The Not-So-Bad Omen

The small village of Krutyń is normally pretty quiet. I guess I should say always quiet, so when there was a streak of light and a loud crash as evening fell last night, it caused quite a commotion amongst the townsfolks.

I was working behind the bar when it happened. The mug I was filling from the cask on the bar overflowed as I watched all my patrons rush to the front door to see what was happening. Wiping my hands on a towel, I followed them outside and onto the cobblestone street. The clamor of people’s voices was mixed with excitement, wonder, and fear.

“The streak was so bright and colorful, like a rainbow in the night sky,” one person said.

Tomasz, who lived next door to the tavern, said, “I didn’t know what was happening, the dogs started whimpering, and then I heard a crash.” He was pointing to the north end of town where the forest was still glowing.

“Tis a bad omen,” Old Jan said, “Mark my words, this a sign of bad times ahead.”

At this, there were many murmurs among the crowd. People were nodding their heads and started to move back indoors. Once back inside the tavern, the people continued to whisper about what the bad omen would bring.

“The crops will fail, locusts will come,” one said,

“There will be a plague, and many will die,” another said,

“The women will go barren and there will be no more children,” I heard from further back in the tavern.

I knew this was getting out of control and needed to do something to turn the sour atmosphere back around into something more joyous, so I summoned the crowd and announced that today was my birthday, and the next round was on me.

Once everyone had a fresh pint in their hand, I raised my mug and said, “Na Zdrowie.”

The crowd yelled back, “Sto lat,” then broke into song:

Sto lat, sto lat, niech zyje, zyje nam! …

Much later, the crowd started thinning out and my old friend Jakub came up to the bar and said, “I thought your birthday was in February?”

I grinned, “It is, but look what happened. People forgot about the omen and stayed around all night buying more food and drink and had a nice evening. I’d say that was a smart business move.”

Jakub was the last to leave, and I was finishing cleaning up behind the bar when I saw the front door open and then close. That’s strange, I thought, maybe just the wind. I suddenly had a peaceful feeling overtake me. I felt very calm and relaxed, which is why when the little alien creature climbed up on the barstool, I didn’t panic.

“Good evening kind sir,” he said. Although I don’t think the words came from his mouth, but rather just in my head. His mouth moved as he spoke, but the movement was out of sync with what I was hearing.

“Ah, good evening to you,” I replied. How I remained calm with a three-foot-tall purple-skinned four-armed creature sitting at my bar talking in my head, I will never know, yet it seemed completely normal at the time. “What can I do for you?”

“I am hoping to hire someone to help me with a task, but first how about some food and drink?” He said with an eager expression on his face.

“I was just about to close up for the night, but I think I can accommodate you,” I said as I scraped the last of the stew from the pot into a small wooden bowl. “Cider or ale?” I asked as I set the bowl and hunk of bread down in front of him.

“Surprise me,” he said.

I pulled a pint of cider from the wooden keg on the counter, then realized his hands were much to small to handle a mug this big. I found a smaller cup and filled it with cider for him and kept the pint for myself.

“What do you call this?” he asked pointing his spoon at his bowl.

“Bigos, or hunter’s stew,”

“Delicious, this is the first real meal I’ve eaten since I left my home planet 157 years ago. I’ve been living on protein capsules the entire time.” He took a sip of the cider and his eyes got wide and he smiled. “Oh, this is good.”

I stood there drinking my cider while he finished his stew and then proceeded to dab all the remaining bits with his bread. He finished and licked his three fingers, which is how many he had on each of his four hands. He raised his little cup and said “Cheers.”

I replied, “Na Zdrowie,” while raising my mug and took a swig.

“So, I was saying that I’m looking for someone to help me with something.” He said as I took his empty bowl and cleaned it in the wash bucket. I dried the bowl and spoon and noticed he was looking right at me.

“Oh, is it something I can help with perhaps?”

“I hope so,” he said. “I seemed to have crashed my spacecraft which has damaged a lot of my equipment on board. The landing also cracked the shield on my helmet, and I’ve determined that in this atmosphere I can only survive for about 24 hours.”

“Oh gosh, what can I do?”

“I still have a working suspended animation chamber that will allow me to survive until the help that I summoned arrives. Due to damage of the onboard control system, I cannot initiate the start sequence while inside. I need you to push the start button basically.” He said all of this without panic in his voice, but very matter-of-factly. “Also, I would like you to bury my spacecraft, so I’m not disturbed until my rescue team arrives.”

“Bury it? In the ground?”

“Yeah, it already caused a good size crater, so it’ll just be a matter of covering it up with the dirt spoils.”

“Okay, I can help you out,” I said after I thought about it for a moment.

“Great, meet me out there in the forest at daybreak and we’ll get started,” he said and slid of the barstool. “Oh, and if you could bring me some more earth food that would be great. I won’t have another meal for at least 157 years.”

After he walked out the front door, my calmness left me and I started wondering what the hell had just happened. Did I hallucinate that conversation, or did I actually just agree to help a space alien with his spacecraft? I closed the tavern and walked home, my head was still spinning.

#

The next morning, I awoke early and made potato pancakes with kielbasa to take to my new friend from another planet. I still wasn’t sure if he was real or not, but I took the food and a shovel from the garden and headed out to the forest north of town. It was easy to find the crashed craft by following the broken off trees and eventually a furrow of earth that ended in a small silver sphere with a hatch on top that was open

“Hello the craft,” I shouted.

My little friend popped his head up from the hatch and waved two of his hands at me. I waved back and made my way through the trench to his shiny sphere. It was only about four feet in diameter and showed no signs of exterior damage from the landing.

