The Invaders
Illustration
Stories
Contents
"The Invaders" by Keith Hewitt
"Surely The Lord Was In This Place" by Peter Andrew Smith
The Invaders
by Keith Hewitt
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
The suns were still high in the sky when Jessica Pike landed on the roof of the Colonial Administration Building, cut the engines, and waited for the rotors to stop. The parking attendant rolled up to her window and tapped on it, asked solicitously, “How can I help you this afternoon?”
“Pike, Jessica A; I have an appointment in the Import Commission Office at two sixty.”
The attendant paused to consider her response. “Appointment confirmed. They have been notified of your arrival.” The attendant concluded by extending a parking slip from a slot in what might loosely be called its face, looking for all the world as though it was sticking out its tongue. While she climbed out and took the slip, the attendant consulted with her vehicle and silently advised it where to park. When she was clear of the vehicle, the rotors kicked on again and it lifted away to park itself in the structure at the end of the building.
The attendant rolled away to tend to another customer and Jessica walked the short distance to the elevator, silently cursing her decision not to wear a hat. The suns were hot, and the cool front meteorology had predicted had not arrived. Predicted? They’d practically guaranteed it. “Another example,” she fumed. “Nobody knows what’s going on around here anymore.”
The elevator took her to the fourth floor, discharged her in a hallway opposite a single frosted glass door that read “Planetary Import Commission Office.” Below the lettering was the starburst-and-terrestrial-globe that was their logo. Her mood was such that the logo irritated her, today — she had asked, once, why the logo included earth and not their home planet of Celeste, and she’d gotten some bureaucratic doubletalk that could be distilled down to: “It was designed on earth.”
As if that was a reason.
She contented herself to scowl at it, saved her words for the commissioner’s assistant who greeted her on the other side. The bureaucrat shook hands with her, smiled in what Jessica was sure an expression they had learned in civil service training. “Ms. Pike, how lovely to see you again,” the bureaucrat said. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“It’s not my pleasure, Mister Farnsworth. Not at all. And I doubt it will be yours,” she answered, and waited to continue until he had ushered her down a short hallway to his office. After the niceties — she refused a cup of what passed for coffee, accepted a glass of water — she sat down and leaned toward Farnsworth’s desk. “Mister Farnsworth, what does it cost to send a message back to the home office?”
He seemed puzzled. “The last I checked, if it’s part of the monthly summary — ”
She shook her head. “No, a priority message. Like, today.”
He frowned, seemed to realize it and softened it to a thoughtful expression. “A priority message these days will run you about three thousand credits per megabyte. That’s the sending cost. Receiving is another five hundred. And, of course, there’s the time frame. If we send it today, it will arrive in roughly — ” he glanced at his calendar — "eleven years, three hundred and twenty-nine days. Say September 3, 2349.” He paused. “But whatever would make you want to do such a thing?”
Jessica scowled, and was not concerned about showing it. “Because I need to sue someone. Actually, probably their descendants.” He said nothing, just raised his eyebrows. “Mister Farnsworth, here’s the deal: ever heard of Zea Mays Everta?”
The assistant commissioner shook his head.
“It’s a type of corn seed — a very specific type. It’s the only breed of maize that will grow to be popcorn. And about a month and a half ago I received a shipment of Zea Mays Everta on the annual ship from earth. This was an exclusive shipment, Mister Farnsworth — I’m the only person on Celeste who is going to be able to grow popcorn for at least twenty-four years. I think people are going to go crazy over it. I’m expanding my farm to grow it, and I got this seed — guaranteed fresh and viable, capable of producing crop and seed corn.”
Farnsworth nodded. “I vaguely remember hearing about this. You must be very excited — you may end up being a very rich woman.”
“I paid my fortune, got enough seed for five hundred acres. I planted it on my freshly fertilized field. And do you know what I got? Corn…and some kind of prickly, butt-ugly thing that the university extension tells me is a very hearty weed. A terrestrial one — that came mixed in with the seeds.”
“Oh my,” Farnsworth said simply, after a short silence.
“Yeah. Oh my.”
“Can you — ” he began.
