First Contact

            Dreams. What are dreams? Is it the brain throwing away unwanted information? But how could he not want this: it was his world, his apartment where he used to live with Laura; his parents’ house, the Central HQ. That was his life; the slideshow rolling in front of his eyes was his life. Isolated images and sounds merged together into a strange movie.

            The pilot’s mind was working. He knew he was dreaming. He could feel his body immobilized by sleep, he could feel the cold night that surrounded him and the humid forest air.

            The images kept on going: a birthday, a car, a classroom. He slowly realized that what his mind is playing with, those images and sounds, aren’t any more his life. They just represented the past. It was a new beginning. The hunger for adventure seemed to grow inside him.

            “I can start building a hut of some sort when I’ll wake up. I’ll make some tools, I’ll explore the surroundings. I’ll be a XXI^st century Robinson Crusoe. This is great! I’ll make a bow to hunt…”. His pragmatic personality was looking for answers, for solutions. These answers, the ways to accomplish the tasks his mind generated came pretty easy. Suddenly his mind stopped as if someone has switched it off. He realized he has forgot something. What? What was it? The feeling that he has lost something grew inside him. What has he lost? The image of a tall woman appears in his tired mind. It is Laura, the girl he was supposed to marry; a tall figure with long dark hair, black eyes and fairly white skin. She had the grace of an aristocrat, maybe due to her long slim fingers and her tall. thin stature. The image collapsed onto itself while the mind of the man was tortured by the feeling of loss.

            HE lost HER. Pretty strange the human way of thinking. He was in an unknown universe, lost in time and space and he still considered that HE lost HER, not the other way around. But, well, this is the human soul that interfered with the human mind. The ways of the soul tend to give illogical mind reactions. She was the last thing that bonded him with the world that he left so suddenly. All the other things flew away like the leaves of the oak nearby in autumn. But her image remained there as the oak stood up to the worst storms.

            “Damn! The storm! That’s how I got here. What happened actually? So, I was going on with the mission, then the two enemy fighters appeared out of nowhere an threw their sidewinders at me. I outmaneuvered the rockets – my instructor should be proud of me, though he’ll never find out why – and headed towards the storm cloud I saw at the horizon. It was the only way to escape the two fighters. I was on a recon mission, with no weapons on board. Well, I actually had the machinegun, but I’m no ace to take out two fighters in a dogfight. Ok, so I entered the storm and all was ok… until the plane went out of control. How did this happened? It must have been that flash – was I abducted? Should have been a thunderbolt. That’s when it happened: the radar went crazy, all the other monitors were switching on and off or they were displaying bad info.”

            Those were the answers he was looking for. The thunderbolt teleported him through space and time. But how? And where was he?

            The planet’s two suns climbed the sky and the late-night fog that emerged from the forest was now on the retreat. The man woke up frozen and wet. The ashes of the fire he made in the evening were still warm, but wet because of the fog. Slowly, as the mind took better control of the body, both the atmosphere and the flesh started to warm. By now, the fog had retreated into the forest.

            The hunger led Clovis to open one of the plastic bags in the cockpit, where, in the evening, he stored the cooked meat. Well, no more toast and omlette-du-fromage for breakfast. Only a piece of half-burned meat.

            After his raw breakfast, the pilot started to arrange his clothes. He couldn’t explore the area in his pilot outfit. Not only it provided no camouflage as it was grey, but it also was too heavy to move around. It was good only for high-altitude flights. So, he remained only in his long green trousers and the green T-Shirt that had written “Air Force” on it. The pistol was set on the right and the army knife on the left. After that he arranged his hair in the cockpit’s window. An interesting face appeared: eyebrows resembling the sea-gall's wings, brown eyes shaped like the eyes of the ancient Egyptians and a hair that had the color of old furniture. His face was quite sharp, with a proeminent chin, and interesting facial bones. Two small ears and a faint roman nose completed the image.

 As a final touch to his outfit, the pilot attached his military insignia: the propeller flanked by two wings all resting upon  an oak leaf – the symbol of courage and honor, to the T-Shirt.

