Let the Fire Fall

Happy Anniversary! Five years ago this month the alien ship came from a blue sky, and changed the history of our world. What changes did it make? One, the war in Asia has become a memory. So the government went a bit left, but lust a little bit. And besides, it’s no concern of this nation if another country decides to go socialist. But the anomaly here is that we have more armed forces deployed on foreign soil than we did five years ago,

Change number two is the unification of major powers In a common cause. How picayune the penetration of a nation’s border for a few miles when the aliens penetrated millions on millions of miles of space. The common goal is space exploration. Or is it to prepare a defensive system in the event aliens return? Or could it be to prepare to meet extraterrestrials as equals, but just a touch of superiority here or there? Well, no matter, whatever the goal is, it’s common.

Another change is the shoring-up of the U.N. Expeditionary Forces: UNEF. That most of UNEF’s members speak American-English, are white, and use weapons made in the States is secondary. The primary purpose for their being Is served daily whenever there is raised a grumbling voice of an insignificant government protesting the arbitrary methods being used to extract from its country its dwindling resources. Of course, no one may be allowed to stand in the way of the Cause, therefore UNEF.

Even more unprecedented is the new dichotomy of the people that is taking place at a faster and faster rate. There are the scientists, and there are the masses. Space agencies wear the purple today.

Today I revisited the ship. Many things there have changed also since my last visit to the site. There is a five-thou sand-acre. park there now, with a ten-lane highway leading to it, and parking space for fifty thousand cars. The land has been donated to the U.N. and is patrolled by a UNEF unit of thousands.

There is a torus-shaped building about the ship and daily thousands of tourists file into it. Inside there are murals and dioramas depicting our space programs, those of Russia and other countries, as well as a quickie course in astronomy. You make a circuit of the building before you enter the ship. And it is big, bigger than the old Queen Elizabeth II. After five years it still isn’t known how the ship was propelled; where it came from; what the many pieces of equipment are for; what the crew ate; what they did for recreation. In short nothing has been learned that wasn’t guessed when the ship first arrived. We haven’t begun to decipher the alien language. We have found no Rosetta Stone for it.

One man alone has profited from the efforts of the corps of scientists who work day and night on the mystery of the alien ship. He Is Emmanuel Curlew. Curlew has written a book that is climbing high on the best seller lists of most countries: It is a book of international curses.