It was a shame no one was there to witness the moment with him. Jez spared a thought for his companions who had perished on the long outbound journey. His friends, his colleagues, the people he had grown to love. They had all known that the trip would be a long one, and that in all likelihood, they would never come home again. But they had gone nonetheless, all keen to play a role in what could possibly be the greatest scientific discovery ever. There was alien life in the universe, and they wanted to be the first to meet it.

Some decades earlier, scientists had picked up faint radio-wave transmissions which emanated from outside the solar system. It was discovered that the source was a habitable planet some fifty light-years away. After much debate among scientists, and then politicians and even religious leaders, the decision had been made to investigate.

By this time, the International Space Consortium had already been set up to coordinate the space programs of various nations. Experiments involving stable wormholes for faster-than-light travel were already doing well, so it didn't take long for an expedition to be mounted.

Given the distances involved, though, everyone knew it would be a very long time before the expedition yielded any results. The scout ship which had been Jez's home for the last sixty years was sent out first. Its mission was to cover the distance between the two solar systems and set up a gateway in the alien system. The gateway could then be used to establish a stable wormhole, through which the Space Consortium scientists could come to investigate the alien system further.

After observing the solar system for a few days, Jez picked the best spot for the gateway. He had spent his life preparing for this moment, and he was careful to double-check all his calculations. He couldn't afford to let his old age interfere with the mission. Once he was satisfied that he and the computer were in agreement about the planned location for the gateway, Jez ordered the ship to create the ring of buoys which would mark the wormhole's entrance.

There was nothing to be seen as the ship spun a fine thread of negative energy in between the buoys -- the necessary ingredient to keep such a long wormhole open. As he sat back in the ship's command module, Jez was pleased to see the elderly ship performing so well. It had suffered numerous mechanical failures in recent years, but it seemed to have no difficulties building the wormhole. He also congratulated himself on the fact that the intelligent aliens in the system didn't seem to have noticed him. The gateway was designed to be difficult to detect; the buoys were dim and didn't reflect sunlight well, and Jez had positioned the structure behind one of the planets, where it was not in the direct line of sight of the alien homeworld. The last thing Jez wanted was for the aliens to see the gateway and rush out to destroy it.

Finally, the wormhole was ready. Jez was so proud that he felt he could now die content. His mission was accomplished. Still overcome by his satisfaction, Jez began to compose a message to the scientists back home. He could imagine the surprise and joy they would all feel at knowing that the scout vessel had made it. They wouldn't be the same scientists who had seen him off on his journey, of course; even more time had passed back home than the sixty years Jez had spent in his ship. But he was sure their modern-day successors would be equally pleased.

Jez tried to pen something worthy of the occasion. He had had sixty years to think of what he would say, and had composed many drafts in all those decades. But now that the time had come, the words seemed to fail him. Maybe his mind was going now that he was so old. Still, he managed to produce something which he thought would do, and sent it through the gateway. Even with the wormhole shortening the distance, it would be a good month before his message got back home. His ship, which travelled more slowly than the light waves, would take up to a year to get home. But Jez felt he could wait another year before returning to find out what was left of his family. He probably had quite a few great-grand-nephews by now.

Jez was so preoccupied with his message and thoughts of going home that it took him a while to realise that one of the sensors on his control panel was flashing. Something was approaching very slowly. Jez changed the view on his screen to one showing his ship's rear section. He was surprised to see some kind of ship creeping up on him. Fascinated by the object, and assuming it to be a vessel belonging to the system's intelligent life forms, Jez manoeuvred his old ship closer. He expected the other ship to stop as it approached. But Jez realised too late that his excitement at this sign of technology was a little premature. The alien vessel was probably no more than a probe ship. It continued on its course and collided with his vessel.

It was several hours before Jez came to. He was pleased to find that he was still alive, but soon realised that his ship was beyond repair. It had drifted toward the centre of the solar system, in plain view of the alien planet. Jez still had some air and the ship was manoeuvrable, but the impact had destroyed its aft section and the communications module was down. Jez could not risk taking his damaged vessel into the wormhole; his only hope was to find somewhere habitable, where he could wait for his colleagues to arrive. Or somewhere to simply die in peace. He had always known there was a chance he would never return home; he was resigned to the idea by now.

Sparing only a few minutes' thought to his disappointment, Jez turned the ship around and headed for the only habitable planet in the solar system. He would have to crash land, but he was confident he would survive the impact. And even if he didn't, it wouldn't matter. The message was sent. The Consortium would be sending their vessels very soon.

