A long time ago
in a galaxy far, far away,
where no man has gone before
and everyone speaks English…
* * *
“Look Captain. A group of inhabitants.”
Captain McAllister turned and looked along the forest path to see a group of short, human-like beings approaching.
“OK landing party,” said McAllister, turning to his crew. “First contact. Best behaviour. Remember, we’re the aliens.”
The new group stopped a few metres from McAllister’s crew. One stepped forward.
McAllister cleared his throat, but before he could speak, the newcomer spoke.
“Greetings. My name is Larmop. We come in peace. Take us to your leader.”
“What?” exclaimed McAllister. “No. We come in peace. Take us to your leader.”
“No,” replied Larmop. “You’re the first lifeforms we’ve met. You must be the indigenous people.”
“Well, we’re not. You’d better leave. We landed here first, two days ago, so it’s our privilege to make initial contact.”
“What do you mean you landed first? We’ve been here for ten days.”
“Yeah, well, er, we’ve been in orbit for sixty days, monitoring.”
“But we landed first. If you’d been,” Larmop made the universal hand gesture for quotation marks, “monitoring, then you would have seen us.”
“Not if we happened to be orbiting the other side of the planet. Anyway, it took us seventy years to get here.”
“Seventy years? That’s nothing. We’re third generation crew. Born and bred in space, we are.”
“Yeah? Well our planet’s been planning this visit for centuries. In fact—”
Suddenly a blinding light appeared in the sky. Both groups fell silent and watched as it slowly descended until finally landing nearby. A humanoid creature, twice the height of a man, emerged from the light. It stopped a few metres from the other crews.
“Greetings. I come in peace. Take me to your leader.”
My entry in the July 2020 300 Word Story Challenge at SFFChronicles
Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy, or other Speculative Fiction
M. Robert Gibson 