Jonathon Henry looked at his calendar in his box-like office. It proved what he had been trying to avoid. Today was September 16, his son’s birthday. He wouldn’t have time to get his nine-year-old boy a present on his way home from work. He would have to get it tomorrow.

“Ms. Lawry, do you know of any toy stores close by?” he asked his secretary.

“Why, yes, I do. Do you need something picked up?”

“Today is my son’s birthday, and I haven’t gotten him a present yet. Would you mind running over and picking up something for me?”

“I’d love to. What would you like me to get?”

“How about an action figure, maybe an alien one? He seems to like that kind of thing.”

“I’ll see to it right away.”

“I can’t thank you enough, Ms. Lawry.”

Five hours later Jonathon was tucking his boy into bed.

“Thanks for the alien, Dad! It’s the coolest! I can’t wait to play with it tomorrow!”

“I’m glad you like it,” his dad answered. “Good night.”

Jonathon crawled into his own bed just a few minutes later. He fell asleep instantly, but his thoughts were filled with troubled dreams.

* * * * *

The President walked swiftly through a corridor that only he knew existed. He was some twenty stories beneath the White House. His body guards had been left behind on the basement level of the White House.

He now entered a room which seemed to be a dead end; however, the President searched closely for the crack in the steel wall which contained a retina scanner. He placed his left eye along the crack. His DNA was quickly examined by the computer behind the fourteen-inch wall. A small fissure on the opposite wall cracked open slightly, then swung outward silently into another corridor.

The only sound was the President’s shoes on the metal floor as he strode down the hallway. It led him to a room not quite as barren as the room before. This one contained a small console jutting out from the wall like a lonely mountain with no companions. A glistening steel chair was bolted to the floor in front of the console. A tiny lens and a circular screen were positioned on the wall directly above the console.

The President pressed a red button, and the doors swung shut to leave an unearthly silence. The small click made by the doors as they locked shut sounded like a scream being echoed through canyon walls. He then removed his tie and laid it on the floor beside him. A small tab could now be seen on his neck. His elongated fingers found the tab and pulled upward with one smooth motion. His mask came off. The kind, friendly, fatherly face of the President had been thrown on the floor to be replaced by one with dull yellow skin.

His head now glowed with a light of its own; he had no more need for the overhead lights. His mind formed the image of the light switch on the console flipping. Within a hundredth of a second, the switch actually did flip. The only light now in the room came from his glowing head and the faint light given off by the backlighting on the screen.

He pressed two more buttons on the console, and the screen came to life. After a few seconds of static fuzz, the computer locked onto its orbiting counterpart and began transmitting. The yellow-skinned alien removed a minuscule disk from the roof of his mouth. He slid it into the proper slot and activated the computer to transmit the data on the disk with a sharp barking noise: “Hurpikk.”

At the same time as this voice command was executed, the computer began receiving data from its mother computer 287.9 light years away from Earth. The computer decoded these messages from the form in which they had been placed to travel faster than light. All of this took less than two seconds, and the screen suddenly sparkled with thousands of numbers and letters, all in a strange alphabet.

The alien sitting at the console was very pleased with the information he had received from his fellow kind.

* * * * *

“All right Dave, if this is some kind of joke, it’s not funny.”

“Jim, I’m not kidding, I didn’t come within ten feet of that vault last night, and you know the papers were in there when I left.”

“You’re the only one who has access to the plans for the planetary defense satellite besides me.”

“Let’s check the tapes again, Jim. We must have missed something. Two-hundred sheets of paper can’t just get up and disappear out of a twenty-inch thick titanium vault. We both know that.”

“Okay, let’s check the tapes then.”

The two men walked over to the monitors and tapes which had recorded everything that had happened around the vault within the past forty-eight hours. They watched the tapes once again. Nothing seemed to be different.

Finally Dave caught a slight flicker near the door of the safe on the third time through. They rewound back to that point in the recordings and played them again at one-eighth speed. The same flicker happened again, only this time it was longer. They slowed the player down to one-one-hundred and twenty-eighth the normal speed and watched again.

This time the men figured out what had happened. They saw the locks on the vault quickly overridden, even at this speed, and the safe was opened just the tiniest amount. A slim stream of matter swished out. The two men were astonished.

“How did that happen?”

“I don’t know Jim, but I wish I did.”

* * * * *

Two sleek ships hurtled through space. They were now within one hundred light years of their destination: Earth.

The creatures aboard these spacecraft were filled with anxiety. Although their informant on Earth had assured them that the planet’s new satellite defense system would be disabled, they could not help but wonder what would happen if somehow the planet had another defense, a hidden one, about which not even their informant knew.

The aliens did not even know what their new food source would taste like. Many had liked the taste of their former food source, but an accident had caused that race of beings to be destroyed. The society was now looking for any source that could feed the billion hungry creatures who filled up the two ships.

As for the ships themselves, they had only been built to carry them to Earth and back. They were elliptical in shape, with three engines placed evenly around the rear of the spacecraft. Through the few portholes which the ships had, a faint yellow glow could be seen, the glowing of the skin of alien creatures. It did not take long for the ships to reach their destination. The satellite defense system had indeed been disabled by the aliens’ spy on Earth. They massed into the landing crafts. The crafts all launched simultaneously and began their descent to the society’s new food source.

* * * * *

The former President of the United States joined his own kind when they arrived. The creatures began eating with such desperate hunger, that only half of the world’s population remained after five hours of the onslaught.

The humans did not know what had happened to them. The United Nations was so dumbfounded by the desertion of one of their key leaders, the President of the United States, that they squabbled in confusion; they knew that it was hopeless to try to stop the invaders.

Suddenly, the humans huddled inside heard a slight slurping sound outside of the doors which led into the meeting room. An unknown source threw open the doors. Every human in the room screamed at the sight of the creatures. However, they could not resist the urge to walk closer to the strange aliens The aliens soon had the humans under mental control and were drawing the people into their bodies with a soft chirping sound of happiness.

Every building had been looked into and every human had either been eaten or penned up for breeding. Nothing else had been destroyed except the human population. Shuttle craft carried the creatures back into their orbiting spacecraft, and soon the aliens had reached their home world to continue their lives, now without hunger.

* * * * *

Jonathon awoke sweating and lying under his bed. He slid out from under the dusty mattress, put on some fresh clothes, and stepped outside. The street in front of his house had been grown over with weeds. His yard looked more like an African jungle than a front lawn. A herd of deer bounded through the ruins of once mammoth buildings, now reduced to rubble heaps. He couldn’t take it. It was all too much like his dream. He walked inside and looked at the kitchen table. An alien action figure with a dull yellow, but faintly glowing skin stared back up at him.