Colossus

The day the Giant Alien Head showed up in the back forty, I knew we were in for a heap of trouble.

I suppose it's usual to say 'It was a day like any other', but it wasn't. About three a.m. there'd been an earthquake.

Just a tremor for us, and in Greater Hudsie we're used to it, it's a seismic area, but what with the rumbling and the bed vibrating, it woke me up - not my wife Manuela, she sleeps through anything - and I got up to check on the livestock in the pen, but they settled down pretty quickly, and there were no signs of sinkholes, so I reckoned we'd got off easy this time. Later I heard it had been a bigger shock over in Hattie, where it had knocked down a shack or two on the outskirts, and even made a new crack in the pavement in Greenglass. But the cows seemed contented enough, so I went back to bed, which is when Manuela woke up a bit and grumbled at me. She likes her sleep.

I'd been up for the second time, to move the cows over to the summer pasture, and was having a caff in the kitchen, when I looked out the window and saw It, reared up from behind the bobwire in the field where I was cultivating sandgrass, trying to get some more pastureland to take hold. Like I said, we're desert.

The kids saw it, too, and got excited. 'Hey, Da, ' said Jose, my eldest, 'You been buying scrap again? That is the biggest, and ugliest, thing I've ever seen in my life.' We moseyed out to see it.

Jose was right. I'd never seen the like of it, and I hope I never do again. There in my field was a Giant Alien Head. It was huge. It was green. And it was like nothing we'd ever seen before

My daughter Juanita craned her neck to look up at it. 'What kind of crittur is it, Da?' she asked. I scratched my head.

It stood on its shoulders, this head, standing up out of the sparse grass. It was hideous - its neck seemed too thin to support the head, which sported a ribbed bone plate with seven vicious-looking spikes sticking out from it. Underneath that were ropy appendages tucked behind protruding organs where its ears should have been. Two sightless eyes looked out at the pasture above a sharp probiscis, and underneath, two fat slugs that must have been lips curled in a sneer.

As if it knew a secret about us, I thought, and didn't think much of it.

'A ugly one, that's for sure, ' I said aloud. 'Big, green, ugly monster.' Carlito, my youngest, liked the sound of that, and kept chanting it until Manuela, who'd come out to look, told him to shut up.

She shook her head. 'This is trouble, chico. Big trouble.' I nodded in agreement. Big, ugly monsters are trouble. Big, ugly monsters mean big, ugly archaeologists, with big, ugly equipment.

Big, ugly equipment means I don't get my back forty back till they're through studying the Phenomenon. And writing papers. I'd be lucky to get a dollar-fifty compensation out of them tightwads in the government, too. I sighed.

'Jose, get on your bike and go to Garcias'. They've got a phone. Tell 'em to call Hattie, let 'em know what we found. And don't let Mrs Garcia feed you. You got food at home.' As Jose, grumbling, went to get his motorbike out of the shed, Juanita turned to me, curious. 'How'd it get here, Da?' I shrugged again, though I had a theory.

When I was a kid, a possum had scared the life out of me. I was visiting my aunt and uncle down South, where it's wetter, and they got a bait of them things. Possums are ugly, but that wasn't why it had scared me.

It was just after a rainstorm, you see, and I was sitting on the front porch, looking around for a rainbow for the novelty of it, when the bushes at the side of the house started rustling. They shook and shook, and then this possum just emerged from inside the bush, not like he was climbing out, but like he just rose from the bush. Like the bush gave birth to him. He must've got wetter than he liked, and just come out.

I figured the Giant Alien Head was like that. The earthquake must've disturbed it, and the sands shifted, and then it just worked its way on up into the field.

I just wished it'd been somebody else's field. I needed that pasture grass come winter.

As I'd feared, trouble came in waves, and with official stamps all over it. The environmental folks checked for lead. Nope, it was copper, hence the green, they said. I shrugged, what's copper? Some old metal, it turned out. Okay by me, but apparently it was safer than lead.

The guys from the local paper showed up, too, and took our picture in front of the Head. We made it to the front page, just above the story about the new schoolhouse. Manuela was proud, went to the beauty parlour for it, and all.

