'Measurements'

"Measurements"
by Jay Richard


On the fourth day of the aliens’ self-imposed isolation, Prime Minister Jacque Metzleschjong got a phone call. The Prime Minister forced himself out of bed and grabbed the phone before his wife could wake up. He grumbled something in Luxembourgish, saying to call his cell in five minutes, and hung up before the person on the other end could speak. Putting on a robe and slippers, he started to wake up as he left the bedroom with his cell phone in hand.

He had barely slept since the K’T’R had arrived. When the trio of aliens in their pyramid-shaped SUV of a spaceship arrived in Earth’s orbit, there was not a single person alive who expected it to land in Luxembourg. While it was a world benchmark for literacy and a member of NATO, the Grand Duchy was not on the list of top places that aliens would make first contact with. The United States, for example, believed that it was a better candidate because it had more missiles than Luxembourg had people. Even Monaco thought it’s puissant self would have been a better landing pad.

The aliens were majestic in their foreignism. About three meters tall, the tripodal creatures were completely covered in skin-tight pressurized suits. They were sickly thin with disproportionately large hands and heads. Decorative cloths with triangular and circular designs were placed over the suits, presumably for aesthetic reasons and nothing more. It would be weeks before anyone realized that those symbols were actually letters. Yellows, tans, browns and oranges were their motif. Everything about them was fluidly angular.

The K’T’R and the European headquarters of the United Nations became the center of a media circus. For five months, the extraterrestrial trio and the UN were inseparable –– until the K’T’R ran off to their spaceship one day and refused to come out. A universal feeling of “Was it something we said?” was immediately felt from the richest white billionaires to the poorest dingo-hunting tribesmen. No one had been able to communicate with the aliens since then. To accentuate the positive, the spaceship was still safely parked just outside of Diekirch and showed no sign of leaving.

Metzleschjong shrugged off his bodyguards and retreated to his poolroom. The room featured three pool tables, painted to each resemble a bar on the Luxembourgian flag, and an overly-well-stocked bar that he got the feeling he’d be getting copious use out of. His phone rang within his robe’s pocket, a good two minutes early, and the Prime Minister pulled it out with a sigh. “What is it?”

“This is Renland,” an excited voice said, sounding too happy at that ungodly hour. “The UN has some big news they’re withholding from its member-states. Don’t ask me how, but I have learned, in part, what they are hiding. Keep in mind that I am telling you this before the CSV even knows about it.” Renland was the leader of the Luxembourg Socialist Workers' Party (LSAP). The Christian Social People's Party (CSV) had ten more seats in the Chamber of Deputies.

Sitting down with a drink in his other hand, Metzleschjong braced himself for additional LSAP propaganda. “Good morning, Renland,” he said dryly. “It’s so nice of you to call. You do realize that some upstart journalist will uncover this story by dawn, correct? I do watch the news.”

“Considering that you are the head of government for the only country housing aliens,” Renland went on, “I assumed that you wanted to know why our guests are refusing to speak to us.”

“Are they allergic to the Preisësch?” Metzleschjong asked between sips of his drink, using a word for “Germans” that carried a hint of xenophobia.

“You would think so, but no.” Renland paused to clear his throat. “Someone has finally translated their miserable whore of a language.”

The K’T’R each carried a small box that served as a universal translator. They had never bothered to explain their language to the humans, but instead used their boxes to speak in whatever was being said to them. Linguists had been tripping over themselves to analyze whatever they could find from the aliens’ language.

“And...?” Metzleschjong prodded.

“Their names are comprised of numbers.”

“And...?”

“Their names are measurements.”

“Please get to a point.”

“Their main ambassador, K’N-h’R-y ... his name is saying how many feet he has, how tall he is and how much he weighs. The name K’T’R itself is, literally, the ideal measurements for a perfect specimen of their species.”

“As I said, get to a point.”

Renland sighed. “My point is that we’re too fat for them.”

Metzleschjong paused in mid-sip. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” Renland said, the joy now out of his voice. The excitement had been in exposing the story before anyone else. The news itself was a bit depressing. “The aliens learned what a healthy human should look like. The UN is not exactly a health club, not by any means. To put it bluntly, the K’T’R are hiding from us out of disgust.”

Putting his glass down, Metzleschjong decided to just drink from the bottle itself. “And what is the UN going to do about this?”

“In the short term, send a team of healthy but not overly muscular people to Diekirch and attempt to reestablish diplomatic ties.”

“And in the long term?”

There was a pause and a sigh. Renland had his own wine out by now; it was that kind of a night. “The UN is proposing we establish, for lack of a better term, ‘fat camps.’”

Metzleschjong didn’t know what to say to that. “Are we going to kill them or put them on treadmills?”

“The UN hasn’t decided yet.”

“Wonderful,” the Prime Minister grumbled. He finished off the bottle and felt a headache coming on. “Have you informed the Grand Duke?”

“Not yet,” Renland said, the sound of him drinking being obvious in the short pause. “I had assumed that you would want to do that.”

“How thoughtful of you,” Metzleschjong grumbled. “Goodnight,” he said, closing the cell phone and terminating the call before Renland could drop anything else on him. With his luck, the aliens would want a daily human sacrifice to appease the Most High Gods of Diet and Exercise.

With a sigh, Metzleschjong stood and scrolled through his list of stored phone numbers. Before calling the Grand Duke, he made sure that at least two wine bottles would be by his side. To look at the situation positively, his wife had been putting on some excess weight lately.