A/N: Taking another look at the 1951 film "The Day the Earth Stood Still". Aliens can be creepy - so can humans.

Unidentified Familiar Object

Helen Benson slammed down the receiver on the telephone again. "I honestly don't know why I even bother to answer it anymore," she bemoaned. "You step out of an alien spaceship you've never been in before, and everyone thinks you've got the secrets of the universe in your purse right next to the tissue and spare change."

"Nonsense," Olivia Barley said from the table in the dining room of the Washington D.C. boarding house where they lived. "Everyone knows you weren't carrying a purse when you came out behind that robot thing. I saw it myself on the news like the rest of the world, you and that Mr. Klaatu Carpenter strolling out together."

"She's right through," Olivia's husband George agreed from beside her. "The government kept her for three days trying to get as much information out of her as they could. Even tried hypnosis. That Klaatu fellow didn't exactly leave us a forwarding address where to contact him."

"Like you're going to write him," she scoffed.

"Well, I don't know…I was thinking maybe a Christmas card would be nice." George may or may not have been joking - it was hard to tell with his serious face and tone.

Helen was going to interrupt the couple when a knock came at the door. She went over to it and peered through the peephole, dreading another journalist, fortune teller or government agent with 'one more question'. She pulled back from the door. It was worse.

It was Tom Stevens.

There was a time when the man had proposed to her, and she had considered accepting. As a widow with an eleven year old son, she couldn't expect to get a lot of offers of marriage; however, something about Tom didn't sit quite right with her. He had a job and he seemed to get along with Bobby okay, but sometimes she got the feeling he thought of the boy as more of a hindrance than someone to help raise as a loving stepfather should.

The man knocked louder. "Come on Helen, I need to talk," his voice carried through the door. It seemed he didn't take 'no' over the phone as the final answer.

He certainly had changed his tone when Bobby came home and described how he had followed the Mr. Carpenter as the stranger shortly entered the spaceship after walking to the landing site. And things really took a turn when Tom had found the diamond in Mr. Carpenter's room and had it appraised. Blinded by ambition to become the toast of the town for his "connection" to the spaceman, Tom had sold out Mr. Carpenter's secret to the military and they had killed the alien shortly after. Then the robot, Gort by name, retrieved Klaatu's body and brought it back to the ship before reviving him to give the Earth his warning before leaving.

"Helen, PLEASE open up," the voice pleaded.

"You might as well let him in," Mr. Krull said with a harrumph. He had been trying to mind his own business, but the noise was getting to be too much for him to concentrate on the newspaper. "We're not going to get any peace otherwise. You just can't count on an insurance salesman to go away when he isn't wanted."

Helen sighed and almost let out a curse before acquiescing and opening the door. "Hello Tom," she said coldly.

Tom let himself through the door and closed it behind him. "Helen, I'm so sorry for anything I've said. It's just this spaceship thing has got everyone crazy and…" he started rambling before he paused and seemed to notice the other people nearby for the first time. "I'm sorry, can we continue this discussion upstairs?"

"Certainly not!" the elderly Mrs. Crockett said sternly as she entered from the kitchen. "No unchaperoned visits upstairs. We have a perfectly good porch out front where you can sit and talk."

Helen was surprised when Tom took her hand and led her to the door. She had assumed he was going to try to persuade her in his own way, but going outside meant he really DID want to talk. They sat on the bench out front and Helen asked, "What do you want, Tom?"

"Helen, I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am for how I behaved."

"Let's see, you got in a big huff anytime I mentioned Mr. Carpenter as though he was trying to court me. You took that diamond out of his room. I asked you not to tell anyone about Mr. Carpenter and you went right ahead and called out the military on our visitor, who promptly got shot…AGAIN…for his trouble. The only reason he's alive right now – assuming he IS still alive – is that their medicine is far more advanced than ours."

"I promise I'll never not listen to you again, Helen." The man sounded desperate. "You don't know what it's like without you in my life."

"And Bobby?"

"Bobby? Well, uh, of course Bobby too. We just haven't really had a chance to bond together as a family, that's all. You'll see once we get married everything will work out just fine."

"It certainly hasn't so far. Listen Tom, I want romance the same as the next person. But you just don't pawn off your kid to a stranger the first chance you get in order to go on a date. You had just met Mr. Carpenter, and you were all gung-ho with him watching Bobby."

"And you weren't?"

"Um," Helen said as she bit her lip. It was true that she had let Mr. Carpenter spend time with the boy after just meeting him – but there was something about the man that shouted 'harmless'. Of course, they had been told that it was Gort who was the true danger, but only as a means of self-defense. "I had met him a little earlier, and the other boarders had monitored them that day as well. Still, that was one night – you can't expect it to be like that all the time."

"We'll get a proper sitter in the future - maybe the Bartlets can watch him."

"You mean the BARLEYs. That's not the point, Tom. I think you're always going to put your career first and me and Bobby are just going to have to settle as something of an afterthought," Helen said sternly. "You're always going to be trying to climb to the top of the pyramid, no matter how you get there."

"How can I provide for my family if I don't put my career first? Don't you want to be the toast of the town? Washington DC is as big as it gets."