Jez woke up in what appeared to be a prison cell. That was his first assumption, at least. But upon looking around the room, he decided it could possibly be a hospital room. The room was plain, with only a bed and some kind of table for furniture. From his position on the bed, Jez could see into a little room built into the main one. There appeared to be various fixtures in there; a bathroom perhaps. The lighting was unbearably bright. Jez closed his eyes again.

It took him a while to remember what had happened. Creating the wormhole. Getting hit by an alien probe ship, crash landing on the alien planet. The aliens must have captured him. That made sense. Jez didn't seriously expect them to ignore him after his ship crashed on their planet. He hoped he hadn't killed any of the aliens or damaged their personal property; he had been aiming for a night time area where there were no lights, to avoid hitting one of their major cities. But there was no way of knowing what else he might have hit instead.

In any case, there was no point worrying about that right now. Jez stood up and looked around the cell, just in case there was some handy air vent to disappear into. Unfortunately, his captors were more prudent than the baddies in most books. There was no visible means of escape. The door was locked, the only thing that could have been a window was boarded up, and in any case, Jez was sure the aliens were watching him.

After his investigation, Jez sat on the bench, resting his old body. He was not a doctor and couldn't be sure, but he was pretty certain he had broken some bones in the crash. The aliens had wrapped one arm and rubbed some smelly ointment on a couple of cuts, but the treatment was rudimentary at best. Jez lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, wishing his old mind had reacted faster when he saw the probe. He could have been on his way home by now.

The aliens came to visit him after around an hour. Maybe they had waited until Jez stopped doing interesting things on his own before they came in to see him. Jez hoped his visitors weren't as repulsed by his appearance as he was by theirs; he couldn't tell either way, since their faces were featureless to his eyes. Both their expressions and their body language were mysterious to him.

So, of course, was their language. The aliens did seem to be trying to set up some kind of communication. They drew dots on a board they had brought with them, but Jez couldn't make out if they were trying to teach him arithmetic or giving him a demonstration of their written language. Or maybe they were drawing their solar system. Jez was mystified.

When they handed him their pen, Jez tried to think of something intelligent to draw. He drew himself and then pointed at the drawing. "Jez," he said. He pointed at himself and repeated the name.

"Jez," said one of the aliens. It bent one of its limbs towards its body and said something very long. The first part sounded like "Vrijni", but Jez lost track of the rest.

He hesitated and then hazarded a tentative, "Vrijni?"

All the aliens started making a loud noise, like a flock of excited birds. They shook their limbs and banged them together to make a even louder noise. Jez decided not to take the noise as a sign of aggression -- there had been none so far, after all -- but he did back away instinctively. The aliens stopped making noise and went back to making cryptic symbols on their board. The exchange of names was the only breakthrough that day.

The aliens left Jez alone for a long time after this. The lights suddenly dimmed a couple of hours later. Jez couldn't tell what time of day it was in his cell, but he assumed the lower luminosity indicated night time. Acting on this intuition, Jez tried to get some sleep in the hope of synchronising his body clock with their planet's day cycle. But he found it difficult to fall asleep. He felt jetlagged and confused, his injuries hurt like hell, and despite being dimmed, the light was still too bright. Jez was used to sleeping in darkness.

The aliens had left him some water and some kind of smelly gruel which was presumably supposed to be food. There was a large bowl attached to the wall in the other room. Jez inspected it thoroughly, to be absolutely certain that it was a toilet as he assumed, and not something else -- like a wash basin or a food dispenser. What if the aliens didn't need toilets? Jez dismissed this preposterous thought and struggled to use the basin, even though it was in the most awkward position possible. He was slightly worried to notice a discoloration of his urine, but he put that down to the food they had given him. The worry was almost immediately dispelled by Jez's delight at finding that the lever on the wall was a flush. At least the aliens were civilised. He hoped that his correct use of the device would convince them that he was civilised as well.

Some time later, the aliens returned. They had brought their board back and spent another day trying to communicate with him. Jez had an equally frustrating time trying to communicate with them. He couldn't tell if 'Vrijni' was with them or not because they all looked the same, but he did try repeating the name. The aliens jabbered at him in response, waving their limbs about, but Jez couldn't understand what they were trying to say. Perhaps 'Vrijni' wasn't the name of a person at all. Jez now wondered if that was the name of their people. Maybe they thought his species were called the 'Jez'! Despite his frustrating situation, Jez found that thought amusing.

