Barry J. House

I WAS PROBED BY ALIENS AND LIVED TO TELL THE TALE!
by Barry J. House

Will Brown and John Smith are friends. Ordinary men with ordinary names... except when you consider that where John comes from his means 'one who yearns for the sweetest cessric pond, even before the third milking of Teuhleuhlah's teat'. For John is from the planet Tau Ceti 42, and first met Will when abducting him from Earth one morning...

The Tau-Cetians are an alien race utterly hooked on the classic Earth TV series, I Love Lucy, and an enterprising group have got together to fund a trip to Earth to try to buy the first series episodes on holo-chip. Whilst on their travels they are also collecting items for their specimen zoo. Will is targeted as the human specimen, but John grows to like Will's incessant wit and decides to let him go, although not before some racy adventures and experiences along the way... including the customary alien probe on entering the spaceship...

Sit back and enjoy this close encounter of the hilarious kind!

I Was Probed By Aliens And Lived To Tell The Tale!, ISBN 1-905203-98-5, price £4.99, is now available to purchase from The Book Depository, Tesco.com, Amazon.co.uk and others. Click here to read a review at Whispers of Wickedness.

Excerpt from Chapter Two:

        "Follow me to the bridge. I shall explain everything on the way."
        Smith waved a limb and the doorway appeared again. "Slither this way," he said, sliding forward.
        As we made our way down one of those eternally dark passageways, Smith told me everything that had happened since I'd last seen him.
        "I can not speak of this to anybody else on board the ship. I am afraid that I might inadvertently ask help from the very entity who is trying to murder me. My hope is that you can help me to catch him before he is successful."
        "Some bloody hope, that is! But what makes you think someone's tryin' to kill you? Perhaps you're just imaginin' things."
        "Will, the perpetrator has already tried to murder me twice! The first time I was relaxing in the sauna on my own, and he turned the temperature up to 1000° centigrade..."
        "Oh, my God, Smith! How come you didn't get turned into a dirty, great Lobster Thermidore, or somethin'?"
        "1000° centigrade is uncomfortably hot for us Tau-Cetians, that is all. He only did it to make me want to cool down a little. No, it was the bucketful of bicarbonate of soda that he dumped into the sulphuric acid plunge-pool that would have killed me!"
        Smith led me into a tiny room. There was barely enough space for both of us to stand in there. When he eventually pressed one of his protuberances against a ceramic knob projecting from the wall, I became rather angry, as it was hardly the time to be using the toilet, and surely he could have left me waiting outside. But then the room started to move upwards; we were in the captain's personal lift. I bloody hate lifts.
        "But how did you escape the murder attempt?" I asked Smith.
        "I was dangling the extremity of one of my base appendages over the pool, just about to jump in, when I got paged for a holo-vid call from my sister back on Tau Ceti 42. Ten nanos later, the ship's cook got in there instead of me. All they found were his seventy-three rhodium fillings and thirty-nine golden earrings! His assistant had to take over, you know. For the past week the only thing on the menu has been baked zephyr beans and merklap burgers; the passengers are livid! But it was my sister who saved my life! All that meticulous planning by my unknown assailant; he must have sat down and planned it to the nth degree, and a simple holo-vid call from Debbie saved the day!
        "Amazin'. Did you say that he tried to murder you, twice? What happened the second time?"
        "Oh, well, that time he just jumped out in front of me with a Pulsar blaster, swore loudly, aimed and pulled the trigger!"

Excerpt from Chapter Four:

        We were standing in the middle of a brightly lit gallery that ran along one of the longer walls of an impossibly huge, rectangular, underground chamber. On the opposite wall, hundreds of feet away, was an identical gallery. I couldn't see where the chamber ended; the walls eventually converged to a single, vertical line on either side of us. We wandered across to an immense silver balustrade, and, looking up, I could see more galleries like ours, indicating the 13 floors that we had just descended. When I looked down, however, those galleries began to converge, once again, until they vanished altogether into the darkness. The humming sound that we had heard earlier was definitely coming from further below.
        "Wow!" I said. "I wonder how deep it goes." And then the child within me came to the fore. "Have you got anything in that box of yours, John, that I can chuck down there?"
        "No, nothing that I can spare."
        "Okay, watch this, then," I said, clearing my throat and spitting out as far as I could into the void. The gob of saliva dropped rapidly out of sight as I started counting. "One...two...three..."
        "But why-?"
        "Shhh...five...six...!"
        I'd got to sixty-three, and was about to give up, when I spied a pinprick of light far, far below.
        "Wow!"
        It was followed shortly by a faint sizzle and a pop.
        "Did you hear that?" I asked, feeling tremendously pleased with myself.
        "Ah, that is why you were counting, Will. It is a means of judging the depth of the shaft. Very clever."
        "Of course. We now know that this shaft is at least... well, sixty-three deep."
        "sixty-three what, Will?"
        "Uhh, look, why don't you have a go, John?"
        "Okay, then try beating this!" said Smith, leaning out between two mighty balusters.
        He emitted a peculiar churning sound and opened three of his mouths at once, expelling a trio of yellowish-green globs, which plummeted away from us. He started counting, and had reached only forty-seven when a number of brilliant, bluish-white arcs lit up the nether regions of the shaft. Soon after that, the humming sound grew momentarily louder, before subsiding back to its previous volume. The impromptu lightning display had caused Smith to emit one of those great, booming laughs of his. "HO...HO...HO!"
        But it was abruptly silenced the moment that he spied what I was doing next.
        I don't think that I've stood on a balcony, yet, in my entire life, when I haven't succumbed to the irresistible urge to take a pee over the edge. I'm afraid that this was no exception.
        By the time that the explosions started below, we had gotten perhaps a hundred yards along the gallery.

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I WAS PROBED BY ALIENS AND LIVED TO TELL THE TALE! by Barry J. House

I WAS PROBED BY ALIENS AND LIVED TO TELL THE TALE!
by Barry J. House