First Contact by Evan Mandery

employed,somewhat reasonably, as a guest bedroom. The use seemed a bit less reasonable when one considered the Fendle-Frinkles had not had a guest in eleven years, but the Professor was glad for the extra bed on the nights when his wife evicted him from the master bedroom.
    The third bedroom was another matter entirely. The Fendle-Frinkles had no children so the room could easily have been used as an office. It was a converted attic, a minuscule room with a short ceiling on the top floor of the house. But though it was small, it had a window that looked out over a ledge where birds liked to perch and sun themselves, and a view of the single tree in their tiny backyard. The Professor, who liked birds very much, envisioned hanging a small feeder from the window. On a sunny day it would be a splendid place to have a sit and a look and a think. It would have made a fine office indeed.
    In fact it was used as a yoga and oatmeal room. When the Professor had first lobbied to use the room as an office, many years ago, his wife insisted she required the room as a place to practice her yoga. She made a great show of converting the attic into a yoga studio, furnishing it with mats and candles and a proper drapery over the window, but to the Professor’s knowledge had never actually performed yoga in the room.
    After three years or so of disuse for the Tantric arts, the Professor made the argument, in something of a lawyerly fashion, that the room had been abandoned for its stated purpose and he should be allowed to claim it as an office. His wife protested she had every intention of getting back to yoga and if he performed physics in the room, the feng shui of the space would be permanently spoiled.
    The pretense she would return to the practice of yoga became difficult to maintain as several more years passed without exercise or contortion. So Mrs. Fendle-Frinkle thereafter contended she required the room for the proper storage of the whole-grain, macrobiotic oatmeal that had become the staple of her diet. She contended that a constant, particular level of humidity was required in order to maintain what she termed the “integrity” of the oatmeal. The Professor, one of the three or four smartest men in the universe, had never heard the concept of integrity applied to hot cereal. When he inquired as to its meaning, he was told he would not understand. But he capitulated, of course, and his wife went through an elaborate charade of installing a humidifier and a dehumidifier and a sensitivemonitor to maintain the proper moisture level at all times. So it was that the space the Professor coveted for his office became occupied by yoga mats, humidifiers, and macrobiotic oatmeal.
    By the by, the Professor tried the oatmeal once and thought it tasted like sawdust. One time, in a puny act of revolt, the kind to which impotent husbands are reduced, the Professor secretly stored one of his wife’s canisters of oatmeal in their dank basement and later substituted it for the moisture-regulated attic-oatmeal without her knowledge. She ate it and made no mention of tasting any difference. The Professor tried it too and thought it tasted, just as before, like sawdust.
     
    I SHOULD PAUSE FOR a moment to say I have taken the liberty here of translating certain terms for the convenience of the reader since the Fendle-Frinkles do not live on Earth. They live on the planet Rigel-Rigel, the very same planet that has just contacted Earth and is home to Maude and Ned Anat-Denarian. To be more specific, the Fendle-Frinkles live in the town of Chewelery in a small subdivision, which used to be okay until the Rashukabia got in. The Rashukabia are an ethnic subgroup that loosely translates as “Dutch.” It should be said the Rashukabia neither look, sound, nor act Dutch. It is simply the best translation available. The planet name Rigel-Rigel has been translated for these pages in a similarly imperfect fashion. The actual name contains six letters and three