by R J Dent

As I drove past the crashed spaceship, I started thinking about how we (as a race) very soon accept things as they have become – and even start to take certain strange things for granted.

          Eleven years ago it had crashed there. Not one single person had actually seen it crash, but everyone for miles around had heard it. It had screamed out of the sky at three in the morning, on the one and only morning in the history of the world when absolutely everyone was asleep. There had been no solitary night prowlers, no 24-hour café or shop workers, no out-with-dog walkers, no tea-breaking shift workers, no shop-doorway sleeping tramps, no passing through long-distance lorry drivers, no anybody at all to witness its Icarus-like descent from the skies, or its mighty crash into and onto the decrepit Odeon cinema. The cinema had been showing the new print of The Day the Earth Stood Still that week, so obviously there were a few news people who had said it was all a publicity stunt that had gone badly wrong. Later, of course, that particular theory was seen to be the first of the desperate answer groping that seemed to grip everyone over the next year or so.

And no, it hadn’t landed in some out of the way hick town, like Fife, Alabama, or on the outskirts of some Russian village such as Stoloika, or Aykramov, or even in the heart of the Australian outback. Instead, it was here, in Brighton, right in the very centre of the metropolis, on top of a flattened cinema, visible from every part of the city.

The visibility thing was due to its sheer size. It was enormous. And yes, it was disc-shaped. A third of it was buried in the cinema and in the ground beneath the cinema. The rest of it towered over the city like a brooding porcelain bicycle wheel. It looked totally unearthly, in a strong, but delicate way, which is a little hard to explain or to imagine, but when you see it, boy do you know what it means. It was made of a material that was beyond human understanding, comprehension and ability to identify. There were no markings on it. None. Also no doors, no windows, no raised, embossed or engraved insignia, no rivets, no ariels or antenna. Nothing but a smooth exterior wall, which wasn’t any one colour, but was all colours at the same time. And it made noises. Quiet and intermittent noises, but noises, none the less. Sometimes it wailed. Sometimes it hummed. Sometimes it clanked. Many UFO pundits gave spurious explanations for this phenomenon, but no real reason was ever found. It simply made noises.