The flying saucer hovered over the earth silently. That silence never set right with its owner. Odin just felt that one of the most powerful and advanced vehicles in all the universe should make some sort of noise. He had no inclination to rewrite the laws of physics just to pipe theme music into the vacuum of space. He had a friend who did that, but that just wasn't Odin's way. A simple electronic hum or a gentle rumble in the ship’s interior would have pleased Odin’s sensibilities. Of course, the sufficiently advanced technology which powered the vessel was too efficient to either hum or rumble. All Odin did to address the issue was engineering one sound. He introduced an artificial swooshing sound into the maneuvering system which swooshed whenever the ship maneuvered – or the sound wooshed whenever the ship swooshed depending on preferred description.

Odin’s drones pointed out the inherent problem with the swoosh. The ship’s primary function required stealth. The ship was built to sneak up on humans in order to observe them in their natural state directly. Then they would abduct the right humans without panicking those left behind. A noticeable swoosh made the observation unreliable and the quiet abduction difficult. Odin knew that his drones were right and didn’t argue against them. He could redesign and overhaul the ship to compensate in some logical way, buuuut the swoosh had been illogical in the first place. It was just for aesthetics. As a compromise with himself, Odin built a toggle switch so that he could turn the swoosh back on when he wanted.

When Candide was abducted, the swoosh was turned off. Odin brooded. Even within his own ship where he was all powerful, he still couldn’t seem to get his way.

A ding rang through the ship.

A drone raised his large head in surprise. From his seat at the engineering station on the bridge, the drone looked around with large black and unblinking eyes, searching for the source of the ding. “I’ve never heard that sound before. I’ll run a system diagnostic immediately. The swoosh might be malfunctioning.”

Odin ordered, “Don’t bother. It’s supposed to do that.”

“Lord Odin?”

“That noise was not the swoosh, Huginn. It was the ding. The ding is a timer which rings after a temporal unit has passed. If the ding is not reset, it will ring again after an additional ten temporal units have passed. Then it goes off after one hundred cycles and then one thousand cycles. That ding hasn’t gone off in the last one thousand cycles. You haven't been around long enough to hear it the last time it dinged.”

“If I may ask, Lord Odin, what is the purpose of the ding?”

“It’s a timer, Huginn. I reset it when something goes right. I’ve been waiting a thousand cycles for something to go right.”

Huginn the drone considered this for a moment. Then it observed, “Well, the ding works. Perhaps that is something which went right.”

Odin winced. According to a legend told throughout a hundred galaxies, Lord Odin held great admiration for irony, and irony hated him in return. The wince froze into a scowl. After a micro-unit passed, his face relaxed. “I’m so hard up for an anything to go right, I will take what I can get. Reset the ding.”

Huginn quickly searched the ship’s command interface for the appropriate command, found it, and reset the ding as instructed. “Lord Odin, the ding should ring exactly one unit from now.”

Odin brooded deeper. “Now I have to dread an upcoming early reminder that nothing has gone right for a unit. Speaking of things which don’t work well, did the abduction crew manage to catch a firefighter yet?”

“Affirmative,” answered a second drone without looking up. Its slender and graceful fingers flew across the control apparatus as it spoke. “The subject is in the observation chamber now. Would you like to remotely observe, Lord Odin?”

Odin glared at the drone, Muninn. For a nano-unit, Odin did not like the way that the drone looked at him. Then Odin remembered that all of his drones had compound eyes which never exactly looked at anything specific but rather took in everything without focusing. Odin’s eyes although hidden behind dark sunglasses did focus and glared with intensity at Muninn. The master grumbled, “No, I will go there myself. I want to get out of this bridge for a while.”

“Yes sir,” Muninn and Huginn answered in unison.

At first, fearless Candide did not realize that he should have been terrified. The handsome youth turned his handsome head back and forth as the hansom brain inside tried to remember walking into the strange room. He could not remember. He grasped for the memory that he never had like a fisherman gathering water in a net.

Skinny and broad-headed creatures milled all through the room around him. Perhaps it was their baldness that seemed off-putting to Candide. Maybe it was their black glossy eyes that vexed him. Maybe their white as paint complexion or noseless faces made his skin crawl.

No, he realized, it was their nudity which troubled him. Candide had witnessed great quantities of nudity while tending farm animals at the cult compound in which he was raised, but he never felt at ease with it. He even felt exposed whenever he had pondered that he was nude underneath his own clothing.

A strange naked creature strode closer to Candide. The unfathomable entity carried a clipboard. Clipboards were rare in cult compound to the point of being exotic. Clipboards had always been a symbol of all which stood wrong with the outside world to hear it from Cult Leader Thunder-ten-Tronckh. The very sight of the clipboard turned Candide’s emotion of unease to fear.

