print previewback JAMES TATE
Spaceship
I saw something in the sky, then realized it was only something in
my eye. I rubbed it and then it felt better. But then there was a space-
ship and I rubbed my eye again. It was still there. It was moving across
the sky at an alarming speed. I didn’t know what to do. Then it was out
of sight. I ran into the house and called the police. I told them what
I had seen. I said, “What are you going to do about it?” They said
they had already dispatched several squad cars to search the area. When they
heard nothing back from those two cars they sent two more. They heard nothing
from those two cars and an hour later they sent the last four cars they had. They
waited nervously at the station. Hours passed. Finally they called for help
from neighboring towns. Altogether they had sixteen cars from nearby towns.
They sent out eight at first. Silence followed. This was really an emergency.
They decided not to send out any more. Too dangerous. They called in the
National Guard. They surrounded the area where they thought the spaceship
had landed. It was a wooded area about ten miles from town. They moved in
slowly, their heaviest weapons drawn. They heard squealing far off. As they
approached, one of the guardsmen was thrown in the air, another sank into a hole.
Then five were shot backward at great speed about a hundred yards. Now the
remaining guardsmen looked at each other and decided to run for their vehicles.
They jumped in and sped off. Then they stopped, not of their own accord, and
a huge, monstrous hand came out of the forest and picked them up and hurled them
back to where they came from, crashing them against a tree. They were all
knocked out cold. Back at the police station they had not heard a word from anyone.
They were terrified the end of the world had come. I called them several more times,
but they were not answering the phone. The policemen from the first two
squad cars showed up at work the next week. The officers on duty were dumbfounded.
They said, “Thank God you’re alive. We can’t believe it. We thought sure
you were dead.” “Oh no, we had the best time in our lives. We’ve never seen
anything like that before,” one of them said. And so it went all week.
The men in the second squad car came back and said the same thing. Then the men
from the other towns, then the National Guard. All said it was the time of their
lives. The officers at the station couldn’t figure it out, nobody could.
They never knew their men liked being beaten up, hurled through space, crushed
and eaten alive so much until now. Perhaps now they will get along better. 