Jack Hood was a farmer in Kent, England, only a few miles from the white cliffs of Dover. It was after midnight when his wife awakened him. “There’s something out there, Jack. Listen to the cows.”

Hood blinked himself awake and listened hard. The cattle were bawling loudly. Hood glanced at the bedside clock: it was at least an hour before dawn.

"I'd better go check," he said, and rolled out of bed.

He had a gnarled shillelagh standing in the corner, and after he dressed and stomped into his Wellingtons, he reached for it, just in case. He made his way to the front door of the house without turning on any lights and went out.

It had rained last evening, so the earth was pungent and sweet. During the night the wind had moved out the clouds and now the sky was clear, ablaze with stars, with the moon low in the west. Standing on the porch in the moonlight, Jack Hood remembered the flashlight in the kitchen, and went back for it.

The moon gave enough light that he didn’t need the flashlight to find his way to the barn. Last night Hood and his wife had watched all the latest news from capitals around the world, and heard the demands of the man in the moon, so as he walked he flashed Pierre the finger.

The cattle stopped bawling when they sensed his presence, yet still they milled about, looking toward the pond. Actually the pond was a small lake, almost two acres in size.

Hood let himself through the gate and walked toward the water. He flipped on the flashlight, swept it around the shore. Nothing out of the ordinary here. A few bushes, lots of mud churned up by cattle, and here and there a small tree.

“Out here,” a voice called.

Elmer turned the flashlight toward the center of the pond… and saw a man standing there. In the pond. In only to his ankles. What the--?

“Hope you don’t mind treating us to a fill-up,” the man called. He had an American accent, which Jack Hood recognized from the movies. “We ran out of water and missed North America. We were skipping and hopping and hoping, and this is where we wound up.”

Hood went down right to the water’s edge. Now he could see that there was a shape, something dark, mounding up out of the water. Aha, the man was standing on something!

“Name’s Rip. Bet we woke you up, huh?”

Jack Hood didn’t know what to say. He simply stood and stared.

Now the man bent over, rapped on the thing he was standing on. It rose slowly and gently out of the water. The thing was a saucer! A bloody flying saucer!

It was big! Ohmigosh, it was big, maybe sixty or seventy feet in diameter. As it came completely out of the water, the water level in the pond dropped and small waves lapped nervously at the shore. The saucer moved gently over the pasture with the man still standing on its back, its legs snapped down, and it settled onto the grass.

The man jumped down and strolled over. He was in his early twenties, clean cut and lean. He reached for the flashlight and turned it away from his face, then grasped Hood’s hand.

“Rip Cantrell. Glad to meet you.”

“Righto,” Jack managed.

“Have a good night,” Rip said, and turned back to the saucer. He went under it and disappeared into the belly.

Seconds later it lifted and the gear retracted.

It moved out over the pond, accelerating, then a small flame burst from a series of rocket nozzles on the trailing edge.

When the saucer was perhaps two miles away, traveling at several hundred knots, the exhaust became an intense light, painful to look at, and all the noise on God’s green earth washed over Jack Hood. The fireball rose almost straight up and kept going and going, shrinking to a pinpoint as it drifted toward the east. Finally it disappeared among the stars.

Copyright ©2004 by Stephen Coonts