“Human, do not be afraid,” the inhuman thing spoke to Candide. The command had the opposite effect of its intent.

The creature continued speaking thus, “You are aboard a ship which flies through space. We call this ship, Asgard. You have been selected from all lifeforms in your community to represent your planet. It is a great honor.”

Candide spoke only silence. The hero backed away from the clipboard like a cat who has learned of its destiny to go to the vet.

Another inhuman creature spoke saying, “Maybe you grabbed the wrong one.”

“I did not,” answered the clipboard-wielding monster. “We were supposed to collect a firefighter. I personally observed this specimen performing such duties.”

“Did it put out any flames?”

“No, it ran into a combusting structure and rescued a quadruped.”

Candide’s keen senses took in how the creatures did not raise their volume when they yelled. In fact, the impossible creatures did not move their mouths when they spoke. They didn’t even use any words that he knew -- yet in a way he could not explain -- he knew what each of them meant when they spoke without speaking.

The impossible thing which did not bare a clipboard said, “Look at its tool. That is no fire extinguisher. This specimen is clearly a lumberjack.”

Candide looked down upon his own hand and lo beheld that he was grasped his beloved axe. Why oh why was he armed with only a fireman’s axe, a tool, when being threatened with a far more frightening weapon, a clipboard?

“I’ve been studying it since we arrived in this system.” The creature turned towards Candide and asked, “Hey human, tell them you fight fires.” The creature pointed its clipboard at Candide in a very threatening manner. The youth dared not argue.

Candide nodded his handsome head in affirmation.

Odin floated into the observation chamber, where specimens were observed, inspected, and cataloged upon arriving on board Asgard. Ten drones were present. Two were arguing in front of the specimen. Three were watching the computers collect data from the specimen. Two were discussing what they would eat for lunch. Another was already eating its lunch. One was playing a video game at its work station. The last was staring at an empty wall. None paid Odin any attention when he entered.

Odin yelled (telepathically), “Drones, your master entered the room.”

All drones nodded their head in agreement of this fact.

Odin asked, “What did I tell you?”

A drone called Jokul answered, “You told us to abduct a firefighter from Earth 32092. We got him.” It waved a clipboard at the specimen's general direction, and the specimen flinched.

A drone from behind Jokul yelled, “Unless this one is mostly lumberjack!”

Odin ignored this answer. He asked, “What do I always say?”

Jokul answered, “With great power comes great sarcasm.”

Odin said, “No, I only say that infrequently. What do I always say which is relevant to this situation?”

A drone named Harald stepped up to Jokul’s side and answered, ‘You always say, “Look busy when the boss shows up,” Lord Odin.’

Odin confirmed, “Close enough.”

A voice from the ship’s intercom system said, “Correct answer, I am resetting the ding.”

Odin shouted, “Huginn! We need to have a conversation about your standards!”

Harald told Odin, “Sir, we might have something to celebrate after all. The scans taken of this specimen are extraordinary. The specimen scored top marks in most categories and well above average in the rest. It’s as close to a perfect human as I have ever seen.”

“Alright,” Odin said, “I would like to meet this firefighter. The rest of you, try to look busy.”

Candide’s terror changed into a morbid fascination. A new figure had entered which drew the attention of the inhuman creatures. Without any large black eyes focused on him, the youth thought that perhaps – just perhaps he could summon the courage move again or breath. He inhaled successfully.

He pondered whether the inhuman had hexed him to prevent his motions. Then, he attempted movement. He lifted an arm and moved his axe behind his back.

A speck of color caught the young firefighter’s attention like a moth to a bug zapper. Inhumans parted to allow the color through. The new figure had come into view and drew closer to Candide’s table. The figure rode atop a silent flying disc the size of a large pizza pan. A dark and opaque visor hid the apparition's eyes, but Candide sensed instinctively that a monstrous eye was focused upon him.

The youth heard a swoosh. He felt something like movement but very much unlike movement. It felt less like movement and more like -- wrong. It was the wrongness which one feels in ones stomach when one bites and swallows wax fruit.

“Hello human,” said the figure to Candide. The figure’s tiny mouth did move, and Candide’s ears heard true words when it spoke. The accent seemed peculiar yet the words were perfectly formed. It was the perfection of the words which made them queer. Up close, Candide’s eyes confirmed what his brain had refused to accept. His captor, the master of the stark and sterile prison, the leader of the pale inhuman crew, was no larger than a loaf of his mother's fresh bread. It wore only the visor. A small and flat snout help up that visor, and pointed ears supported them from the back. Cloven hooves poked out from underneath a broad belly. The alien was a boar, a small green piglet.