“I brought you some breakfast,” I said holding up the little metal lunch pail I brought.

“Great, I am famished,” he said and hopped down and sat on the edge of the furrow. “Thank you, this smells delicious.”

While he ate, I turned to assess the work that needed to be done. All of this was so very strange, yet it seemed so perfectly natural when I was near the little guy. I felt like we’d been friends for years.

“So, I was thinking, if you just dig a pit there behind the spacecraft, then we can roll it backward into the hole,” he was pointing in the furrow a few yards behind the sphere. “I did the calculations and if you center the hole there where I put that stake, the hatch will be face up when it falls in.”

I grabbed the shovel and started digging. The furrow was already as deep as the craft, but I knew it should be deeper with plenty of fill on top so no one would find it. I kept eyeing the sphere and then eyeing my hole until it was about dished out to a half-sphere. After finishing the hole, I worked on smoothing out the sides and bottom of the trench so the craft would roll nicely.

When I finished, I looked at my friend who sat on the edge dangling his legs with two hands on his knees and then started clapping with the other two. “Well done friend,” he said joyfully then proceeded to walk to the front of the spacecraft.

I followed him and then he started pushing and the sphere rolled right into the hole. I looked at him astonished. “Either you are exceptionally strong or that thing weighs almost nothing.”

“A little of both,” he said and flexed all four of his biceps and grinned ear to ear. “It’s made of a cobalt-beryllium alloy composite with a foam-core.”

I nodded like I knew what he was talking about but had no clue what any of that meant. “So how does that thing actually fly through space?” I asked. “I mean, what propels it?”

“On my home planet, we have a series of induction propulsion tubes which shoots it into space, then with specifically timed gravitational assists from different moons and planets in my solar system it accelerates to nearly the speed of light in just a couple of years, your time.”

Again I nodded but didn’t follow any of that. “And it took you 157 years, my time, for you to reach Earth? Your planet must be far away.”

“My home planet is approximately 146 light years from here,” he pointed to the northern sky. “You can see my home star in the eye of the constellation your people call Taurus the Bull.”

“Huh, that all seems incredibly unbelievable but yet here you are talking to me.” I said as I shook my head.

He climbed back into the sphere and waved me over. He went through some of the features of how he navigates, can make slight adjustments to the trajectory, and then showed me the suspension chamber and how it works.

“Once I’m inside, the liner shrinks down around my body and fills with a fluid the halts my metabolic processes and holds me in a suspended animation until the process is reversed.” He pointed to a touch pad and said, “Place three of your fingers here and I’ll program it so you can initiate the sequence.”

I did as he asked and then he went through a series of prompts until a little light went from red to green. “There, we should be all set.”

“You’re saying you are basically going to slept here in this metal ball that I am going to cover with dirt and sometime far in the future another one of your kind will come and wake you up?” I asked as some clarity of the situation was taking hold in my head. I felt like his ability to ease my anxiety was fading.

“Yep, that’s about it. I already sent the distress signal so if all goes well the extraction team will be here in 157 years.”

He climbed into the small chamber and made a few preparations inside. “Be sure to bury me well. Oh, and I almost forgot your payment,” he handed me three small shiny metallic wafers.

I looked at them. They featured a crowned bust of one of his people on one side. And a circle of branches and leaves on the other. I looked back at him.

“Three hundred Krevnar, quite a sum. I don’t know the exchange rate here on Earth but if you ever get out to my home planet, you could have one hell of party for that.”

I just looked at them again and put them in my pocket.

“Thank you for all you did. I am ready now. All you have to do is place your fingers on the pad and the system will start.” He waved with just one hand and slid the chamber door closed.

I reached in, touched the pad which initiated what appeared to be a countdown sequence although I couldn’t understand the language, and closed the hatch.

It took the rest of the day to bury the spacecraft and fill in the trench. I figured I’d erase as much evidence as possible to keep village busybodies from snooping around out here and hopefully negate anymore talk of bad omens. I scattered some branches and brush and made the whole area look undisturbed then walked back to the tavern.

There were a couple of patrons waiting by the front door of my tavern as I approached so I veered off and went around to the back door, so they didn’t see me coming from the crash site with a shovel in my hands. I let them in and started filling mugs of ale and cider. They were murmuring about the bad omen again.

“I walked out to the forest this morning and there was no sign of anything out there,” I said nonchalantly. “A couple of trees snapped off from a bolt of lightning is what I think happened.”

The bad omen talk fizzled out as a few more patrons came in with news of the copper peddler coming to town to sell his wares. I listened for a while but then my thoughts turned over the events of the last two days. I did some quick math then took out a piece of parchment and wrote this:

In the year 2026, a strange event may occur. A visitor from the heavens will come to Earth. Do not be alarmed. They are friendly and mean you no harm. Show them these coins. Tell them someone long ago helped one of their own. Welcome them.

- Stanislaus Iwanowska

I placed the note and coins in an envelope and labeled it ‘Do Not Open Until the Year 2026’. Then I placed it in a glass jar down in the cellar near the wine. Who knows if the next owner of this tavern and the ones following will abide be the instructions, which is why I didn’t give any details about the buried spacecraft.

When I came upstairs, I had a few more patrons that wanted dinner with their drinks, so I got started on a big batch of Bigos and chatted with some of the regulars. Jakub had come in and he asked me how my day was and if I had seen anything interesting in the forest.

“Nothing but the usual dirt, trees, and brush,” I said.

That year’s harvest was one of the best anyone could remember, and the following winter was milder than most with a plentiful wild game in the area. Everyone was able to fill their larder, and nobody mentioned the bad omen again.