Dave and his candy bar had
wandered off from the group in order to be alone for a bit. They found a
secluded part of the park and Dave sat down on the grass, holding the candy bar
gently but firmly in his left hand. It was sort of an open area, surrounded by
trees, slightly rounded and maybe twenty feet in diameter…although, being only
six years old, Dave probably didn’t know what a diameter was.
The candy bar
certainly didn’t know.
Had you been in
the clearing with him that day…well, first of all, you’d see something really
weird happen in a minute…but you’d also probably think that Dave was a pretty
typical kid. Certainly he didn’t look all that unusual, and might easily have
blended in with a crowd of quiet children. But it wouldn’t last because, sooner
or later, the other kids would get a bit rambunctious and want to run and play and
make a lot of noise…but not Dave. Dave hardly ever spoke, didn’t like to run
around and make noise, and usually preferred to sit quietly on his own. Not
that he didn’t like the other kids or anything, he just liked sitting quietly
and reading a book or watching a video, or, in this case, eating a candy bar.
The other kids liked Dave all right, but some of them were put off by his
gentle, quiet ways.
Thus isolated,
Dave proceeded to carefully unwrap the candy bar and was about to take the
first bite, when he saw lights in the sky above his head. He looked up and was
understandably surprised to see a spaceship descending from the sky. He watched
in amazement as the spaceship settled down only a few feet from where he was
seated.
When the ship
had landed, a door slid open on one side and a ramp descended. There appeared a
creature which could only be described as an alien. Tall, green, with six long
fingers on each hand (making for a total of twenty-four fingers overall), big
black eyes and legs which looked more like tentacles. It was wearing a blue
outfit and seemed, to Dave at least, to be smiling.
This creature
walked (more like slithered) up to Dave and spoke in a surprisingly friendly
voice: “Greetings, Earth Human. My name is Gygar and I am from the planet Ramzok
many, many lightyears from here. My people and I have been observing this
planet for one thousand geldars, or slightly less than ninety-two of your Earth
years. And, frankly, we have not been happy with what we have seen. Half of you
are starving, while the other half is obese. Ninety-nine percent of you work
like dogs to maintain the lifestyle of the one percent who have all the money.
You go to war with people who have a slightly different interpretation of books
written eons before any of you were ever even born. And the less said about
what you watch on television, the better. We have therefore decided that, for
the good of the universe, your planet will be destroyed.
“We are not,
however, without mercy, which is why I have come here today: To offer your
species one last chance to redeem yourselves. We selected you at random out of
all six and a half billion humans on this planet to be an envoy for all
mankind. If you can give me one good reason not to blow up the Earth, I will
not. So, human, for the sake of all life on this planet, I ask you: why should
the Earth be spared?”
For a moment,
Dave said nothing. It was a lot to take in after all. Suddenly the weight of
the world was resting on his six-year-old shoulders and he wasn’t sure he was
up to it. In fact, he thought seriously about just crying and running away, but
he figured that would probably count as a forfeit and Gygar would blow up the
Earth. So, scrabbling around for an idea, he looked down at his hands. That’s
when a thought occurred to him and he extended his left arm.
Confused, Gygar
opened his hand and allowed the small human to drop something brown and
half-covered by a plastic wrapper in his alien hand. He had never seen anything
like it before, so he wasn’t sure what it was. He looked at it carefully, then
looked down at Dave. Dave mimed eating, explaining to the alien what he was
supposed to do with the candy bar. Gygar shrugged and bit into the chocolate…
And his eyes,
already large, grew wide. And his smile broadened. He licked his lips and took
another bite…and another…and another…
“This is the
most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted!” cried Gygar. “What do you call it? Oh,
wait, it says here on the wrapper…‘Cho-Co-Late?’” He pronounced the ‘O’s and
the ‘A’ wrong, but it was close enough and Dave nodded. “And you say you make
this here on Earth?” Dave nodded. “Well! I think we’d better just take another
look at this whole situation. Thank you, Small Human. Oh, here,” he added,
holding what was left of the candy bar out to Dave. But Dave shook his head.
“You mean I can have it?” Dave nodded. “Wow! Thanks!” With that, Gygar turned
around, got back into his spaceship and took off into the sky.
It was about
this time that Dave was found by his teacher and returned to the group. He had
no way of knowing that after their conversation, Gygar had accessed his ship’s
vast database of information and learned that chocolate needs to be grown at
very precise temperatures and that, of all the planets in civilized space, only
Earth had the necessary conditions to produce the delicious crop.
And that’s how
this quiet little boy saved the entire world and introduced chocolate to the
other end of the galaxy. Next time you see him, say thanks.
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