It was never established whether the aliens, (or Nangs as they came to be called), had pre-formulated their attack plan based on intelligence gathered from our species. Since every human who had claimed to have been snatched, probed and even more improbably returned home intact save for their memories, was discounted as a raving lunatic. When the sidereal siege began, their faces displayed neither the weary recognition, nor the self-righteous “I told you so” expressions one might have anticipated. Like the vast majority of mankind, their faces revealed only fear. Or they would have done, were it not for the fiendish method of attack employed by the space boonies.

For they merely had their rockets duck down through the ozone layer, (facilitated by handy manmade ‘after-you Claude’ gouges) and proceeded to hover above the continents. The nitrous oxide waste product from burning their fuel laid down its pleasantly noxious cloak over mankind. Thus was the human race disarmed by the happy gas, even those for whom it triggered unpleasant neural memories of trips to the dentist to have teeth extracted. They more than anyone brought the palm of their hand up against their jaw, in an euphoric disbelief.

All started pointing up at the unfamiliar and the peregrine, yet rather than finding it threatening, they took the upmost dissociated delight in its very uncanniness. Not to put too fine a point on it, to a man and woman they burst out laughing. Giggling their way into subjugation. There was only ever a record of this process, since the news cameras kept rolling and broadcasting, even after their operators had abandoned them in their deracinated delight.

Save for one cohort who failed to see any funny side about being inroaded. It was only the caries of the race who were resistant to the effects of the happy fumes. Those dope heads of cocaine and heroin addiction. Either the nitrous oxide simply had no effect on them because of a built up immunity through opiate conjoined brain receptors. Or worse, the nitrous oxide shoved the opioids aside from their docking stations with the brain, yet still the laughing gas’ molecules were unable to wreak any characteristic change in the brain chemistry, due to its effects being overridden, nay trampled, under the addicts’ fury at not being able to get high on their drugs of choice. Their street dealers too were so scandalised by this extra-terrestrial muscling in on their territory, that they too batted the leavening effects of the nitrous oxide away in their cold fury.

In their customary paranoia, the sub-cohort of Rap and Jungle music stars immune to the N20 conjured a theory that the aliens were spreading the anaesthetic in order to extract all the gold in human being’s teeth. Their mouths of course being the greatest treasury of the precious metal. They armed themselves with their semi-automatic rifles and strode out in their 4X4s to protect their buccal riches.

Many of the drug addicts had been, or were still serving in the military. The very self-medication that had enabled them to endure their various conflicts in a stuporous haze, now helped fire their focused engagement in this most radical of battles. And fortunately being militarily trained, they simply manned the heavy ordnance neglected by the non- drug-addled servicemen and directed the payloads at the ships in the skies. No bunch of astral dental hygienists were going to conquer their big blue marble. They snorted and rubbed the residue of the cocaine on their fingertips into their gums and set off to kick these interplanetary dealers out of their home turf of earth.