The president leaned back in his chair. He nodded thoughtfully and gestured for Mr. Greene to continue.

"The object landed in a...Mr. Thompkins' farm. According to Thompkins, it destroyed about an acre of pasture land and crushed his best milking cow. He would like to be compensated for his loss."

The president pressed his fingertips together in front of his face. "Send him our condolences for the loss of his cow and let him know that when we make contact with those responsible for sending the object, his request will be made known to them."

"Yes, sir, very good." Greene said jotting the information down.

The president turned back to his cereal box. He had nearly finished the word search.

"And...uh...Mr. President, what would you like done about the object itself?" Greene said.

"Huh?"

"The object, sir. What would you like us to do?"

"Hot damn!" The president said, thumping the table. "I found it. It was backwards. Those tricky bastards!"

Greene cleared his throat.

"Oh...yes. What?" The president said turning back to Greene.

"The object, sir. Some of the...uh...specialists believe it might be a spacecraft of some kind."

"Really?"

"Yes, sir."

"A spacecraft?"

"Yes, sir."

"Let me see that again."

Greene gave the president a stack of photos. The president pushed back the sleeves of his bathrobe as he took them. He cocked his head to the side as he shuffled the stack. He turned one of the photos a few different ways. "Are you sure about this, Greene?"

"No, sir. It's just a theory some of the boys are offering."

"Really? It looks like a pop can to me." The president said without taking his eyes off the photo.

Greene shrugged.

The president turned to him. "Here, let me show you. Doesn't that look like a pop top?"

"I suppose it could."

"Damn right it could." The president gave the pictures back to Greene. "Alright, how about you and the boys open it up? If there are aliens in there, I'll owe you a car."

"How do you suggest we go about opening it, sir?"

"The pull tab, Greene." The president said tapping the photo. "The pull tab. Do I have to do everything for you?"

"No, sir." Greene made his way to the door.

"Greene, wait. Bring me another box. I need something to read when I eat."

"Yes, sir, I'll see what I can do."

The president settled back to his bowl. He lifted his spoon out and took a bite. "Damn," he said and tossed the spoon away. "It's all soggy now."

Sylvia Langstrom held the microphone just below her mouth. She delivered her story exactly the way she'd written it in the car on the way over and tried not to think what this mud was doing to her shoes. She hated going out in the field.

"At about 5 o'clock this morning, the silver object you can see behind me landed in the small kingdom of –"

The large man with small eyes standing to her left jabbed her in the side. "We're a republic now," he said. "Democracy is wonderful thing."

Sylvia screwed her mouth up. The man was the accuracy officer the army had issued her when they had landed. He was tall and broad. His nose was flat like it'd been crushed in a fight long ago. She had offered him a chance to read her story over before she started taping. He'd turned her down. Sylvia guessed it was because he couldn't read. His name tag was upside down.

"At about 5 o'clock this morning, the silver object you can see behind me landed here in the small republic of Rustolium."

The accuracy officer nodded and smiled.

When they'd arrived at the landing site, Sylvia and her cameraman, Ian, had tried to find a good shot of the object. When they got close, a squad of Rustolian troopers came over and shooed them away with sharpened sticks, the Rustolian Army couldn't afford guns. Sylvia had tried to explain that they were with the press. The troopers didn't listen. She'd hoped that the accuracy officer would explain the situation to them. He didn't. He was too busy staring, with his mouth wide open, at the object. He drooled a little bit.

Sylvia and Ian and circled hoping to find some high point so they could shoot down at it. Unfortunately, Rustolium has the distinction of being the only completely flat country in the world. Kansas has more hills. President Gnit (the 'T' is silent, the 'G' is not), when he first took office, had leveled the country to reduce greenhouse gasses. He believed that hills made bicycling difficult. He'd hired over a hundred bulldozers to work around the clock to level the whole country. It cost several billion dollars and took about seven years. The only problem with his plan was that no one in the country owned a bicycle.

Around the back of the object, several Rustolian troopers, some of the same ones who had just shooed Sylvia away, were charging admission to see the object. Sylvia and Ian went up and paid their five dollars to see the object. She worried what the accuracy officer would say about this. He didn't say anything to her, he just asked the troopers for his cut.

Rustolium doesn't have its own currency. They mostly just use the American dollar. When President Gnit took office, he'd tried to start printing the Rustolian ralph again. But their economy was so poor they had to print the ralph with so many 0's that the ralph was too large to be easily carried in most standard sized wallets, purses, or pockets. President Gnit had briefly considered issuing everyone in Rustolium super-sized wallets which could be worn on your back like a backpack. But his advisors warned that this could lead to a dangerous rise in pick-backing. So the ralph had been scrapped and they went back to using the dollar.

Sylvia and Ian found a nice shot of the object and they prepared to do the story. The accuracy officer placed himself just to Sylvia's left. He smiled widely. He had a large ketchup stain on his shirt.

"...experts believe the object may be related to the bright meteor seen across Canada and the Eastern United States. Some have argued that it may have come from as far away as –"

Just then a jeep full of men pulled up behind Sylvia. They were led by a man smartly dressed in a crisply pressed suit. The rest of them were dressed, like most everyone else there, in Rustolian Army fatigues and, like most of the other men, they wore their pants so low that their butt crack was clearly visible.

The men walked up to the object, gathering around a flange, which clearly resembled the pull tab on a soda can. Three of the men in fatigues picked one of the smaller ones up. He grabbed on to the flange and began jerking it downward.

A door opened on the side of the object. A thin grey man stepped out of the door. Large black eyes covered half his face. He was all eyes and elbows.

"What the hell?!?" The grey man shouted through his thin mouth.

The men in fatigues froze. Some looked away guiltily. A few backed away slowly. They left the smaller man hanging from the flange.

"I came to bring you people world peace and you're out here trying to steal my antenna?" The grey man continued, stepping out of the ship. "What kind of –"

He was cut off by a fat man in coveralls who punched him across what was probably his jaw. The grey man crumpled to the ground. The man's belly jiggled as he tackled the thin alien, he was screaming something about a cow. His face was bright red, a startling contrast to the thin grey fingers that were pushing back against his ample cheeks. The grey man's thin arms didn't do much to the chubby Rustolian farmer.

Everyone stood and watched, initially too shocked to do anything. Eventually, some of the men in fatigues slipped into the ship. The flange broke and the smaller man who had been dangling there hit the ground hard. Then the looting began in earnest, the Rustolian army officers triumphantly carrying bizzare contraptions out of the ship past the fallen grey man. Sylvia watched as one man demonstrated how he was going to use a large glowing blue object as a shovel. The accuracy officer brought out some sort of monitor, which he wore as sunglasses.

Ian taped the whole thing from Greene's arrival with the army to the beating of the gray man. When he and Sylvia got back to the US, they were promptly awarded Pulitzer Prizes for their report on the dangers of aliens and international travel.