An unpublished mini story by John Lucas. According to records maintained by the Ministry of Defence, nearly twelve thousand encounters with aliens have been reported since the end of World War Two, but all except one have proved unfounded.   The exception occurred in 1974, when a laboratory accident at Oxford University inadvertently transported a brochure promoting holidays in Devon some sixty thousand light years to a small rocky planet in the Galaxy’s far spiral arm. The visitors appeared in Falmouth three days later, twitching sporadically as they sought to control the unfamiliar muscles of their newly-constructed human pseudo-bodies.   All day they wandered the town, pleading unsuccessfully with suspicious landladies to accept solid gold ingots or immortality serum in return for bed and breakfast.   Shortly before nightfall they left the town for ever, pausing at the tourist information office to leave behind a handwritten complaint which remains to this day the world’s only authenticated product of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Copyright © John Lucas 2003

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