How to survive on Earth


It was a beautiful July night. The birds were singing and the wind was hissing.
High, among the clouds, a spaceship was soaring downwards.
  Inside the spaceship was one creature, Bluk. He had come from the planet
Alpha Pavonis III on an investigation mission to Earth.

Bluk saw that his ship's fuel was on the edge of ending. The ship's speed in
the atmosphere was getting higher and higher. He started to sweat as his ship's
steel hull was glowing white. At the last moment he saw a kind of fenced castle
down below with a smaller castle inside its fences. Bluk quickly ejected in
front of the smaller castle while his ship was smashed to smithereens.

When Bluk regained conciousness, he found himself standing in front of a giant
hairy beast. It was panting and making strange noises. Had the castle's owner
not imprisoned it with a thick chain, it could have eaten Bluk. "I guess they
don't like beings from Alpha Pavonis III on Earth", thought Bluk to himself.
  Bluk noticed the door was opening. Out of it stepped a creature, whose
anatomy was like his, only he had a curious reddish tone of skin and had only
four limbs. The being appeared to be wearing skins of other beings. Bluk had
seen those objects in his picture books.

The being yelled "Down!" to the beast who was harassing Bluk. This indication
of knowledge of coordination impressed the beast so much, that it sat down,
walked into its castle and calmed itself.
  It was only now that Bluk made out the strange black hieroglyphs on the door
of the castle. The first was just like a ribbon-creature from Athena, who rose
up, then curved downwards touching itself, and stopped down a little distance
from its starting place.
  The next one looked like an oval steel ring, with which he too had played
when he was a child. The next was an obvious moonplant, which in its great
desire for ultraviolet light had split into two and was reaching its sprouts
into two diagonal directions simultaneously. All three were difficult to
understand for Bluk.

The being said something so utterly incomprehensible, that Bluk couldn't
undrestand it. He switched on his intergalactic translator and managed to have
some idea about the being's speech. It said: "Oh my Goodness (it must be some
kind of Earthern god, thought Bluk), what have we here? Isn't it a cute little
Martian! What's your name? My name is Michael."
  Bluk's first cause of amazement was the being's uncertainty. He would have
recognised a being from another planet when he saw one, and would have no need
to ask confirmation from it. The name was also peculiar. According to his
galactic book of first names it meant: "one who has become the object of
admiration of a light blue bread container." Bluk was, however, completely
assured of the fact that the being remembered its name right. Maybe there
indeed were light blue bread containers on Earth.

Michael stepped behind a strange sight blockage in front of his door, and
seemed to jerk his way onwards to the door. Bluk thought there must be some
kind of malfunctioning turbolift there. When he came behind the sight blockage
he was surprised. There wasn't any turbolift, but three large stone slabs each
one and a half time Bluk's height, lying on top of each other.
  Maybe they were for keeping uninvited guests away. Bluk had grown used to
pass obstacles, so he agilely climbed to the door. It opened, letting him
inside.

It was curious inside. Giant furniture abounded in all places, along with
ancient tungsten lights, and plates with pictures painted with organic pigments
both sensible and otherwise hung from the walls.
  Bluk's greatest cause of amazement was a box standing in a room, showing a
picture of a man on its screen. The man moved and talked about completely
incomprehensible things, like how hunger causes trouble in a place called
Africa and how things were broken in an unified government, mostly because of
black things. What black things, was left unclear.

The box seemed to be some kind of galactic transmitter. The man on the screen
seemed to tell Michael things, but due to some mysterious reason he didn't do
anything to reply to the man, but stared at him as though he was worshipping
the box as a god.
  "This is called a television", said Michael to Bluk. To show some further
samples he fingered a little device, which seemed to have effect on the
function of the television. Many other men tried to make contact with Michael,
only to remain completely void of replies.
  However, when a man dressed in war-paint, who seemed to have no sense in his
way of dressing, greeted "all children" with exaggerated excitement, Michael
greeted him. For a reason unknown to Bluk the man didn't notice Michael.

In the evening Michael and Bluk went to sleep. Michael clambered under a giant
thick cloth. Apparently the skins he wore on him didn't warm him enough. Why
didn't he wear that cloth all the time, was left unclear for Bluk. To his
amazement, just before falling asleep, Bluk heard Michael clearly groaning
angrily to something. Maybe he can't distinguish between dream and reality,
thought Bluk.

In the morning a funnily-dressed man arrived holding to pieces of paper with
some kind of writing on them. They also had two little pictures like the ones
hanging in Michael's room. "Michael Williams, I have a letter for you!"
"Williams?" wondered Bluk. "Are there two people living here?"
  Michael snapped the piece of paper from the man and tore it open. Inside was
another piece of paper. Michael read the writing on it, said something about
cursed females, the weather, some long journey, and why the female in question
couldn't come to him instead.

In a couple of minutes Michael took Bluk with him and started driving in a
strange Earthern vehicle towards the female in question. Bluk was amazed by the
strange tricoloured lights, which only had one lamp lit at a time. Everybody
was interested in the red light, since they stopped in front of it, staring at
it with great concern. They didn't care anything about the green light,
however, but drove straight past it.
  After arriving at their destination Michael and Bluk stepped out of their
vehicle and the female human greeted them. With her were two humanlings, who
were very excited about Bluk and asked him all sorts of things. The discussion
made Bluk homesick, so one of the children said he had found a spaceship in a
package of food. "A spaceship in a package of food?" thought Bluk. "Don't these
humans watch what they are eating?"
  The child brought the spaceship to Bluk. It was completely different from his
ship, clearly rounder and with a strangely big glass dome. It had some weird
blinking lights, for which he couldn't find any use.

After accomodating himself with his new ship Bluk bid the humans farewell and
started the engines of his ship. It was strangely weak, apparently its battery
wasn't poweful enough. In any case it rose to the air and Bluk set course for
Alpha Pavonis III.
  At home he stepped out of his ship into a turbolift, rode on it home where he
sat in his armchair and told his uncle Blak and sister Belk about how one can
survive on Earth.