Vrillon

On a Saturday evening in southern England, the news was running, and then for about six minutes the news was not in charge of the channel anymore. You’re tuned to G Z S, one ninety-seven point seven, and this is Transmissions from the Fringe.

November twenty-sixth, nineteen seventy-seven. Just past five in the evening. Across parts of southern England, families watching the independent television news hear the newsreader’s voice go strange, then drown under a deep buzz. And out of the buzz comes a voice. Distorted, hollow, patient. It says its name is Vrillon. It says it speaks for the Ashtar Galactic Command. And it has come to warn the people of Earth.

The voice talks for the better part of six minutes. It tells humanity to put down its weapons. To give up the instruments of destruction. That we stand at the edge of a new age but cannot enter it carrying what we carry. The tone never rises. It is the voice of something that believes it has nowhere else to be. And then it lets the channel go, and the program comes back like a door swinging shut.

Now the dull part, which is the frightening part. To do this, you do not break into a television station. You stand somewhere out in the countryside with a transmitter, in line of sight of a broadcast tower called Hannington, and you put up a signal stronger and cleaner than the one the tower is trying to relay, and you make the tower repeat you instead. That takes real equipment. Real money. A real understanding of how broadcast engineering works, and exactly where the chain has a gap you can stand in. This was not a kid with a radio in his bedroom. The broadcasting authority investigated. The government took notice. And nobody, in nearly fifty years, has ever found out who Vrillon was.

Strip away the alien and what you have got is a person. A person who built the rig, drove to the spot, waited for the right minute, and used the most powerful megaphone in the country to tell a few hundred thousand strangers to stop killing each other. Then packed up and disappeared so completely that all the looking since has turned up nothing. The message asked for peace. The method was a quiet act of war on the airwaves. Both things are true at once.

Somewhere out there, maybe, is an old man who knows exactly what he did on a November evening in nineteen seventy-seven, and has never told a soul. The signal was his for six minutes. Then he gave it back.

This has been Transmissions from the Fringe. The dial stays warm. G Z S.