She cut him off. “It’s too late. It’s already growing, everything was planted, and the weeds are coming in with the corn. The extension tells me anything powerful enough to kill the weeds will kill the corn, too — and I had to do some fast talking to convince them not to do it anyway, just to stop the potential spread of the weed. They were going to crop dust my field, Mister Farnsworth, and kill it all. I couldn’t let that happen. This is too important.”
“How did you — ”
“I told them if they flew anything over my field but a surveillance drone, I would shoot it out of the sky.” She paused. “By the way, if you can help me clear that up with the constable’s office, I’d appreciate it.”
Farnsworth made a face. “I’ll see what I can do. I understand you were speaking in the heat of the moment. But I still don’t see — ”
“It’s a disaster. The good seeds and bad were all sown together, and they’re growing up together, and the only way through this is to wait until the harvest in February. Then it’s going to have to be harvested very carefully, separating the weeds from the grain.” She fell silent for a bit, rubbed her face with her hands and shook her head. “I don’t even know — we can’t program the harvesting machinery for it. It’s going to cost me three times as much to harvest half the yield I should have had, if I can do it at all. It’s going to ruin me.”
Farnsworth nodded sympathetically.
“So, I intend to sue the company that supplied those seeds — or their heirs. What they did was nothing short of evil…recklessly evil.”
“It was,” Farnsworth agreed. “But whether your suit gets to them in September of ’49 or October, I don’t think will make much difference. You may just want to save your money and send it with the regular monthly communications for a tenth of the price — no sense in throwing good money after bad.”
Jessica nodded, continued to scowl.
“And I understand your anger — I really do. You were trying to plant something special — something like this world’s never seen before. And now you have this to contend with. It’s not fair. It should have been a great thing — and what that company did could ruin it all.”
“I’m not going to let that happen. But it’s going to mean picking through the whole crop, and it just seems hopeless.”
Farnsworth smiled again. “Ms. Pike, nothing is ever hopeless. Let me have a word with the agronomy school — I think I can talk them into recruiting some students to help you as a class project. When February comes, they can help you harvest — and sort out the good from the bad. I’m going to guess the extension will be pretty eager to make sure all the weeds get burned, so there’s no more contamination.”
Jessica took a deep breath, nodded slightly. “You would do that?”
The assistant commissioner’s smile grew. “You’re trying to bring something new to Celeste, Ms. Pike — something the likes of which many people have never seen before. It will be worth the effort.” He stood up, reached out to shake her hand again, held it briefly and looked her in the eye. “It may seem hopeless — but there’s always hope. You should know that better than anyone — you’re a farmer.”
* * *
Surely The Lord Was In This Place
by Peter Andrew Smith
Genesis 28:10-19a
Peter pulled the car into the parking lot.
“What are we doing, Dad?” Krista looked up from the university pamphlets. “I thought we were meeting Mom at the restaurant.”
“We are.” Peter unbuckled his seatbelt. “I want to show you something first.”
Krista sighed and slowly got out of the car to follow her father. “Is this going to take long, I’m hungry.”
“You’re a teenager,” Peter said. “You’re always hungry. I just wanted to show you this.”
Krista sighed again and walked with her dad down the pathway to the beach. There were several people swimming and a couple of groups of children were digging in the sand close to the water under the watchful eye of their parents.
“Beach. I see it. It’s lovely. Can we go now?”
Peter kept walking and Krista reluctantly followed. Peter stopped almost at the water. He took a deep breath.
“This is where it happened.”
“Where what happened?” his daughter asked.
“This is where I started to believe in Jesus.”
“Huh?” Krista looked at her father. “I thought you always believed in Jesus. Nana and Pops raised you in the church.”
“They did and I understood lots of things about the Bible and Jesus when I was your age.” Peter looked at the water. “I didn’t believe though.”
“I don’t understand.”
Peter gestured back toward where they had come from. “I was walking down this beach after school my junior year. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do and was trying to figure out what my future would hold.”
“I thought you always wanted to teach.”
“I discovered that later.” Peter smiled at her. “In high school, I and everyone else assumed I would go into the army like your grandfather.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Peter shook his head. “This was where everything changed for me.”
Krista looked around at the unremarkable beach. “So, what makes this place so special?”
