The Day The Space Weevils Came To Town.

It was the day the Space Weevils came to town.

Me and Gramma Gamma had been working the defense station atop the Howard County Public Library, manning the Photon Cannons in the event of another incident like the one we had last year, which you probably read about in the Reader's Digest. Anyway, there we still were.

"Sure is hot," said Gramma Gamma. She adjusted the pins in her bun, which was sticky even on a dry day, with a gluey sucking sound. "And humid," she said.

I looked at the thermo-meter. Ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit. I looked at the hygro-meter. Humidity: 110%. I looked at the baro-meter just as it turned from Change to Sudden Death.

"Yep," I said.

And then came the Space Weevils.

There was a distant rumble on the horizon and what would have been a cloud of dust if not for the 110% humidity, and from out of the haze and brown came a Greyhound Bus with CHARTER writ on its forehead, if buses can be said to have foreheads.

"Can buses be said to have foreheads?" I asked Gramma Gamma.

"I believe so," she said.

The bus grumbled up Main Street past the Pickle Hotel and Ross's Best Ever Grocery Store and stopped at a red light and finally parked in front of the Convention Center. The doors of the bus opened and gaped darkness. And from out the darkness swarmed —

"Space Weevils!" I said.

"Aw," said Gramma Gamma. "You young scrap. You wouldn't know a Space Weevil from another thing. They might be Egyptian Alfalfa Weevils. Or dogs."

I grabbed my binoculars and focused them on the swarming critters. "Well, they're teensy tiny and they're wearing the teensy tiny space-suits with the antenna on and everything."

She put on her half-moon glasses to take a squint at the street. "Okay, so maybe they are," she acknowledged.

"What do we do about 'em, Gramma?" I said, fingering the trigger of my thirty terawatt Photon Cannon.

Gramma Gamma coughed and lit a cigarette. "Probably nothing," she said.

And we didn't. The Space Weevils visited the Historical Society, caught a show (the matinee of THE FANTASTICKS, which I thought rather good), took pictures of each other in front of the statue of what's-his-name that is in front of the Town Hall, stopped in at the Automat for dinner and finally swarmed back aboard the bus and roared off into the sunset at about eight-fifteen.

Along about nine up through the roof trap-door came Edward Wilmot, features editor of the HOWARD COUNTY REPORTER. He was chewing on a candy cigarette.

"Got anything to say about the Invasion of the Space Weevils?" he said.