February 2012 Challenge Entry #2

From John Orman (Hillsboro)

Morsel Code

Ignoring that beautiful day’s glorious sunshine, and then the twilight’s soothing sunset, mad scientist Dr. Serling Rodman was working in the lab late one night, when his eyes beheld an eerie cryptographic breakthrough. His heart pounded as he read the fragmentary decryption of the alien transmissions being sent between the spaceships of the approaching armada. Serling noted many awkward usages of clichéd phrases.

"Please bring home the bacon, Miss Piggy" could have been just a loving suggestion between two hungry Klingons. That directive to "bite the hand that feeds you" might have been just a general rule of etiquette among the Saucer Men from Tau Ceti IV. "We need food for thought" could have been just the brainwave of a bodiless floating head from Omicron II. But given the weird juxtaposition of the more frightening phrases "eat their hearts out," "give us a hand," and "present arms," slowly it dawned on Serling that he was no longer dealing with just a bunch of jumbled out-of-this-world clichés.

But there was no dawn outside the lab—more like an eclipse, as the full moon and all the stars in the sky vanished from view in the lab’s bulletproof skylights, blotted out by the metallic intruder above. The quiet of the cool night air was shattered by the sizzling of a brewing storm, but it was no ordinary storm of lightning. Particle beams of alien origin sliced through the lab’s titanium door like butter.

The lab’s lone antique machine, a long-broken grandfather clock, oddly tolled midnight—and Serling realized that for whom the bell tolled was the human race. As one of the first targets, Serling was frozen solid by the blasts from an InstaFreeze raygun, then eaten out of lab and home as a bland corpsicle. Too late, in his last crystallized and masticated thought, Dr. Rodman realized that all those trite translated phrases added up to the inescapable conclusion that we were all toast, since the transmission correlated into a cookbook of the definitely non-vegetarian kind.

Far away from the isolated mountain lab, in the sleepy city below, the muffled sounds of screams and piercing raygun blasts seemed to indicate an approaching, unpredicted change in the weather. The noise was odd and distant, but still so much like the ominous sound of thunder.

©2012 by John L. Orman