'Eve,' said Adam, 'I'm not exactly convinced that they will trust us. I mean, if I were receiving such a message from an obvious alien origin, I might be tempted to be think it is a synthetic voice generated by the aliens who have efficiently studied us.'

'Yeah, yeah. More probably, the Earthmen have all the necessary means to analyse your voice and confirm you are indeed human. Which leave only one choice left: you have been brainwashed. And if you think about it, it might not be that far from reality.'

'Ok. I see I am worrying too much about this message.'

'Yes. We've talked about it over and over. You're doing it for the benefit of the entire human kind.'

'And to bring peace to the galaxy,' he pointed.

'Yes.'

'How long till we receive an answer?'

'I already told you, with our current position and speed, a message on any wavelength should take about eight months to return to us. Compared to the few centuries we'll have to wait until we physically come back to Earth, it is instantaneous for all it matters. Now, get prepared before I get bored and decide to record it myself.'

Adam cleared his throat and still unsure glanced one last time at Eve before finally grabbing the microphone.

'People of Earth, speaking is Adam, from the first interstellar ship you sent ages ago to hypothetically settle on a wonderful new world for the humans. We are alive. Despite the fighter you sent to disintegrate us. And the fighter, well, he's been destroyed. Not by us of course - we had no means for that - but by the very aliens you did not want us to meet.'

'So, in truth, I, and Eve beside me, owe them our lives. That said, we understood your point and the risk we carried for the rest of the human race. But we decided that this risk was counterbalanced by the opportunity to contact an alien race. And we succeeded. That was probably the only time we could make a choice in this whole story.'

'Now the good news is that the aliens are not the arachnoid psychopaths you would have expected as an arch-enemy. They're certainly strange and difficult to grasp, but from all we know, they're decent folks. They cared for us, up there in the void, and they do care for their people back home. They're of course curious about the humans, which I believe should be reciprocal.'

'All this to say that there is a small flotilla coming towards the stellar system. Actually we're part of it, they are towing our ship along. So we may see Earth again after all. We're told that their objective was just observation. I gather we're kind of a religious or scientific enigma to them. Obviously, a word given is not enough to fully trust someone, but you need to start somewhere. That's why I'm helping in doing the intermediary here.'

'As a human, my gut feeling is that they are indeed visiting and not invading. In fact, I doubt they have anything more than knowledge to extract from the Earth. At least, they don't feed on humans.'

'Anyway, their message is simple: Don't shoot.'