I Told Them

I Told Them by Chris Pye

© 2023 Chris Pye

New Mexico 1950

 'I told them, right?' Enrico snorted.

He swivelled in his office chair and looked up into the large translucid eyes of the grey man-like extraterrestrial standing very tall beside him.

'Ho detto loro, OK?' Enrico added in Italian, in case that helped.

The Grey Man scratched what might have been its nose, had it been there, with a flipper-like appendage attached to what Enrico had come to think of as its arm. From their great height, the two luminous eyes regarded Enrico Fermi, one of the brightest human minds it had met. ('Were like Mama's dinner plates,' Enrico would later recall.) The short Italian physicist felt even smaller. He squirmed a little in his chair.

'What did you actually say?' the Grey Man asked.

Or rather that's what Enrico 'thought' he asked. The alien, besides missing a nose, didn't have anything that Enrico Fermi might call a mouth either. The words just seemed to pop into Enrico's head, bouncing around inside his skull with - and Enrico was sure about this - a bit of an Italian accent.

'Well,' Enrico Fermi began, 'I put it as a paradox. I said that by my calculations, given the high probability of extraterrestrial civilisations existing in our galaxy - in the universe! - it’s really odd that we haven't encountered any of you yet.'

'And that was it?' said the Grey Man.

'Perfect, wasn't it,' Enrico smiled.

'Was it? Not what we agreed though.'

'Which was?'

'That you'd tell them I'd arrived. Right? With a Big Message.'

Enrico's feelings were ruffled. The Grey Man's unsettling, globby eyes were calling him out on this one. But, extraterrestrial alien or not, Enrico wasn't having it.

'Well, OK. Not telling them, as such. But my approach is much subtler - delicato - don't you see. I started them thinking.'

'Thinking?'

'Yes, we don't want to alarm everyone. We're simple folk, we humans. Un po' stupido, ok? We panic over very little. It's the herd mentality. We easily go mob-handed at new thoughts: flying saucers, little green men, probing; that sort of thing. We need people to sneak up on the idea properly.'

'Sneak up on the idea?'

'Yes. Extraterrestrials. You know, come round to you a bit at a time.'

'Come round to me?'

'Yes.'

'A bit at a time?'

'Stop repeating per l'amor di Dio!' Enrico snapped, 'I don't know who's talking, me or you.'

The echoes in his skull were giving Enrico Fermi a headache. He stopped speaking and massaged his forehead. Outside his office window, night had fallen. Light from his two desk lamps reflected off the glass as shadows lurked in the corners around loaded bookcases. The biggest shadow of all reached up to the ceiling.

Enrico took a deep breathe, stood up, and looked at what would have been the Grey Man's navel, if the being had had one. Craning his neck, Enrico peered up, straight into the ethereal pools shining above.

'Yes,' he exhaled. 'Sneak up. Furtivamente, OK? Now that I've planted the idea, there'll be a sense of expectation. They're thinking. There must be something out there, right? Not just fantasy stories. You could be here already! So... They'll start looking for you. Then, when the time's right, you'll just pop up and - Ecco! Voila! They'll welcome you. Probably not with open arms but certainly with something.'

'Pop up?'

Enrico sighed. It hadn't been easy. The Grey Man had simply appeared in his back garden a couple of days earlier while Enrico was watering his beloved azaleas and demanding that he, Enrico Fermi, the most top-of-the-tree physicist ever, tell the world that, after travelling aeons of light years (compacted into nano seconds of course), he, Mr. Extraterrestrial Grey Man, had come to warn People-of-Earth about their impending doom. Discussion had taken place in the garden shed because Enrico didn't need his wife involved in any embarrassing catering for the new guest.

'You're not taking me seriously!' the Grey Man snapped.

A distinct lack of expression on what could have been the Grey Man's brow was contradicted by lots of expressive Italian overtones tumbling in Enrico's head.

'What about my message to the People-of-Earth? That you're all doomed.'

'Got it. We're doomed,' said Enrico. 'But we've always been doomed, right? Vita Brevis etc. Nothing lasts. Universe billions of years old. All that sort of thing.'

'Yes, but you're more doomed that you need to be,' the Grey Man said pointedly.

'So you keep saying,' Enrico replied. 'What was it? We've set our planetary ball rolling down the hillside of extinction? Molto poetico and thanks for the head's up and everything but - '

'No buts! Hundred years. Done'

'Look,' Enrico said patiently, 'I know you wanted me to shout it out: I've met an alien, doom-laden message; fanfare, cheerleaders and all the brouhaha we do so well here. I get it. Va bene. But it wouldn't work. Wouldn't work! People haven't thought enough about this stuff yet. We're new to the real atom-splitting-quantum-space-thing,' Enrico paused for effect, 'And we believe we are super special, right? Super speciale. Next step, The Moon. We can fix stuff.'

Enrico could sense a cynical razzing noise from the Grey Man.

