The captain activated the viewscreen and drew in a sharp breath. “We’ve got company,” she said, voice dripping with sardonic enthusiasm.

“Company?” I asked, peering over her shoulder at the live footage of the tiniest goddamn spaceship I had ever seen.

“Emissaries,” she said. “From the clown homeworld.”

We watched with baited breath as hatch on the little spaceship opened and something began to emerge from inside with agonizing slowness. It was long, rounded, and black—at first I thought it was the domed head of some new xeno, but then I saw the laces.

“It’s a shoe!” I gasped, as the comedically oversized footwear toed the rocky surface of the moon with cartoonish trepidation, as though it were nervously testing the temperature of a swimming pool. “My god, if its foot alone is that big, how can—”

The captain shushed me and nodded at the viewscreen. “Just watch,” she said.

I watched. I could do nothing but gaps in stunned, horrified silence as not one, not two, not three or four or five, but forty clown emissaries emerged from that minuscule spaceship one by one and formed the least orderly ranks I had ever seen.

“This ought to be fun,” said the captain dryly.