“Show the general the first message we received.”
General Shott, flanked by serious-looking officers and aides took the computer sheet the nervous radio technician handed him.
The domed control room was crowded for the very first time. This SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Information, radio telescope station had never been visited before. Now half the military from the closest base was here. And with good reason. Contact had been established.
General Shott read the sheet. It said WE ENJOY RICKY AND LUCY. SEND MORE. “Ricky and Lucy?” the General questioned.
“I Love Lucy, sir,” Dr. Bowen, the astronomer in charge, replied. “The aliens are picking up our old television signals. From the ‘50s.” Dr. Bowen let that sink in. “That means these signals have been traveling at the speed the light for over 50 years and are just now reaching them.”
“So you’re saying these aliens are pretty far away. And they just happen to speak English?”
“No, sir. I believe that they studied the television shows and figured out our language. There were a lot of tv shows broadcast in the 1950s. And all of them came from America.” Dr. Bowen picked up a stack of transmission printouts.
“If these aliens are as far away as you think, what’s the emergency? Why call us instead of the NASA?” The General looked annoyed. His officers and aides assumed the same expression.
“Because that’s not the only transmission we’ve received. Next we got this one- DO THE HONEYMOONERS KNOW THE RICARDOS? Then this- MY LITTLE MARGIE CAUSES HER FATHER MANY PROBLEMS. They continued in this vein, lots of them.”
“Meaning?” the General asked, vaguely curious.
Dr. Bowen sat on the edge of a desk. “That the aliens believe they are viewing real life, not old sitcoms. That the Ricardos, the Kramdens and all the rest of the 1950s television families are the inhabitants of earth.”
General Shott crossed his arms. “Interesting, but I still don’t see a problem. The distance alone serves as our defense.”
“Actually, there are two problems.” Dr. Bowen flipped through more of the computer printouts. “The aliens are forming opinions of us through these old tv shows. They have decided that men on this planet are henpecked, buffoonish incompetents and are thus no threat to an invasion.” He let that sink in. “Women are either too busy at home or too scatterbrained to be any kind of a defensive force.”
“So the aliens think we are easy pickings for conquest? Based on characters in old television comedies who they think are real.”
“Yes. Even police shows and westerns don’t seem to pose a viable threat to what the aliens see as our vulnerability.”
“Understand.” The General was losing interest. “Still, the distance factor is in our favor. These aliens are hundreds, hell, thousands of light years away, in another galaxy probably.”
Dr. Bowen looked at the astronomers, engineers and radio technicians gathered around, facing the military contingent. “That’s the second problem. Hal?”
A gawky man with oversized glasses pushed up on his forehead stepped forward. “General,” he began nervously, “I checked with contacts at NASA, who forwarded me this data from the Explorer probe near the edge of our galaxy.” Hal passed the faxed photos to Shott. “See those dark spots in the upper right of the first photo, sir?” Hal asked.
The General nodded. “Space dust? Meteor swarm?”
Hal gulped and answered, “No sir. Spacecraft. Hundreds of them. Coming this way.”
Dr. Bowen broke in. “Apparently they have figured a way around the speed of light restriction. According to our calculations, given their nearness and the distance they’ve already covered, the spaceships will be here in two weeks.”
“With hostile intent,” the General murmured to no one in particular.
“Um, yes,” Hal spoke up. “We received transmissions addressed to Sgt. Joe Friday, whom the aliens think is in charge of earth defense. They are claiming earth as part of their empire and are sending their spaceship armada to take over.”
“Sgt. Friday? From Dragnet?”
“Yes. The aliens also mentioned that our spaceships, as seen in Flash Gordon and Tom Corbett’Space Cadet, are no match for theirs. Now, General,” Dr. Bowen continued, “you see why we called the army and not NASA.”
General Shott snapped to attention. “Major, patch me through to the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Is there a room I can use as a headquarters? And I’m going to need all of the communications received from the aliens.”
“Sure. You can use the mapping room.”
“Wait; look at this.” A young technician ran up, waving a new computer printout.
Dr. Bowen took it, read it quickly, smiled and passed it over to the General. “I think we just got saved.”
The printout read WE REALIZE INVASION IS IMPOSSIBLE. CAPED MAN TOO POWERFUL EVEN FOR US. RECALLING OUR SHIPS.
“What?” The General was stunned.
Dr. Bowen knew the answer. “They’re watching The Adventures of Superman. They think he’s defending our planet, like he did on the old television show.”
“God Bless George Reeves,” the General breathed in relief.
Dr. Bowen added, “Who would ever believe that television would one day save the world?”
Rod Drake enjoys watching Heroes, Veronica Mars and Smallville when he isn’t writing flash fiction. Check out Rod’s other stories published in Flashing in the Gutters, Fictional Musings, Flash Flooding, Flash Forward, MicroHorror, Six Sentences and AcmeShorts.
Very entertaining. Very amusing too.