"How many times do we have to make contact with you people until you get the hang of this?" the alien asked.
"Hey, take it easy," Joe snipped.
"You were supposed to meet us back at the abduction pad at oh five hundred. We don't have all day, you know." The orange man was not happy. Had his species not evolved a built-in clock behind the left ear, he might have been anxiously glancing at his wrist.
"I thought I was dreaming," Joe attempted miserably to defend himself.
"Flakkon Farvolg!" the alien cursed. His own mother would have blushed. "It was a dream, you idiot! That's how we make contact!"
Now that, Joe thought, was rather unfair. The little orange men in his dream weren't this rude. "Don't you think it would have been more effective to, I don't know, mail a letter?"
"I don't have time for this," the alien blurted. He grabbed Joe's pants leg with his little orange hands and started tugging, presumably in the direction of the abduction pad. His several pounds of weight couldn't budge Joe's 180-pound body, but Joe decided to give him some slack. He didn't really feel like finishing his jog anyway. Besides, he was curious what an abduction pad looked like.
"Isn't an 'abduction pad' a bit of an oxymoron?" Joe asked. "Aren't abductions supposed to be a little more spontaneous? What if I kept running? Would you have had to move the abduction pad, or would you have to bring me all the way back to the original abduction pad? What if I didn't want to go the abduction pad?"
"Then I would have had to use this." The alien opened his four fingers and revealed a small metallic box, not vastly different from Joe's television remote control. As innocuous as the box was, Joe felt dimly that he should have kept his trap shut.
A flash of yellow light escaped from the box. Joe wondered if the alien had just taken his picture. He stopped wondering, and passed out.
The last thing Joe saw before his vision went black was the alien adjusting the bow tie on his tuxedo. "Why a tuxedo?" Joe thought, and drifted to sleep.
