemed undifferentiated — they were all the same length, with no obvious thumb. The first and third fingers opposed each other, and so did the second and fourth.

The alien raised one finger, then two, then three. It then reached its second hand around from behind its body, and raised two of its fingers — making a total of five — and then the remaining two, making a total of seven.

So far, so good. But then Frank thought perhaps he’d made a mistake.

Maybe the alien would now assume humans communicated through a gesticular language, rather than a spoken one. He touched a hand to his own chest and said, "Frank."

"Frank." The alien was a gifted mimic — it sounded just like Frank’s own voice.

No, no, that wasn’t it — it had recorded his voice and immediately played it back to him. There must be some sort of recording equipment in the vest it was wearing.