“I was walking and thinking, and I guess before I knew it I started to pray. I asked God to help me see the way forward.” Peter smiled. “That’s when it happened.”
“What happened?”
“I felt God was here on the beach with me.” Peter tilted his head. “It’s hard to put into words. I just knew that God was here with me and a feeling of peace washed over me.”
“Huh.” Krista looked at the ordinary beach once more.
“Yeah. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. As I looked out at the water and as I thought about the future, I realized it was going to be okay.” Peter pointed to some large rocks beyond the sand. “I sat there for what must have been hours just watching and praying.”
Krista looked at the rocks for a moment. “Then what happened?”
“I went home and told Pops that I wanted to teach school instead of going into the army.”
“What did he say?”
“He stared at me for a few moments and told me to do what I needed to do.” Peter smiled wistfully. “He never said he was disappointed, but I think he wished I’d followed in his footsteps.”
Peter took another look around the beach and then checked his watch. “Well, we better get going or your mother will wonder what happened to us.”
They walked in silence back to the car.
“Dad,” Krista said as they got in. “Why did you bring me here?”
Peter turned to her. “You’re going to be graduating high school next year and I know that it’s stressful trying to figure out what you want to do.”
“You’ve never pressured me to be a teacher like you or an accountant like mom,” Krista said. “You’ve always told me to follow my own dreams, don’t worry about that.”
“I’m not worried about that at all. I wanted you to know a couple of things. The first is that God is everywhere so be ready because when you least expect it, God will draw you near and you’ll realize that you’re in the presence of God.”
“Has what happened to you on the beach ever happened again?”
Peter nodded. “A couple of times -- when I least expected it.”
“Okay. What’s the second thing?”
“That when you walk with God, you’ll be okay no matter where your journey takes you.”
Krista nodded and as they pulled back onto the road, she thought about what her father had shown her and about what she wanted to do in her life. She closed her eyes and found herself praying not just about where her life was going but also in thanksgiving for the people God blessed her with along the way.
*****************************************
StoryShare, July 19, 2020, issue.
Copyright 2020 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
"The Invaders" by Keith Hewitt
"Surely The Lord Was In This Place" by Peter Andrew Smith
The Invaders
by Keith Hewitt
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
The suns were still high in the sky when Jessica Pike landed on the roof of the Colonial Administration Building, cut the engines, and waited for the rotors to stop. The parking attendant rolled up to her window and tapped on it, asked solicitously, “How can I help you this afternoon?”
“Pike, Jessica A; I have an appointment in the Import Commission Office at two sixty.”
The attendant paused to consider her response. “Appointment confirmed. They have been notified of your arrival.” The attendant concluded by extending a parking slip from a slot in what might loosely be called its face, looking for all the world as though it was sticking out its tongue. While she climbed out and took the slip, the attendant consulted with her vehicle and silently advised it where to park. When she was clear of the vehicle, the rotors kicked on again and it lifted away to park itself in the structure at the end of the building.
The attendant rolled away to tend to another customer and Jessica walked the short distance to the elevator, silently cursing her decision not to wear a hat. The suns were hot, and the cool front meteorology had predicted had not arrived. Predicted? They’d practically guaranteed it. “Another example,” she fumed. “Nobody knows what’s going on around here anymore.”
The elevator took her to the fourth floor, discharged her in a hallway opposite a single frosted glass door that read “Planetary Import Commission Office.” Below the lettering was the starburst-and-terrestrial-globe that was their logo. Her mood was such that the logo irritated her, today — she had asked, once, why the logo included earth and not their home planet of Celeste, and she’d gotten some bureaucratic doubletalk that could be distilled down to: “It was designed on earth.”
As if that was a reason.
She contented herself to scowl at it, saved her words for the commissioner’s assistant who greeted her on the other side. The bureaucrat shook hands with her, smiled in what Jessica was sure an expression they had learned in civil service training. “Ms. Pike, how lovely to see you again,” the bureaucrat said. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“It’s not my pleasure, Mister Farnsworth. Not at all. And I doubt it will be yours,” she answered, and waited to continue until he had ushered her down a short hallway to his office. After the niceties — she refused a cup of what passed for coffee, accepted a glass of water — she sat down and leaned toward Farnsworth’s desk. “Mister Farnsworth, what does it cost to send a message back to the home office?”