"No, I do NOT want that. I don't want to be in the spotlight, or meet only the right people, or use other folks just to build myself up. I just want a simple, happy life is all. Sorry Tom, but I think we're just too different for our own good."

"Well, if that's the way you feel about it, okay."

Somewhere inside her head, a little alarm went off. Tom gave up too easily. There must be something else, but she was going to make him say it instead of trying to guess what. She stood up and headed toward the door to go back inside. "Good luck on finding someone that wants the same things you do, Tom." She opened the door and went inside.

Tom bolted up from the bench and squeezed inside behind her. "Thanks Helen, I appreciate that. There is one other thing."

As she suspected. At least now the others could hear from the next room. "Yes?"

"It's only a small thing. You remember that diamond I got from Carpenter?" he asked.

"You mean the one you stole?"

Tom winced a little. "I didn't know it was a diamond," he said, sidestepping the issue of theft. "There was something special about it - I had it appraised by three different jewelers. They all offered to buy it, but the government took it from me to study."

"Gee Tom, it's too bad they took what you stole."

Mrs. Crockett appeared with a cup of coffee which she handed to Tom. "If you're going to stand around, you might as well have something to drink," she said before disappearing back into the kitchen.

Tom drank the coffee absent-mindlessly. "They didn't offer me a penny for them. Said it was a national security issue, and they commandeered it."

"Really? What did they discover when they analyzed them?"

"I don't know, they wouldn't tell me. They did ask if I had any more. I figure if I had those two that Bobby had, I could make a deal with them. I could set us up..."

"No. I don't even know where they are now, and even if I did I wouldn't give them to you. Mr. Carpenter is gone, along with Gort and the spaceship. The Earth is left to itself now, to put our house in order and eventually join some more civilized neighbors out there somewhere," she said while moving her hand in an arc over her head. "Professor Barnhardt and his fellow scientists are hard at work to bring us into a new age. I suggest you reconsider your priorities just as everyone else must. Goodbye, Tom."

"Helen, maybe just one then. Think about where..."

"Oh, Mr. Stevens?" Mrs. Crockett said as she came back into the room and took the empty cup from Tom. "I can tell you where at least a little of one of those gems is."

"Yes?" Tom asked, surprised but eager. "Where?"

"You just drank it. I ground up a little and put it in your coffee. Don't worry, I called the nice men at the Army and they're sending someone over right away to get you tested. I'm sure they'll do whatever it takes to find it."

The color in Tom's face drained. "Um..." he said, before practically running into the door before opening it and dashing out into the night. They could hear the tires from his convertible screech as he drove off.

Helen started laughing. "Oh, Mrs. Crockett - you couldn't possibly have done that. Diamonds are much too hard to grind up without the most sophisticated tools!"

The older lady blushed a little. "Forgive me for telling the lie, but I don't care for that Mr. Stevens at all. I felt that we should rid ourselves of him, but didn't want to be rude."

"Good riddance to bad rubbish," Mr. Krull added as he put down his paper. "I think you were better off with that Mr. Carpenter."

"At least he didn't sell insurance," Helen joked. "But you'll excuse me, that wore me out. I'm going upstairs."

"Certainly dear. We'll try to keep the noise down," Olivia said. Helen looked at the three older residents and wondered if they were ever capable of creating a ruckus. Never underestimate people of a quiet nature, she admitted to herself as she said her goodnights and headed upstairs. She passed by Bobby's room, where he was working on his math homework. "It's about time for you to put that away and get ready for bed," she told him.

"Okay. I'm kinda stuck right now, anyway. Sure wish Mr. Carpenter was here to help me again. He was real good at math."

"He certainly was if he helped Professor Barnhardt with that complicated math problem. You can ask the teacher tomorrow. Say Bobby, do you have those diamonds he gave you in a safe spot?"

"Sure do." Bobby got up and went to his bed and pulled out the electric train layout underneath. He reached into the hopper car on the train and extracted the two diamonds. "Say, they look different. Almost like they're shining a little bit," he said as he handed them to his mother.

She took the gems and held them in her hand. They did look a little different. She cupped her hands together to cover the diamonds in darkness, and there was a definite faint glow to them. She handed them back to Bobby. "They must be really special diamonds. We don't have the kind that glow here on Earth. Now put them away and get ready for bed. I'll check on you in a few minutes." She turned and headed to her bedroom, feeling a little peculiar.

There was something Klaatu had told her before they emerged from the ship and he gave his departure speech. His people did indeed use precious stones as currency, but just as the people of Earth had learned to use diamonds as a cutting tool the gems he had given Bobby had another purpose as well. They were tuned in a way, he said, to the drive unit on his ship. While sitting on the Earth or flying away, they appeared clear and normal. But if the distance was decreasing, they would begin to glow red - faint at first, then brighter as the drive grew nearer to the stones. Helen had seen a definite, faint red glow.

She didn't know why exactly that made her feel so happy, but it did. It had felt like the Earth had stopped spinning the day Bobby's father Robert was killed in the war.

Now it felt like it was spinning again as it should.

The End

A/N: I had seen this movie many years ago, and was able to catch it again recently. I forgot how I didn't care for the Tom Stevens character, so I felt he needed a little comeuppance. Or at least make him sweat a little.

I never watched the reboot, so I don't know WHAT I would have written if I had watched that one instead.