Betelgeuse Bridge

You tell them, Alvarez, old boy; you know how to talk to them. This isn’t my kind of public relations. All I care about is that they get the pitch exactly right, with all the implications and complications and everything just the way they really were.
If it hurts, well, let them yell. Just use your words and get it right. Get it all.
You can start with the day the alien spaceship landed outside Baltimore. Makes you sick to think how we never tumbled, doesn’t it, Alvarez? No more than a hop, skip, and a jet from the Capitol dome, and we thought it was just a lucky accident.
Explain why we thought it was so lucky. Explain about the secrecy it made possible, the farmer who telephoned the news was placed in special and luxurious custody, how a hand-picked cordon of M.P.s paced five square miles off into an emergency military reservation a few hours later, how Congress was called into secret session and the way it was all kept out of the newspapers.
How and why Trowson, my old sociology prof, was consulted once the problem became clear. How he blinked at the brass hats and striped pants and came up with the answer.
Me. I was the answer.
How my entire staff and I were plucked out of our New York offices, where we were quietly earning a million bucks, by a flying squad of the F.B.I. and air-mailed to Baltimore, Honestly, Alvarez, even after Trowson explained the situation to me, I was still irritated. Government hush-hush always makes me uncomfortable. Though I don’t have to tell you how grateful I was for it later.
The spaceship itself was such a big surprise that I didn’t even wet my lips when the first of the aliens slooshed out. After all those years of streamlined cigar shapes the Sunday supplement artists had dreamed up, that colorful and rococo spheroid rearing out of a barley field in Maryland looked less like an interplanetary vessel than an oversized ornament for a what-not table. Nothing that seemed like a rocket jet anywhere.