He seemed puzzled. “The last I checked, if it’s part of the monthly summary — ”
She shook her head. “No, a priority message. Like, today.”
He frowned, seemed to realize it and softened it to a thoughtful expression. “A priority message these days will run you about three thousand credits per megabyte. That’s the sending cost. Receiving is another five hundred. And, of course, there’s the time frame. If we send it today, it will arrive in roughly — ” he glanced at his calendar — "eleven years, three hundred and twenty-nine days. Say September 3, 2349.” He paused. “But whatever would make you want to do such a thing?”
Jessica scowled, and was not concerned about showing it. “Because I need to sue someone. Actually, probably their descendants.” He said nothing, just raised his eyebrows. “Mister Farnsworth, here’s the deal: ever heard of Zea Mays Everta?”
The assistant commissioner shook his head.
“It’s a type of corn seed — a very specific type. It’s the only breed of maize that will grow to be popcorn. And about a month and a half ago I received a shipment of Zea Mays Everta on the annual ship from earth. This was an exclusive shipment, Mister Farnsworth — I’m the only person on Celeste who is going to be able to grow popcorn for at least twenty-four years. I think people are going to go crazy over it. I’m expanding my farm to grow it, and I got this seed — guaranteed fresh and viable, capable of producing crop and seed corn.”
Farnsworth nodded. “I vaguely remember hearing about this. You must be very excited — you may end up being a very rich woman.”
“I paid my fortune, got enough seed for five hundred acres. I planted it on my freshly fertilized field. And do you know what I got? Corn…and some kind of prickly, butt-ugly thing that the university extension tells me is a very hearty weed. A terrestrial one — that came mixed in with the seeds.”
“Oh my,” Farnsworth said simply, after a short silence.
“Yeah. Oh my.”
“Can you — ” he began.
She cut him off. “It’s too late. It’s already growing, everything was planted, and the weeds are coming in with the corn. The extension tells me anything powerful enough to kill the weeds will kill the corn, too — and I had to do some fast talking to convince them not to do it anyway, just to stop the potential spread of the weed. They were going to crop dust my field, Mister Farnsworth, and kill it all. I couldn’t let that happen. This is too important.”
“How did you — ”
“I told them if they flew anything over my field but a surveillance drone, I would shoot it out of the sky.” She paused. “By the way, if you can help me clear that up with the constable’s office, I’d appreciate it.”
Farnsworth made a face. “I’ll see what I can do. I understand you were speaking in the heat of the moment. But I still don’t see — ”
“It’s a disaster. The good seeds and bad were all sown together, and they’re growing up together, and the only way through this is to wait until the harvest in February. Then it’s going to have to be harvested very carefully, separating the weeds from the grain.” She fell silent for a bit, rubbed her face with her hands and shook her head. “I don’t even know — we can’t program the harvesting machinery for it. It’s going to cost me three times as much to harvest half the yield I should have had, if I can do it at all. It’s going to ruin me.”
Farnsworth nodded sympathetically.
“So, I intend to sue the company that supplied those seeds — or their heirs. What they did was nothing short of evil…recklessly evil.”
“It was,” Farnsworth agreed. “But whether your suit gets to them in September of ’49 or October, I don’t think will make much difference. You may just want to save your money and send it with the regular monthly communications for a tenth of the price — no sense in throwing good money after bad.”
Jessica nodded, continued to scowl.
“And I understand your anger — I really do. You were trying to plant something special — something like this world’s never seen before. And now you have this to contend with. It’s not fair. It should have been a great thing — and what that company did could ruin it all.”
“I’m not going to let that happen. But it’s going to mean picking through the whole crop, and it just seems hopeless.”
Farnsworth smiled again. “Ms. Pike, nothing is ever hopeless. Let me have a word with the agronomy school — I think I can talk them into recruiting some students to help you as a class project. When February comes, they can help you harvest — and sort out the good from the bad. I’m going to guess the extension will be pretty eager to make sure all the weeds get burned, so there’s no more contamination.”
