
Mrs. Baker finished writing up the reports of her third-grade class. They had predictably seen several things in her picture of the moon. Kerri saw a Teddy Bear in the moon; Bill saw a robot in the moon. Marcia saw an elephant in the moon. That one took her a few minutes to visualize.
Then there was Jason.
Jason saw a “deformed Mickey Mouse with terrifying white-hot eyes aiming directly at Amilee’s house, ready to burn her and her entire family to a blackened crisp.”
The fact was, she’d been worried about Jason for some time. He said things that scared the other children more and more. At first, she wrote it off to imagination. Then she assumed that Jason liked Amilee, and his little horror stories were a third grader’s way of showing it. But this? This not only sent Amilee into tears but terrified most of her class to the point that it was necessary to send them outside for an unscheduled recess while she kept Jason in for a chat.
The chat went the way she expected it to, and Mrs. Baker knew it was time to involve her superiors. She picked up her cell phone and dialed the number for the Andromedan commander. It was a mistake to put a tactical scout into the form of an eight-year-old boy. They needed to replace him with someone who didn’t chronically tell the truth to these humans. If not, the entire invasion would fail.