Leslie Mothershed hurriedly packed up his cameras and headed for Switzerland. He knew—he really knew—that this was the break he had been looking for. At last the idiots were going to recognize his talents. He rented a car in Geneva and traveled around the country taking pictures of Swiss chalets, waterfalls, and snow-capped peaks. He photographed sunrises and sunsets and farmers working in the fields. And then, in the middle of all that, fate had stepped in and changed his life. He was on his way to Bern when his motor failed. He pulled over to the side of the highway, furious. Why me? Mothershed moaned. Why do these things always happen to me? He sat there fuming, thinking about the precious time lost and how expensive it would be to have his car towed. Fifteen kilometers behind him was the village of Thun. I’ll get a tow from there, Mothershed thought. That shouldn’t cost too much.
He flagged down a passing gasoline truck. “I need a tow truck,” Mothershed explained. “Could you stop at a garage in Thun and have them come and get me?”
The truck driver shook his head. “It’s Sunday, mister. The closest garage that’s open will be in Bern.”
“Bern? That fifty kilometers from here. It will cost me a fortune.”
The truck driver grinned. “Ja. There they get you by the Sundays.” He started to drive on.
“Wait.” It was difficult to get the words out. “I’ll—I’ll pay for a tow truck from Bern.”
“Gut. I will have them send someone out.”
Leslie Mothershed sat cursing in his disabled car. All I needed was this, he thought bitterly. He had already spent much too much money on film, and now he would have to pay some bloody thief to tow him to a garage. It took almost two interminable hours for the tow truck to arrive. As the mechanic started to attach the cable from his truck to the car, there was a flash of light from across the highway, followed by a loud explosion, and Mothershed looked up to see what appeared to be a bright object falling out of the sky. The only other traffic on the highway was a tour bus that had pulled to a stop in back of his car. The passengers from the bus were hurrying toward the scene of the crash. Mothershed hesitated, torn between his curiosity and his desire to move on. He turned and followed the bus passengers across the highway. When he reached the scene of the accident, he stood there transfixed. Holy God, he thought. It’s unreal. He was staring at a flying saucer. Leslie Mothershed had heard about flying saucers and had read about them, but he had never believed they existed. He gaped at it, awed by the eerie spectacle. The shell had ripped open, and he could see two bodies inside, small, with large skulls, sunken eyes, no ears and almost no chins, and they seemed to be wearing some kind of silver metallic suits.
The group from the tour bus was standing around him staring in horrified silence. The man next to him fainted. Another man turned away and vomited. An elderly priest was clutching his beads and mumbling incoherently.
“My God,” someone said. “It’s a flying saucer!”
And that was when Mothershed had his epiphany. A miracle had fallen into his lap. He—Leslie Mothershed—was on the spot with his cameras to photograph the story of the century! There was not a magazine or newspaper in the world that would reject the photographs he was about to take. A coffee-table book about Switzerland? He almost laughed aloud at the idea. He was about to astonish the whole world. All the television talk shows would be begging from him, but he would do Robin Leach’s show first. He would sell his photographs to the London Times, the Sun, the Mail, the Mirror—to all the English newspapers, and to the foreign papers and magazines—Le Figaro and Paris-Match, Oggi and Der Tag. Time and USA Today. The press everywhere would be pleading with him for his photographs. Japan and South America and Russia and China and—there was no end to it. Mothershed’s heart was fluttering with excitement. I won’t give anyone an exclusive. Each one will have to pay me individually. I’ll start at a hundred thousand pounds a picture, maybe two hundred thousand. And I’ll sell them over and over again. He began feverishly adding up the money he was going to make.