Had  Lee over for dinner and a movie, sort of. It was a Twilight Zone marathon on TV, and what did we see? ‘To Serve Man’. Oh gawd, Lee nearly turned  white. A bit too familiar a tale for him after  our experience with Zar as we came to call him later on.

Not that our guest was a human eating alien like on the show. No he was far worse. Hurt him in any way, and his Botulism life force would have destroyed mankind. He’d even tested that ability  on one of our crewmen. Poor Foster never had a chance when 'Zar' used a 'paper cut' to infect my crewman. No doubt he had our annihilation  in mind from the moment we brought his capsule aboard.

He even contaminated some compartments with explosive gas. Morton and Ski investigated and discovered the hatches were fuzed shut.  We had to dive the boat at a deep angle to force the gas away from the hatch they could escape from and sealed it off.

I’d had to kill him, whatever he was. He’d claimed to be human. But something in me rather still doubts it, despite the ruins of his ancient civilization.

After I’d had Lee remove all of my important papers to his cabin, with a bit of trickery, primitive though it was, Zar was consumed in a fire of his own making when he used his blaster weapon at me, unknown to him, safely tucked behind the sealed off vent.

There was nothing left, as Doc had advised. Not even ashes or bone. Nothing.  Still, the scientist in me would have liked to have  examined the remains if there’d been any. But for our protection and that of the world, it just wasn’t possible.

As for his companions, still encapsulated in the undersea ruins, well, I helped trigger even more earthquakes to cover them, sure that not even tons of rock would  crack any open. We’d had enough trouble opening Zar’s capsule.   

One thing though, even though the official log, in this case, was  seen by the President, it’s doubtful any new Commander in Chief will want to uncover those cans of worms in the future either, so to speak.

As for the Twilight Zone, Lee’s pizza had gotten cold while he ran some soothing cold water on his face, then  we happily began to switch channels. First it was some old TV show about a family lost in space, but  that was too close to being an ‘alien’ kind of show, then we came upon some docudrama about crab fishing and settled on that. Got me to thinking, perhaps we can nab a few the next time we’re out diving…