Of Stardust and Ditchweeds, a play fragment.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

Number Two: Commander of the Alien Craft.

Number Four: Subordinate, presumably a "think-tank" person, high ranking intelligence officer.

SETTING: On The Ship, having just taking aboard some reluctant and confused humans.

(FADE IN)

Number Two: We’ve stuntified the light barrier, traversed across the endless void, defied time and circumstance.  Exploration budget.  Military budget.  Our very best among us sent across the stars.  Did all that to hide among them, the earth people.  And eat them.

Number Four:  Hey Number Two.

Number Two: Yes.

Number Four: Rabbit Stew.  A Warner Brother’s cartoon.

Number Two: What are you on about?  Explain.

Number Four:  Well it goes like this.  Seven and I were watching the old cartoons, the ones where they try to cook the rabbit.

Number Two: Television?  Your idle hours paid off for our cause?

Number Four: Yes, indeed.  They would have a big cauldron of water sitting on a roaring fire.

Number Two: Boiled would be good, yes.  Human soup.  Just force them in, the beasts.  A two cadre strategy.

Number Four: Nope, nope.  Bloodless and surprisingly without violence, you see.  That’s the thing.  They didn’t just toss the protesting rabbit into the stew.  That would have been too easy, or seemed too easy.

Number Two:  It would have been violent to just toss him in and dunk his little bunny ears into the boiling water.

Number Four: Well, it was a kid’s show.  It’s Shakespearean as you say, a bloodless snaring, and the rub, the very rub….

Number Two: Caribbean?  Creole?  Bourbon Street rub?

Number Four: They make the bunny decide.  He has to willingly choose to climb into the stew pot.  That’s the devilish brilliance of the thing.  He’s given the power of choice, and he, as the earth people say, is self-destructive enough to jump in and let the water get hotter and hotter still, the way humans so often are self-destructive and oblivious to obvious harms.

Number Two: I like this innovation.

Number Four:  This way uses not even one Cadre of the military.  Barely even a skeleton crew of guards in our kennels.

Number Two: They didn’t always know to pluck diamonds, those people.  This ‘least resistance’: I like the doctrine.

Number Four: Of course, not needing the soldiers and guards here, leaves us a bigger portion of Human Stew.

Number Two: The absurd brilliance of the thing, being both intelligently devised, and then set before intellectual ruffians, a kind of clockwork ineptitude.

Number Four: The very dust underneath the great cornerstone, Number Two, tasked and set to bring it off however might be possible.

Number Two: The very dust among even greater things.

Number Four: See how dust collects and becomes more and more bothersome.  Witness time’s discretion.  It is an ancient foil across the pictures of the old emperor, earth dust.

Number Two: You’ll earn a promotion, yet, but for the time being, extra work would only cut into your television time, and it seems Earth television is where you get your best ideas.

Number Four: I watched Scrooge on TBS.  I’m your own Tiny Tim to be carried through the streets on your shoulders as you expound.

Number Two: Are we paying you to sit around getting your best ideas from Earthling television?

Number Four: And this too, dignified and brilliant in its simplicity, Number Two.  The empty programming slots that would come along and feed the empire for decades.

Number Two: I’ll have to keep an eye on you, too, because I see a streak of brilliance in you, too, little geode.  He of the empty hours that saved the economy of the star empire, securing a very billions-strong new food supply.