The elderly farmer had a favourite idiom come to mind, as he looked out of his bedroom window.
Once bitten, twice shy, is what he thought. He’d been ridiculed consistently for almost five years since the last time these guys visited. Nobody believed him. That wasn’t going to happen this time! He switched his bedside light off to get a better look. Yes, it was them alright. It looked like the very same ship. He well remembered the last time. The humming sound when the saucer was landing, that had woken him back then. The lights twinkling around the edge of the saucer. The ugly little buggers coming down the ramp. It had been a hand-held ray gun they used to disable him. He couldn’t move; that’s how they got him into the saucer. The filthy creatures had poked and prodded him for hours. They must have tranquilised him or something, because he didn’t have a clear memory of what had happened. He had to admit that no real harm was done to him. But the cheek of it!
After they left last time, he quite naturally told people about the whole experience. He thought they’d be interested, but they just didn’t believe him. That’s when the jokes and leg-pulling started. He thought it would die off after a while, but it didn’t. He’d show them, this time!
Standing there in the dark, he began to figure out what was needed. He knew that he shouldn’t show himself; that’s how they got him last time. He had hardly gone out through the front door when the ray hit him. The other thing he was aware of was the large quantity of TNT he had stored in the shed. He wanted to clear his back field of rocks and half buried boulders, in order to expand the farm’s crop-growing area.
He was sure the craft came down on three legs, but he couldn’t remember how high off the ground it made the whole thing. He needed to know whether there’d be room under there to pack the explosives. Looking down, he couldn’t tell. He slowly made his way downstairs to get an idea of how much room he’d have. He was happy with what he saw.
Back upstairs, he dressed in the darkest clothes he could find. Then, leaving the farmhouse as silently as possible, through the back door, he made his way to the shed. It was fortunate that there was enough moonlight for him to see what he was doing without having to switch any lights on. Leaving the main door open, he could see the tarpaulin that covered the six crates he’d had delivered a few months back. Each one was stacked with blocks of the powerful explosive. It was going to take him a long time to pack the blocks under the ship, but he was determined to use the lot!
After just under three hours of carrying sacks of blocks around to the back of the ship, opposite the section that drops down to form a ramp, the job was finished. He had created a large, tightly packed pile beneath the belly of the saucer. He knew enough about handling the stuff to prepare a fuse that would give him around five minutes to leave the area. He was aware of the possibility that the farmhouse could be part of the damage it could cause. As he now lived alone, he was willing to take the risk and rebuild, if he had to.
As he put a match to the slow-burning fuse he had made, he considered how fortunate he was to get a second chance to prove to others that he had been telling the truth all along. Once it was fizzing, he began to run at a steady pace towards the town.
The explosion was tremendous. It lit up the sky with a gigantic orange plume. He sat on the trunk of a fallen tree, on the edge of his property, taking in the sight for a while before he heard the sirens.
As day broke, he looked around at the little that was left of the house. The place was crawling with police and fire vehicles. Ambulances came and left, there being no injuries. Special crime scene personnel, forensic teams and other specialists picked their way through debris during the day.
In the days that followed, the international press was full of stories about the event and how, among other things, pieces of unidentifiable metal and strange, unrecognisable body parts where being studied by medical teams and physicists around the world.
Now, in the town’s public house, telling his story over and over, with pints paid for by others, who want to hear, there is no ridicule.