THE ALIENS WHO DISLIKED ALBUM-ORIENTED ROCK

Justin’s new hire, Tim, called back petulantly from down the hall. “Badly.”

Justin returned to the production room, where Tim was seated in front of a reel-to-reel. “What’s that now?”

“That the new Floyd?”

“Yep.”

“Not in stores yet, is it?”

“Nope. Pay attention,” Justin said, pointing to the tape in Tim’s hands, which he was creasing.

“Why can’t I be in music processing?” Tim whined.

“Three months minimum in production. That’s the protocol here. You start at the bottom like everybody else, and after you’ve proved you can do the basics we let you move to the more difficult task of listening to all the new music before everybody else in the world gets a chance to. It’s a thankless job, but someone has to make sure none of the songs we broadcast says ‘fuck’.” Justin smiled, then returned to lecture mode. “What order are the heads in?”

Tim sighed and pointed one by one at the magnetic heads on the tape machine. “Erase, Record, Play,” he said.

“E-R-P. Very good. Now let’s make some splices.”

Tim looked up suddenly. “What’s that?”

The on-air monitors were silent. There was no music. There was no anything.

“I’ll be right back,” Justin said, and he ran out of the room and down the hall to Master Control.

Tim sighed. He toyed with a razor blade. He unreeled a length of splicing tape and cut it off. Then he took a felt-tip pen and wrote CONFIDENTIAL! on the tape and stuck it to the wall. As he did so, he could hear The Beatles’ “Get Back” coming from the on-air monitor. He stood up and leaned out the door to see if Justin was on his way back. He sat back down again.

He tipped his chair way, way back until he was about to fall and caught himself at the last moment. After a few more minutes Tim gave up and left the production room to visit master control. He got there just in time to see Justin’s feet as he disappeared out the open window, not down but straight up.

Tim rushed to the window, horrified. There was no one up in the sky. There was no one on the ground. He turned to look at the room. It was empty. The monitors were quiet. He faced the window again. The sun was breaking through in more places now.

Dark patches moved slowly in and out of each other in the sky. The sunlight highlighted a telephone pole just outside the second-story window.

Underneath it a power line was swaying back and forth.

“Hey!”

Tim spun around. Orville, the station manager, was opposite him. “Jesus,” Tim cried.

“So you’re just standing there?” Orville said. “Great. How long has it been dead air?” he said, rushing to the console. Let It Be was spinning on the turntable, the cartridge drawing endless circles around the inner groove.

“I – I didn’t – ”

“Yeah,” Orville said petulantly, picking up the needle and dropping it between two tracks. He grit his teeth. “You new here?”

“Yes, but – ” Tim said.

“Well I suggest you talk with Justin about getting properly trained. This is a broadcast radio station. You know – sounds? Music? Traffic reports? That kind of thing. We can get you a radio to take home and listen to after work if you like. Can you tell me one thing? Where do you people come from?” Orville’s voice was rising. There was an audible buzzing in the room.

“What trade school do you people go to where they don’t teach this stuff? I’m sick to fucking death of it. In fact,” Orville said, now shouting over the resounding hum that filled the room, “you can go home. Just go home!” Tim could just make out the voice of Paul McCartney on the speakers, who began to sing “The Long and Winding Road”.

“Just get the fuck out!” Orville screamed over the now roaring noise. He opened the window and was instantly sucked out and up into the blue blue sky. The noise went away instantly.

Outside water dripped quietly on kids riding skateboards down the alley.

Tim turned around slowly and retreated as quietly as possible to the production room. After a while, the needle once again reached the center of the record and all was silent. As the afternoon progressed the album cuts kept turning into full album sides as the station employees were abducted one by one from the control room after cueing up their choice of popular artists.

It wasn’t long before the monitors turned quiet and stayed quiet. Tim, the last one left in the station, locked himself in the production room and continued his editing exercises. He filled two fifteen-minute reels of quarter-inch tape with classical music, keeping the monitors down really low just to be safe; but even so he retained a fleeting sense of dread, as if he were being laughed at from a distance. And Tim could not have known that in fact he was being laughed at, as a small group of navy-blue-colored aliens in a spacecraft shaped like a bar of soap 300 miles above the Earth whooped and hollered and fell off their chairs laughing, knowing as they did that Tim was recording over something that was already on those quarter-inch tapes. Tim’s tape, they knew, had been recycled from a one-inch videotape, and without knowing it Tim had just recorded over the top quarter of a third-generation dub of a Danish pornographic movie, which the aliens were enjoying almost as much as the whole thing.

SECOND MORAL: Sometimes you get aliens who don’t like the AOR format, in which case you’re screwed.