Sam Wendelbourne looked quite unlike the way one usually pictures a magazine editor. He was wearing a tee-shirt, shorts, thongs, and a two-day stubble. In his late sixties, stringy, and grizzled by the Arizona sun, that was Sam. And the magazine office was nothing fancy, just a room above the three car garage. There was a computer with publishing software, the magazine went to the printer on discs, there was a scanner for the artwork, a combined telephone and fax machine, some filing cabinets, a desk, two chairs, and a gun cabinet. And that was it. Apart that is from the moose’s head that gazed benignly down at Sam as he worked. It had long since forgiven him. Sam’s magazine, ‘SIGHTINGS’, had a world-wide readership. A die-hard band of true believers. The latest issue was now in the hands of the printer and Sam was spending a busy Saturday morning cleaning up some of the mess. As always in the season, the afternoon would be held sacred to baseball on the television and a few cans of Coor’s. His wife, Gloria, who always helped him in the rush before publication, was catching up on some neglected housework. Sam’s was a niche market, U.F.Os. The late forties and the fifties had been the vintage years with an intense public interest fed by a flood of books, magazine articles, and films. George Adamski was claiming to have been taken by saucer to the far side of the moon and beyond. Children were being abducted to provide genetic material. Bob Renaud was in telepathic contact with aliens in earth orbit and was passing on their instructions to the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs Of America. Ashtar of Venus was allaying fears of an atomic holocaust with a reassuring ‘We come in peace to save you’ and George King had a rendezvous in space with Jesus Christ who recommended that everyone should read George’s book. Those were heady days.
But they were days long gone and the popular press had moved on to promote other interests. Thank God for die-hard true believers. They kept Sam’s little magazine alive and profitable. And it seemed that nothing could dent their faith, not established fact, and certainly not the laws of science. Sam was constantly amazed at their ability to hold mutually contradictory beliefs and their ability to to keep their belief walled off from reasoned logic. And the lack of solid evidence became sure proof that the U.S. government was hiding the evidence in fear of a general panic. Every year, Sam attended a number of U.F.O. conferences to show the flag for the magazine. They were a pot-pourri of comic-book ideas, all of them presented with a religious fervour and there was a religious element behind many of them. A lot of raving lunatics was Sam’s private assessment but they paid his bills. His magazine was on the more conservative side. All the regular columns and most of the ‘contributed’ articles he wrote himself under a variety of pen-names. The central purpose of the magazine was to keep its readers informed of U.F.O. sightings earth-wide and to do this it relied heavily on newspaper clippings. Fortunately, one of Sam’s two sons ran a clipping business which was a big help. But many were sent in by the readers themselves. Most were serious but there were a few facetious ones. One that came in the mail the previous day had told of Stephane who wished to return to his home planet to get his guitar. He was being treated by psychiatrist and probably rightly so. But, had he had two heads, they would have believed him. Sam, himself, could not doubt that we have visitors but he was irritated by the assumption that extraterrestrials must necessarily be outlandish, emaciated stick men or green scaly creatures with tentacles and eyes on stalks or, again, amorphous lumps of jelly that require mechanical assistance. Why did it never occur to anyone that they might very well be identical with humankind: look like Stephane perhaps? Surely that was logical. The human body was a very practical design and the human brain was capable of dealing with matters of extreme complexity. On earth, of the higher animals, humans endured the widest range of habitat. Why should this not be true among the planets? Years before, he had written a book which he had hoped would prompt serious consideration of this idea. In his story he told of Qworog who was forced to set his scout ship down in the Great Salt-Lake Desert due to a malfunction of the ship’s life-support systems. The sun was on the planet’s other face when Qworog landed but the ground was still warm when he set foot on it. A gentle breeze was beginning to stir and although the air was somewhat different in its proportions to that of his home planet, after the fustiness of the constantly regenerated atmosphere in his ship, it was very pleasant indeed. He was not unduly alarmed. The area was known to be uninhabited and his ship’s emergency beacon would bring help before the night was ended. But then his ship had lifted off by itself. There was no explaining it. The hatch was open and there were hatch interlocks to prevent that very thing. There were other interlocks to indicate his absence from the controls but the computers were obviously ignoring them. He was stranded, possibly forever, on an alien and savage world. His anguish was compounded when the sun rose and the story dwelt at length with his wanderings over the next few days. Finally, he was found dehydrated and apparently delirious near the edge of the Bonneville Salt Flats and taken to hospital. He was a puzzle to the authorities. He was unknown in the area and his fingerprints were not in the files of any law-enforcement agency. His clothing suggested motor sport but this clue led nowhere and his language was also no help. It was mostly because of not knowing what to do with him that the hospital placed him in a rehabilitation unit.
