Fiddler's Green

"I always keep that theory around for circumstances like this. It works more often than you would like to admit."

"What about the Little Green Men?"

"Sometimes humans are a little unobservant, but to co-exist with a species for six-thousand years, and not notice them, especially a species powerful enough to bring down this ship, seems unlikely."

"Let me show you something, Boss," I told him. I tapped the computer and brought up three of the images captured from the planet’s surface. The colonists when the landing party first encountered them, the Wilson homestead, and the Aves Quentin lying beached on the shoreline.

"What of it?"

"Look close," I said. I had the computer enhance a spot in the trees behind the colonists who had met the landing party. There was a shadowy circle that looked like a face, peaking out from behind the trunks of one of the trees, wearing an expression of devilish amusement.

"And here..." I tapped a spot at the front of Quentin’s fuselage. From the canopy of the command module, one could almost make it out two little faces peering from the inside. I showed him another face in the shadows behind the Wilson house.

The commander squinted for a long time. "Za... there does appear to be something here, but that could just be a trick of light and shadow. You know, there is a psychological tendency in humans toward anthropomorphism, a bias that makes us see a face in the random arrangement of objects and features."

"Boss, look at the moon."

The image of the Wilson’s house had a clear view of the moon in the sky overhead. Here, the image of a face was even more pronounced, eyes arched and squinted, and a mouth in a leering rictus of a grin. I pointed to the moon, and then to the faces lurking in the other scenes.

The faces were exactly the same.

--- Avember 23, 10154 AS