At the first approach the forest seemed lush and impenetrable, but a resourceful person always finds a way. The forest was like a cathedral: silent and huge. Tall trees reached for the blue sky above and the only noise was that of some heretic birds or simply the wind, that gentle warm wind that felt like the breath of God who must have been hiding inside the ancient trees.

“This is how Pangaea must have looked like.”

Indeed, the forest had something archaic within. Clovis felt his mind liberated by all the stress accumulated during the previous day. He wasn’t tired any longer. That green and brown and light-blue picture of the forest around him gave him strength, the strength to carry on.

Many trees looked like the ones back on Earth, but it couldn’t be Earth. Two suns and no moon came as a distinctive mark of this alien world.

As he went further into the labyrinth of trees Clovis took marks, tried to forge a mental map so he wouldn’t get lost. At one moment he noticed a clearing in front of him, and as he approached it voices could be heard. Those were human voices! Nevertheless he was ready for anything.

Clovis reached the clearing in prone position, also he had to crawl for several meters in order to keep his position secret. From under a bush he scouted the clearing: several people dressed in  grey uniform-like clothes and a huge transparent tank filled with orange gas, hovering at about 25 cm above the ground. Slowly the people left the area talking in their strange language.

Now all it remained was the hovering tank that had several devices attached. Clovis slowly emerges from the cover of the bush and carefully approaches the tank. Something inside was alive; he could see an alien approaching the glass-like wall. It looked like a mummy: a long thin body, fairly large head with huge black oval eyes; it had no nose, only two holes in the place where the nose should have been; a small mouth; the skin was almost grey, hard to tell because of all the orange gas inside. That being noticed him too and started to observe him. The beings’ muscles reminded Clovis of a telephone wire he used to trip over back home: Laura hated mobile phones, so she had a standard one installed at home. There she was again! Still in his mind.

“Bad timing Laura! I was making the first contact over here… Never mind, I could use some pieces of advice, so back me up, would you?”

The image in his mind didn’t answer. Clovis noticed that the alien changed his place inside the tank – he nearly forgot him.

- Hail! I am Clovis Carpath, lieutenant in the Air Force, registration id: 4.02.35.71. I request your identification.

- I am Merkab, Navigator, member of the Spacing Guild. You showed up earlier than expected. Merkab’s voice had something metallic within, maybe because he could be heard from the two silver chromed metal spheres attached to the tank.

- Earlier than expected? What do you mean? And how come you speak my language so well? Clovis’ questions kept running like a torrent, but Merkab waited patiently in his tank. At least he seemed patient.

“Stop those questions you fool! You are annoying me! Curse the fact I can’t kill you! I’ll need you in the future. I saw that!” Merkab remembered the angry words of his teacher after he had committed a serious error: “You have no patience, you are much too impulsive. That’s what will kill you, and, worse, that’s what’s going to kill innocent people too. I’ll have you expelled!” But the teacher hadn’t done that, and Merkab became a Navigator, maybe one of the errors in the infallible Guild system.

- So, you want answers, Clovis - Merkab started calmly – here you are: we are in the 72^nd year of life of the Great Paddishah Emperor Shaddam IV, ruler of the million planets. The Empire’s power is divided between the Emperor and the Landsraad, the council of the Great Houses that rule the planets in the Empire. We, the Spacing Guild provide transport in between the planets, we have TOTAL control of the transport as we are the monopole. By the way, human, this planet is called Kaitan, the residence of the Emperor. Satisfied?

            Clovis stood astonished as he heard this flow of information. Another world… another universe. He realized that Merkab who had an almost impertinent way of speaking  was human too, only his kind bread in space for thousands of generations and so, their body structure was mutated creating their thin, long body.

- What about me? Clovis whispered like a man with no hope.

            - I’ll take care of you, I’ll be your tutor.

            In the mean time the other people approached. They were all humans, with a strange insignia on their uniform – probably the insignia of the Spacing Guild.