Little Green Men - Short Story by Oonah V Joslin

 

Little Green Men

by  Oonah V Joslin 

Mars is a nice place – with a bit of curiosity and a lot more perseverance it could become a hit with the tourist trade. But when we first landed, in March, I don’t know what I was expecting really, maybe not the full on maria-chi band and red dust cocktails in the foyer welcome but at least a grunt of recognition, an acknowledgement for the effort it took to travel three hundred million miles.

“Pat” says the commander, “c’mon. We have work to do.” They always use the word ‘we’ in the loose sense.

Now, I’m used to roughing it and I don’t mind taking orders but building your own camp from flat pack? You know what those instructions are like. I couldn’t make heads nor tails of them. We went through it all in mission training but I was too excited to listen, ‘a potential defect’ they said but I was selected for my innovative algorithms.

They don’t call it the red planet for nothing. Everything’s covered in red dirt and there’s rocks all over the place. It’s like a regular building site. But then that’s what we were there for – Building and Assessment of Resources for Colonization Kits. Since I was pretty poor at the building part, the commander decided he’d be better off sending me off on reconnaissance.

“Reconnaissance?” says I.

“Do you see that volcano over there?”

Well you couldn’t really miss it. “Affirmative,” I said. They like you to say words like affirmative. It makes them feel important.

“That’s your destination. Terrain report. Lots of photos. Take along a Roverbot.”

Patbots aren’t super-intelligent but let me tell you, dogbots take the biscuit. He just ran wild. He must have sniffed every rock between Tharsis camp and Pavonis! ‘Thank god there’s no trees on Mars,’ I thought.

Pavonis was way farther than it looked and after hours of seeing nothing but red dust, the sky looked green. The volcano itself was gigantic, with sides like the ski slope from hell. It was red of course. It was dusty. Nothing to see here. Just then, Rover ran off and disappeared down a hole in the ground. I’m shouting Rover, Rover! like a demented fool, when the ground gives way under me and I’m on a roller-coaster ride down one of them giant lava tubes. I don’t know how far I fell but the first thing I remember was a great deal of kerfuffle, then faces and a cacophony of voices.

“What is it do ye tink?”

“Sure I’ve nivver seen the like o’ it in all my born days.”

“What’s yer name if ye have one fella?”

“Pat,” says I. “My name’s Pat.”

“Seamus, it says its name’s Pat!” Someone poured some golden warming stuff down my speaker,

“and it speaks English, so it does.”

This information was not universally welcomed.

“So what are you doing here anyway, Pat?”

“Building and reconnaissance,” I explained.

This news was very unwelcome. 

The place was entirely green, a glen and underground forest, waterfalls, rainbows and, high overhead, a pink sky.

I choked a bit but managed to find my voice again. “What was that snake thing I slid down?”

“No snakes here m’lad. Yer namesake got rid of them all a long time ago.”

“Ummm right. Did you happen to see my dog Rover?”

“That eejit of a ting? Ran away so it did. But sure we found you and it’s lucky being St Patrick’s Day and all. You’ll stay for the party?”

I honestly couldn’t see any reason not to and it was a great ceilidh. There was singing, jigs and reels, a good deal of drinking and much merriment.

The next day I came to, covered in dust, close to Tharsis camp. The base had been all but wiped out by a huge dust storm and the mission had to be abandoned. I filed my report but nobody believed it. My memory files, though intact from my point of view, were inaccessible and I’d somehow lost my camera. They labelled me Defective and reassigned me to data analysis. So, unless you believe me, only I know the truth. I was on Mars, partying with little green men. Leprechauns. The Irish got there first. And Rover? For all I know he’s still lost in the lava tubes. He must be barking by now!

 

Oonah V Joslin was born in N. Ireland. Her first poetry was published in the school magazine. Teaching took over but she never stopped writing. For the past 15 years she has accumulated an online body of work which includes Flash Fiction from MicroHorror to humour, a Novella, 'Genie in a Jam' in Bewildering Stories and a her book 'Three Pounds of Cells' published by The Linnet's Wings Press. Oonah served as poetry editor at Every Day Poets and until recently, at The Linnet's Wings for a total of 12 years. You can see Oonah reading Almost on Brantwood Jetty, from her book, aboard The Steam Yacht Gondola in a National Trust video and follow her on Facebook.