One Door From Heaven

ponytails with yellow ribbons.
        Mr. Neary gives this rather formidable lady an impatient look. "Well, these aliens didn't go huntin' for no Lincolnshire reds, now did they? They come here and took Clara-and my theory is they knew she was the smartest cow in the field. Anyway, as I was sayin', this vehicle like whirlin' liquid metal hovered over my Clara as she was standin' exactly where I'm standin' now."
        Most of those around the circle look up at the afternoon sky, some wary, some with a sense of wonder.
        A young woman as pale as Clara's low-butterfat milk says, "Was there any sound? Patterns of harmonic tones?"
        "If you mean did me and them play pipe organs at each other like in the movie, no ma'am. The abduction was done in dead silence. This red beam of light come out of the vehicle, like a spotlight, but it was a levitation beam of some type. Clara lifted off the ground in a column of red light, twelve feet in diameter."
        "That is a big levitation beam!" exclaims a long-haired young man in jeans and T-shirt that announces FRODO LIVES.
        "The good old girl let out just one startled bleat," says Mr. Neary, "and then she went up with no protest, turnin' slowly around, this way and that, end-over-end, like she weighed no more than a feather." He looks pointedly at the pipe-smoking, ponytailed woman. "Had she been a Lincolnshire red, she'd probably have kicked up a hell of a fuss and choked to death on her own cud."
        After blowing a smoke ring, the woman replies, "It's next thing to impossible for a ruminant animal to choke on its own cud."
        "Ordinarily, I'd agree," concedes Mr. Neary, "but when you're talkin' a fake-smart breed like Lincolnshire reds, I wouldn't be surprised by any dumbness they committed."
        Listening, Curtis is learning a great deal about cows, although he can't say to what purpose.
        "Why would they want a cow anyway?" asks the Frodo believer.
        "Milk," suggests the pale young woman. "Perhaps their planet has suffered a partial ecological breakdown entirely from natural causes, a collapse in some segments of the food chain."
        "No, no, they'd be technologically advanced enough to clone their native species," says a professorial man with a larger pipe than the one the woman smokes, "whatever's equivalent to a cow on their planet. They'd repopulate their herds that way. They would never introduce an off-planet species."
        "Maybe they're just hungry for a good cheeseburger," says a florid-faced man with a can of beer in one hand and a half-finished hot dog in the other.
        A few people laugh; however, the pale young woman, who is pretty in a tragic-dying heroine way, takes deep offense and glowers the smile right off the florid man's face, "If they can travel across the galaxy, they're an advanced intelligence, which means vegetarians."
        Summoning what socializing skills he possesses, Curtis says, "Or they might use the cow as a host for biologically engineered weapons. They could implant eight or ten embryos in the cow's body cavity, return her to the meadow, and while the embryos mature into viable specimens, no one would realize what was inside Clara. Then one day, the cow would experience an Ebola-virus type biological meltdown, and out of the disintegrating carcass would come eight or ten insectile-form soldiers, each as big as a German shepherd, which would be a large enough force to wipe out a town of one thousand people in less than twelve hours."
        Everyone stares at Curtis.
        He realizes at once that he has strayed from the spirit of the conversation or has violated a protocol of behavior among UFO buffs, but he doesn't grasp the nature of his offense. Struggling to recover from this faux pas, he says, "Well, okay, maybe they would be reptile form instead of insectile form, in which case they would need sixteen hours to wipe out a town of one thousand, because the reptile form is a less efficient killing machine than the insectile form."
        This refinement of his point fails to win any friends among those gathered in the circle. Their expressions still range between puzzlement and annoyance.
        In fact, the pale young woman turns on him with a glower as severe as the one with which she silenced the man holding the hot dog. "Advanced intelligences don't have our flaws. They don't destroy their ecologies. They don't wage war or eat the flesh of animals."