It was there, in the months that followed, that Qwogog came to accept his situation. He was stuck on this planet for good and must make the best of things. He began to pick up the rudiments of American English and lost some of his apprehension. He put others in mind of a child in that almost everything appeared to be quite new to him, to surprise him, and this tended to reinforce in his auditors the idea that although his memory might have been lost his reason had not. He was clearly lucid and quite intelligent. After some months with no apparent return of his memory, the doctors decided that he might as well be released and, with a new name and a ’new’ social security number, he was eased out into the community. It was a traumatic experience which might have been worse had he not been boarded with a middle-aged childless couple. They provided an emotional shelter while attempting to bring him out socially. They also tried some discreet match-making but with little success. It was possibly too soon. Qworog was, at first, appalled by the American custom of dating. On his home planet, one’s mate was chosen by the Eugenics Council after rigorous physical and psychological tests. As a result, genetic defects had almost been eliminated and one was definitely assured of a compatible mate. It was a good system. To choose one’s own mate, apparently at whim, seemed nothing less than criminally irresponsible. And it was so stressful. Later though, he began to concede that there might be some points in its favour. He remained living with the couple for four years and became in effect their son. Right up to their deaths, they were ‘Mom’ and ‘Pop’ and he changed the name he had been given to theirs which pleased them greatly. In time, it was generally assumed that he was their son but he never did tell them his story. A business opportunity lured him to a neighbouring state but they stayed very much in
touch. He had changed more than he realised in those four years. Imperceptibly, he had become almost as all-American as one could get and, in a country unique in its racial diversity, he no longer stood out. He made good in his new location, married a local girl, and raised a fairly typical American family.
That in short was the story. Actually, it ran to about 300 pages. Writing it was the easy part. Getting it published was another matter. No publisher would handle it, So Sam, having an axe to grind, had published it himself. Only to regret it. The publishers had seen the problems. Everyone agreed that the book itself was well written. The description of Qworog’s suffering in the desert was particularly graphic and indicated some desert experience, portrayal of life in the hospital and rehabilitation unit was entirely convincing, and the cultural shock suffered in this unique immigrant’s first encounters with the American way of life was pictured with a wry understanding. But! The book was neither one thing nor the other. It had nothing for the Sci Fi fans. Qworog’s life before the grounding, the technology and the life-style, was merely glossed over. Perhaps the author found difficulty in creating a believable technology and social structure. It was not the stuff that Sci Fi dreams are made of. For the general reader, an otherwise good story was made unbelievable by the unlikely premise that a visitor from another world could be integrated into American society with no-one being the wiser. Sales were poor. After nine years, Sam still had about eighty copies of the thousand printed. Every so often, he would run an advert in the magazine and shift a few. It was said that everybody had a book in them but Sam often wished that he had left his where it was. “O.K. Honey! It’s time to give those little green men a break.” It was Gloria with coffee. She also had a letter in her hand and Sam knew what was coming. It would be from one of their boys both of whom were married and living in California. There was a conspiracy, in which Gloria played a major part, to have him retire and move over that way. ‘He must face the fact that he was getting on–he owed it to himself to slow down–and what about his heart tremor?–the weather there was less extreme–and didn’t he moan about his back every winter?–and wouldn’t it be nice to see the grandchildren more often?’ and so on. It was a constant barrage and Gloria had a world-ranking collection of retirement- community brochures. Any minute now she’d start in. But Sam was determined not to retire. Not yet anyway and not to live in a geriatric concentration camp. Hell! He was as fit as others half his age. There were still a couple of stags waiting for him up in the hills. And he was quite happy where he was. Flagstaff was home. That was where his friends were and the Arizona life-style suited him just fine. And he still enjoyed the challenge of putting the magazine together. In a few years, maybe, it might start to become a grind. Then he’d sell out. But definitely not before. And who knows, by that time he might have cleared those last few copies of his autobiography.