Jessica took a deep breath, nodded slightly. “You would do that?”
The assistant commissioner’s smile grew. “You’re trying to bring something new to Celeste, Ms. Pike — something the likes of which many people have never seen before. It will be worth the effort.” He stood up, reached out to shake her hand again, held it briefly and looked her in the eye. “It may seem hopeless — but there’s always hope. You should know that better than anyone — you’re a farmer.”
* * *
Surely The Lord Was In This Place
by Peter Andrew Smith
Genesis 28:10-19a
Peter pulled the car into the parking lot.
“What are we doing, Dad?” Krista looked up from the university pamphlets. “I thought we were meeting Mom at the restaurant.”
“We are.” Peter unbuckled his seatbelt. “I want to show you something first.”
Krista sighed and slowly got out of the car to follow her father. “Is this going to take long, I’m hungry.”
“You’re a teenager,” Peter said. “You’re always hungry. I just wanted to show you this.”
Krista sighed again and walked with her dad down the pathway to the beach. There were several people swimming and a couple of groups of children were digging in the sand close to the water under the watchful eye of their parents.
“Beach. I see it. It’s lovely. Can we go now?”
Peter kept walking and Krista reluctantly followed. Peter stopped almost at the water. He took a deep breath.
“This is where it happened.”
“Where what happened?” his daughter asked.
“This is where I started to believe in Jesus.”
“Huh?” Krista looked at her father. “I thought you always believed in Jesus. Nana and Pops raised you in the church.”
“They did and I understood lots of things about the Bible and Jesus when I was your age.” Peter looked at the water. “I didn’t believe though.”
“I don’t understand.”
Peter gestured back toward where they had come from. “I was walking down this beach after school my junior year. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do and was trying to figure out what my future would hold.”
“I thought you always wanted to teach.”
“I discovered that later.” Peter smiled at her. “In high school, I and everyone else assumed I would go into the army like your grandfather.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Peter shook his head. “This was where everything changed for me.”
Krista looked around at the unremarkable beach. “So, what makes this place so special?”
“I was walking and thinking, and I guess before I knew it I started to pray. I asked God to help me see the way forward.” Peter smiled. “That’s when it happened.”
“What happened?”
“I felt God was here on the beach with me.” Peter tilted his head. “It’s hard to put into words. I just knew that God was here with me and a feeling of peace washed over me.”
“Huh.” Krista looked at the ordinary beach once more.
“Yeah. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. As I looked out at the water and as I thought about the future, I realized it was going to be okay.” Peter pointed to some large rocks beyond the sand. “I sat there for what must have been hours just watching and praying.”
Krista looked at the rocks for a moment. “Then what happened?”
“I went home and told Pops that I wanted to teach school instead of going into the army.”
“What did he say?”
“He stared at me for a few moments and told me to do what I needed to do.” Peter smiled wistfully. “He never said he was disappointed, but I think he wished I’d followed in his footsteps.”
Peter took another look around the beach and then checked his watch. “Well, we better get going or your mother will wonder what happened to us.”
They walked in silence back to the car.
“Dad,” Krista said as they got in. “Why did you bring me here?”
Peter turned to her. “You’re going to be graduating high school next year and I know that it’s stressful trying to figure out what you want to do.”
“You’ve never pressured me to be a teacher like you or an accountant like mom,” Krista said. “You’ve always told me to follow my own dreams, don’t worry about that.”
“I’m not worried about that at all. I wanted you to know a couple of things. The first is that God is everywhere so be ready because when you least expect it, God will draw you near and you’ll realize that you’re in the presence of God.”
“Has what happened to you on the beach ever happened again?”
Peter nodded. “A couple of times -- when I least expected it.”
“Okay. What’s the second thing?”
“That when you walk with God, you’ll be okay no matter where your journey takes you.”
Krista nodded and as they pulled back onto the road, she thought about what her father had shown her and about what she wanted to do in her life. She closed her eyes and found herself praying not just about where her life was going but also in thanksgiving for the people God blessed her with along the way.
*****************************************
StoryShare, July 19, 2020, issue.
Copyright 2020 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