'Look, I wanted to seed the idea first, OK?' he continued. 'So when I was having lunch with Konopinski, Teller and the boys over at Los Alamos - Fuller Lodge actually. Nice cotoletta by the way. Just chatting. And then, get this, I dropped the whole Galaxy v Beings Paradox into the conversation. You should have seen their faces! You ever seen an 'idea bomb'? Like an atomic bomb only bigger. Bam. Just like that. Now everyone is talking about the possibility of... You.'

Enrico started to give a smug little titter at the memory of his bomba di idee but the heavy silence in his head wiped it away, bringing him firmly back to the room.

The Grey Man seemed to have grown even bigger, his shadow longer. The reading lamps in Enrico's office seemed dimmer and the pale luminous eyes brighter.

The Grey Man rested his flipper appendages on what might be his hips and his 'voice' took on an indignant air.

'Possibility? Possibility?' the Grey Man stuttered, 'I'm a possibility? Look at me. Here I am. What's possible about this?'

Suddenly, he slapped Enrico Fermi across his face with a flipper.

Enrico's fingers explored his shocked cheek: a little sore; definitely wet. A whack with a wet fish was surely similar. ('That sort of thing hadn't happened to me since my childhood in Rome,' he would later recall.)

The voice in Enrico's head rang loudly. 'You think I've travelled all this way to be chatted about? Over a lunch table? You're not getting it. This is really, really important. You have to tell them, tell the People-of-Earth about the future. You're all doomed!'

Enrico's Italian blood, the righteous indignancy of ancestors whose grapes had been traduced, ran red in his veins. No alien had ever hit a Fermi without a challenge. Puffing up, Enrico wiped his fingers on neat trousers.

'So? We're doomed. Got it. Not that you've told me much about that. Let me say again. If I'd just told them, as you put it, they wouldn't have believed me! And what would I say anyway? Some big grey alien from outer space with goggly eyes has just popped up in my back yard to say our days are numbered etc etc?'

'Why not?' retorted the Grey Man in a tone that made Enrico's head throb. 'And what goggly eyes?'

 'You kidding me? Forget the eyes. Look, I know what I agreed in the garden shed but then I thought it through - on a blackboard even - and it works out as: Belief first. Message second.'

There wasn't a jaw for the extraterrestrial to drop, but Enrico was sure he heard it.

'I've been at the forefront of physics for ages. Got awards coming out of my culo. An international reputation! Wife. Family. Azalee per l'amor di Dio. I can't simply pop you up just like that. I'd be certified - ninety five percent chance of that, by my calculations. And you'd be dissected - one hundred percent on that! No way. Can't happen..'

It was a stand off.

Two watery, bespectacled eyes, more used to a blackboard than interpersonal communication, locked with two huge ephemeral pools of light, more used to gazing into the fathomless voids of outer space.

'Can't happen?' repeated the Grey Man.

Enrico winced. 'No.'

'You won't even try?'

'I'm a super-physicist, right? You got that. Those are the odds I calculated should we try it your way. Hopeless. You must let me try it mine.'

'And just how long will your way take?'

Could an extraterrestrial be sarcastic? Enrico wasn't sure.

'I can't say for certain,' he replied, 'So many factors. You're now a seed - I semi devono essere annaffiati - seeds must be watered, right? And seeds take their own time to grow. But I could calculate.'

 Enrico picked up a pencil and for several minutes scribbled on an office pad, muttering like a little steam train.

'Allowing for things not invented yet; processes not discovered; communication in it's infancy - stuff like that... Mmm. Hard one.'

The Grey Man's immeasurable and wonderful eyes didn't have any eyebrows but, if they had, at least one of them would have been raised. The voice was very quiet.

'Your best shot? As a super-physicist?'

'As a super-physicist, then, given the start we've made. And the interest I see, which is a lot. And undoing the rubbish I've read, which is also a lot...' Enrico added a couple more numbers in a column, 'Let's say...'

There was a pause in which Enrico stopped humming and sucked the end of his pencil.

'What?' said the Grey Man

'Merda.'

'What?' said the Grey Man.

'A hundred years,' Enrico said sheepishly. 'Another paradox, eh?'

The Grey Man's exasperated reply rattled the bones in Enrico's skull.

'You want me to hang around for a hundred years to tell you what I'm telling you now? Too late. But, anyway, that can't happen.'

'But you only got here last week. Surely you can stay a bit longer? Don't you like the garden shed?'

The Grey Man's voice smiled sadly. 'Not that, thanks though. I've other things to do; other planets to warn. It's complicated. I might be able to come back. Can't say.'

'Soon? In time to tell us more about il nostro destino - the Doom Thing?' asked Enrico. 'Assuming we don't know by then?'

He turned to gaze pensively out of the office window into the night. In the silence that followed, Enrico could see his own reflection in the glass alongside the twin orbs of the extraterrestrial's eyes.

'I mean, I might not be here by then,' he said softly, 'Depends what we've been up to. But everyone should be ready and interested in getting past the Doom Thing by then. Right?'

The silence went on too long and when Enrico Fermi turned back to the room, the Grey Man was gone.

No eyes.

Just the two table lamps in an otherwise empty room.

— the end —