Marty the janitor took your note with the numbers on it,as well as the watch,but when your claws spasmed involuntarily
and burst out of the glove you'd enclosed them in,he knew immediately you needed to see
the Man.
General Harbottom,leader of the 2018 Mars Mission,was somewhat surprised when a janitor and a teenaged kid burst
into his office,but when you pulled your insect hand out from your shirt
Hardbottoms immediate
response was
to drop the mug of java he was sipping on and say
"Oh"
Ever the professional however,he soon was barking out orders to his underlings,getting doctors to take blood samples from you,snip off the odd insect bristle for analysis and
prepare a cover story for why Ricky Jones,son of
Norm and Meg Jones and grandson of the late
Jonathan Winters,retired Air Force Captain,was suddenly taken sick.
Hours later your parents were rushed onto the Centre in a Deep Space limo,and the three
of you sat in Hardbottoms office while the former astronaut explained things.
He started with that left hand of yours.As the image of a Earth Praying mantis
flashed on the office projection screen Hardbottom explained that the closest genetic
match for the bristle they'd snipped off was a praying mantis.
And no,he didn't know if you were about to turn into a giant female praying mantis.
His experts however were consulting with various emptymologists around the world to
keep that from happening.
Then he flashed on a old image that showed your grandad Jonathon Winters in a space suit,standing beside
a smiling cosmonaut.Behind the two stood the mother of all Proton rockets,atop of which
was a spaceship called Orbitos X.
It seemed in 1966 grandad had been a astronaut on a top secret deep space mission
with the Soviet Union for a orbit to a asteroid a million miles out.
Hardbottom guessed grandad had picked up the 'watch' somewhere along that trip.
And it was obviously not just a watch.
Tests on the thing showed it was 110 million years old,and the General guessed it had lain undisturbed as some alien
articact from a highly advanced insectoid race of aliens,till Captain J Winters
had tromped towards it on the asteroid.
Then it must have shapeshifted to appear to be a fairlty common 1963 Stratochief
watch in a very uncommon place,a asteroid orbiting Earth a million miles away
Hardbottom flashed another slide on the screen,which showed
a brownish grey egg-square shaped object 3 feet by 3 feet in size,sitting on a lab table
in the Centre.
"The Watch in its natural shape" explained Hardbottom
Hardbottom then brought in a woman he explained was the Presidents liason with Deep Space
.
He then looked around the room for bugs and hidden cameras,
"What I'm telling the four of you must never leave this Centre he explained.
Hardbottom flicked a switch and a blurry image of a object
appeared.The twinkling of the starlight showed they were seeing
a deep space telescope image of a object
half again as far from Pluto as Pluto was to the Sun.
"Our scientists estimate its 33 miles across and 99 miles deep.
And its not a asteroid or a planetoid.We believe its a 110 million year old galactic space craft built by the same insect culture
that built the Watch" said the former astronaut.
Genral Hardbottom said these recent developments had completely tossed
the intended mission for the Glenn Shepherd out the window.
He said the boys in planning were now calculating for a 15 year one way trip to that alien space ship,and he wanted you aboard the Glenn Shepherds crew.