Free Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales by Garry Kilworth Page A

Operations Policy and now acting as my ADC, ‘that these are aliens. What we have here, general, is your actual alien invasion of Earth. Naturally they chose to conquer the United States first, because we are the most powerful nation on the planet.’
    ‘Why Nebraska, colonel?’ I asked. I am General Oliver JJ Klipperman, by the way, and I was at the time on a secret underground army base in South Dakota. ‘Nebraska isn’t exactly the most powerful state in the union. Why not New York or Washington?’
    Cartwright smiled grimly. ‘Look at the map, General. Nebraska is slap bang in the middle of this great country of ours. It has one of the smallest populations. You get more people on Fifth Avenue on Christmas Eve than live in Nebraska. You simply have to wipe out a small population and you control this country’s central state. Expand from there, outwards in all directions, and you have America. Once you have America, you have the world. It’s as easy as that.’
    I nodded. It all made sense. Nebraska was the key to the control of the US of A. The aliens had seen that straight away. ‘What do we know about these creatures?’ I asked next. ‘The President will expect me to sort out this unholy mess and I want to know who I’m killing when I go in with my boys.’
    The colonel gave me another tight smile. ‘These creatures, as such ?— nothing, general. Zilch. But we have a trump card. We’ve been preparing for such an invasion for many, many years and our general information is voluminous.’
    ‘It is?’ I said. ‘How come?’
    ‘Hollywood,’ said the colonel, emphatically. ‘We’ve been making films of alien invasions since the movie camera was first invented. We’ve covered every contingency, every type of attack, from your sneaky Fifth Column stuff such as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers to outright blatant frontal war, such as Independence Day . We know what to do, general, because we’ve done it so many times before, on the silver screen. We know every move the shifty shape-changing bastards can make, because we’ve done them in many films, sometimes twice—sometimes so many times it’s become a cliché. Alien , War of the Worlds , The Day the Earth Stood Still , Close Encounters of the Third Kind , you name it, we’ve covered it. On film.’
    ‘Weren’t they friendly aliens in Close Encounters ?’
    ‘No such thing, general. What about those poor guys, those pilots they beamed up from the Bermuda Triangle in WWII? Eh? They kept them in limbo until their families were all dead and gone , then let ‘em come back. Is that a friendly thing to do?’
    ‘I guess not. So, colonel, we’ve had all these exercises, albeit on celluloid, but what have we learned? What do we do with them? What do you suggest is our approach?’
    ‘Blast them to hell, general, begging your pardon. If there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that if you give ’em an inch, they’ll take a planet. They’ve got Nebraska. That’s almost an inch. We need to smash them before they go any further. Blow them to smithereens before they take Kansas, Iowa or Wyoming, or God forbid, Dakota.’
    I always err on the side of caution, that’s why I’m still a one-star general I guess.
    ‘But what do we actually know about these creatures? I mean, why come down here looking like Charlie Chaplin?’
    The colonel’s eyes brightened and he looked eager.
    ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I have a theory about that, sir. You see , we send crap out into space all the time. I don’t mean your hardware , I mean broadcasts . They must have picked up some of our television signals. What if their reception had been so poor that the only thing they picked up was an old Charlie Chaplin movie? Eh? What if it was one of those movies in which he appears on his own—just a clip—and, and here ’s the crunch, they, they thought we all looked like that?’
    The colonel stepped back and nodded.
    ‘You mean,’ I said, ‘they think the Charlie