The third planet of Maris swung splendidly in its orbit.
Earth’s sun is younger and brighter than Krypton’s was. Your cells have drunk in its radiation, strengthening your muscles, your skin, your senses. Earth’s gravity is weaker, yet its atmosphere is more nourishing. You’ve grown stronger here than I ever could have imagined. The only way to know how strong, is to keep testing your limits.
You see, I was contacted through my breakfast cereal, and then it was confirmed to me by the Cosmic Fish that I am definitely from outer space.
[Looking at his mound of mashed potatoes, which he has shaped into a mountain he has never seen] This means something.
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
I always liked fish. I never thought that one day they would like me too.
The man in the skiff watched the fish come with his farsense.
What an incredible smell you’ve discovered!
Do you smell fudge in places where there are no fudge?
There is no Xoanon!
There is no spoon.
Are we talking little space friends here?
From the moment the invaders arrived and breathed our air, ate and drank, they were doomed. They were undone, destroyed, after all man’s weapons and devices had failed, by the tiniest creatures that God, in His widsom, put upon this earth. By the toll of a billion deaths, man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet’s infinite organisms, and that right is housed against all challenges…for neither do men live nor die in vain.’
When the bomb goes off, there’ll be a thousand mutations! Andromeda will spread everywhere! They’ll never be rid of it!
There’s a pretty good chance I’m infected too.
I’ve never been sick, I’ve never been injured… what do I do now?
Oh, what’s really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything?
Will you think really hard when we’re eating your brain waves?
The nervous energy produced by the act of thinking, also as the reaction to glandular emotions, has long been known to be electrical or quasi-electrical in nature, and it is this output which nourishes our shadowy superiors. They can and do boost the harvest anytime they want, by stimulating rivalries, jealousies, hatreds and thus rousing emotions.
And that makes you look like a squid?