Then the archaeologists showed up in droves. They measured. They took soundings. They sat around our kitchen, drinking up our caff supply, and argued about what it all meant.

Vandermolen, the big noise from Hattie, was sure he knew what it was. 'It's proof of Alien Visitation,' he claimed. 'I have long been of the opinion that this planet was visited by terribly advanced aliens from outer space, who seeded our civilisation. Look at the pyramids. Look at...'

'Balderdash,' said Rickerts, the guy from out west. 'It represents an ancient, but totally native, development.' The alien appearance of the statue is merely due to a religious idea. It represents some ideal of the ancient civilisation - however repugnant its visage is to us.'

Vandermolen snorted. 'So we put it in the museum with the usual sign, eh? 'Cult object'? I am not ready to concede defeat so easily, my dear colleague.'

They went on like this for days, while I moved my cattle over to my brother-in-law's to keep 'em out of the way. Too many archaeologists spoil the milk, I've found.

Then came the shocker: there was more of the blasted thing underground. It just hadn't come up yet. I didn't want to think about what the body of that monster would look like. Even less did I like to think of what my pasture was going to look like when they finished digging. I was ready to dig in my heels and send for a lawyer.

Then the cavalry arrived, in the form of Juan Sanchez, Simon's oldest boy, who had gone to college and was now working for the government up in Hattie. He showed up with a government grant in one hand and a reimbursement form in the other. Seems the government thought this discovery was so big - it was big, all right, too big, in my opinion - that it 'warranted further on-site study'. And so they were willing to buy us out.

I had no complaints about the settlement. We got a nice price for what amounted to 200 acres of scrubby, sandy soil, and we moved over to my brother-in-law's while we scouted around for a new place to start a spread. The kids were closer to the new schoolhouse, Manuela got along with her sister-in-law like a house on fire, and I helped Pablo with the cows and watched the Big Dig from a safe distance. It was a win-win situation, in my book.

After the first big shock, the paper people left me alone - after all, I had nothing interesting to say except 'yup, I seen it' - and hung around the dig itself. But one day, Dr Vandermolen came by to drink some of my sister-in-law's caff, and told us how it was going.

They'd dug up the whole shebang, except for a piece that was broke off. They hadn't found that yet, but they were still hoping. The whole thing was so huge you could get inside it. And it had writing at the bottom. They were still arguing about the writing, and what it meant.

Over his second piece of shoofly pie (and his third cup of caff), Vandermolen told us that they were going to make a museum out of the site as soon as they'd finished, and we'd all be able to go over and see it - right now there was a big wall around it, maybe they didn't want to spoil the surprise.

Vandermolen still believed in his alien theory, and was glad to explain it to an audience that didn't fight back with footnotes. 'I think these aliens were flesh-eaters,' he said. 'The statue served as some sort of collection point for human sacrifices.' He gestured in the air with his fork, and I dodged shoo-fly crumbs. 'First, because the staircase inside could hold a lot of people. They probably forced them up and out the holes at the top, letting them fall to the their deaths. It was probably presented as a religious sacrifice.

I was glad the kids were in bed - I didn't want them to be thinking about how they'd grown up on top of something like that.

Vabdermolen continued 'At least, that is how I interpret the verse at the base of this Juggernaut.'

The verse was in some ancient language, but they'd sort of puzzled it out. Vandermolen handed me a copy of the translation his graduate student had made. It read:

'Give me the tired ones, the poor ones, The big crowds that can't breathe [well], Give me the garbage, too [?], that washes up on the tide, Give them all wet from the ocean to me. I hold up my light beside the Golden Gate.'

Professor Vandermolen explained that last bit. 'We think the Juggernaut promised the victims a better life in the world to come. That might have made them more willing to be sacrificed.' He went on to say that the diggers were pretty sure that when they found the missing piece of the statue, it would have a lantern, or a torch, in its upraised paw.

'I think I can prove that Earth was the victim of an invasion of man-eating aliens, ' he concluded. I nodded, convinced by this smart man.

'I'm just glad they're gone, ' I said, putting out my arm and pulling Manuela to me, nuzzling the soft fur on the back of her neck. 'They look like they were a nasty species.'

Manuela growled softly in agreement, and lashed her tail.