Montreal was in a turmoil if not in a panic. Wild rumours spread of space creatures on a rampage. It had started at Expo 67 and spread to McSwill University where the “invaders” had attempted to initiate a “civil war”. The Quebec government declared a provincial state of emergency and school and business establishments were closed with citizens advised to stay in their homes. Churches were packed with thousands praying for salvation.
While Quebec was in a state of anxiety the rest of Canada, if not the world was highly skeptical of an alien invasion despite the fact that a parade of highly respected authorities and experts had verified they had seen aliens and their spacecraft fly away. The rest of Canada aware of the “unique nature” of Quebec society fluffed off the panic as a public relations stunt to draw large number of visitors to Montreal’s World Fair Expo 67. In didn’t take too long for the frenzy to subside as the media convinced them this was simply a prank of devious engineering students.
Mutants in Montreal were not so easily persuaded to forget the affair. It verified their assertion that planetary aliens existed and that by reaction of Montrealer’s they would be seen as mutants. For Squid and his band of Montreal mutants aliens were but a segment of the great galactic brotherhood. Squid wrote of the incident in the weekly “Hebdo des Mutants”, “Mutants have never been truly welcomed on Earth and this includes the newest variety being those from other planets. What sort of welcome were they accorded? They were shot at and thousands were stirred into a state of hysteria by sensationalist media hounds. It was disgusting they were treated and viewed in such a manner. Unfortunately we mutants are accustomed to such behaviour. Sometimes we fall under a hail of bullets but more often we are crushed under the weight of societal treatment and legalised discrimination. The establishment distrusts anything that does not conform to their conception of reality and the manner in which they treated these aliens flagrantly emphasizes this unsavoury reality.”
Jiber and his crew had been enjoying hearty snickers over the consternation they had created. It taught them an important point in Earthling psychology and that to survive one was to conform to a degree of respectability. It wasn’t advisable to parade about in strange garb or let one’s ship be seen. It only made these Earthlings suspicious, Dress like the masses, eat like the masses and think like the masses. It was this Squid idiot that was perceptive on this point. Another Earth idiot leading a band of hopeless humanity. Why was dignity so important to these fools? His own father on Zortixia had been executed because he failed to supress this type of moral weakling that could corrupt the soul with such slimy talk. These mutants were weak but tricky and he would have to keep a close eye on them. It was good that these mutants were weak and virtually no one paid attention to them. The mutants were of a nonconformist nature and they flaunted it openly. No wonder they were so politically weak. No one on Earth liked to hear the truth about themselves. The more conformist a population was the easier it was to detect their deviance and stamp them out. The ruling classes on Earth were doing a decent of supressing political deviants. Forget this insipid minority talk of welcoming cultural deviance. If only his father on Zortixia had carried this simple task he might be still alive.
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