Page 10 - Extraterrestrials, Foreign and Domestic

Mrs. Whittle’s Call to Judgement

“Wasn’t much of a moon last night, Mr. O’Donnell. I was looking
for my flashlight when the front door opened. I’m sure it was locked,
but he opened it like it was on a spring and unlatched.”
“He? Only one of them? How many arms and legs?”
She grimaced. “I can’t exactly say. Probably none.”
O’Donnell leaned forward. An odd fantasy, he thought: no limbs.
This could be kinky. “Hmm. How did it move, then?”
Mrs. Whittle scrunched up her face, as if confronted by a repellant
form of sea-life.
“He did have fingers and toes. Or something short and wiggly like
fingers or toes. All over his body. It took me a while to get used to it.
Not at all what I expected.”
“I should think not,” observed the columnist, despite whatever
images he could conjure up of her acquaintances.
“Well, the Bible doesn’t really say anywhere that Gabriel looks like
a human being. We just hope he will, I guess.” She brightened. “But
he turned not to be Gabriel, after all. You can understand my
confusion, can’t you, Mr. O’Donnell?”
“Oh, yes, certainly. An error any of us might have made.” He
scrawled ‘fundamentalist’ under her name and address.
“He was very polite and sympathetic. He let me go to the
bathroom before we left. I knew there was no way out of it, and
if he was Gabriel, well, then, I had no objections to going with him.”
Perry O’Donnell watched for the tell-tale signs of craziness around
her eyes and hands. Seeing none, he gently prompted, “So the two of
you went out of the house and got into the saucer?”
“Saucer? Oh, no, it looked more like a teapot. Gobleshu—that’s
what his name sounded like to me—said he had picked me partly
because I would fit inside his vehicle; I am rather petite, you see.”
The reporter nodded and smiled enigmatically.
“Other than that I think it had to do with my isolation and the
local flying conditions. At any rate, he wished me no harm; his people
were hereditary servants of the Entelekons and had no choice but to
carry out their orders.”
O’Donnell’s pencil gyrated furiously across the pad. “The—
Entelekons, you say?”

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