The aliens with the board came back every day for about five days. Together, the aliens and Jez did make some minor progress. By the end of the five days, Jez had established without a doubt that Vrijni was the name of one of the aliens. He was pretty sure they understood that Jez was his name too, and he learned the names of other individual aliens. Most were unpronounceable, and since Jez still couldn't tell the creatures apart, he felt that the naming exercise was only partially useful. They had repeated their dots experiment every day; Jez finally decided that they were trying to teach him to count in their language. He obediently learned the sounds they made as they indicated each symbol, but when he tried to teach them numbers in his language, they didn't seem interested. Maybe they thought it was more important for him to learn their language than the reverse. That was logical; after all, there was only one of him and possibly millions or billions of them.

By the sixth day, Jez was still struggling to get over his jetlag. He ached all over, and the food didn't agree with him at all, even though they changed his menu every day. But at least it satisfied his hunger and they gave him plenty of water. He was able to get some sleep in the period when the aliens left him alone, though he found the bed they had given him uncomfortable and he still wished they would turn the light off completely. Jez considered trying to dismantle the light source, but decided against it. In the first place, the aliens might have left the light on for a reason, and would possibly interpret the tampering as a hostile act. In the second place, Jez had no knowledge of their power circuits. Even assuming that he could remove the light source without electrocuting himself, there was no reason to believe that he would be able to reassemble it in time for the morning. So he took to sleeping with his eyes covered and nearly got used to it after a while. He also moved his bedding to the floor; that was slightly more comfortable and allowed him to cushion his most sensitive injuries. Even so, he wasn't able to catch up on quite enough sleep to keep him fit and alert. He was getting weak and was really feeling his age.

On the morning of the sixth day, Jez was surprised to be visited by what appeared to be a different set of aliens. Their clothes were a different colour and they didn't have a board. They spent some time jabbering and then two of them seized Jez and pulled him off his bench. They weren't violent, but it was obvious they wanted him to come with them, and wouldn't take no for an answer.

Still holding onto him, they escorted him down a series of corridors. These were much too brightly lit for his eyes, even brighter than his cell. But Jez found that he could close his eyes and let the aliens guide him. He assumed they would escort him back to his cell eventually, so he didn't need to memorise the way. And he was too old and frail to attempt an escape. All he could do was trust the aliens.

They deposited him in an atrociously bright chamber which he assumed was a medical ward. There was no particular reason for him to assume that, since to his eyes, it didn't look like a medical ward. It could just as well have been a torture chamber. But Jez thought it made sense for the aliens to want to learn about his anatomy. Considering their inability to communicate with him, they were hardly going to try and interrogate him.

Jez had been in the room a few minutes when yet another set of aliens -- he assumed these were doctors -- started performing a series of anodyne tests on him. They stripped off his clothes and then proceeded to photograph and measure every part of him; his limbs, his genitals, his head, his spine. Jez tried to tell himself that they were merely curious, but he couldn't help feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed, standing naked while aliens inspected his most private parts. Then things progressively got worse. They pressed machines against his eyeballs and in his ears, and then looked down his throat and up his rectum. They made him lie down on some kind of examination table and tied him to it, before wheeling him into another room. This one was restfully dark and Jez relaxed, until he realised that all the aliens were taking shelter behind a glass screen. What were they doing to him? He tried to calm himself down -- maybe they were merely doing an old-fashioned X-ray. But he felt the panic mount as the tests continued.

Finally, just as he had hoped, the doctors gave him back his clothes, and the aliens he had seen that morning escorted him back to his cell. The doctors' tests had left him in pain, in some cases even reawakening injuries from the crash, and all Jez could do was collapse on his makeshift bed. He felt exhausted and depressed; he was too old to be subjected to such treatment.

The aliens thankfully left him alone for the next couple of days. Maybe they knew the doctors had hurt him and wanted to give him time to recuperate. With no means of entertainment, Jez spent most of his time lying on his bed. His stools and urine continued to look unhealthy. The food the aliens gave him varied from brown fibrous things which required a lot of chewing to white formless goo which made Jez throw up. He guessed they were trying different diets in an effort to find one that suited his digestive system. But nothing seemed to work. Three days after the examination, Jez began to experience severe stomach cramps. He stopped eating the food they gave him, even when they reverted back to the gruel he had got when he first arrived.

Over the next few days, Jez was occasionally visited by aliens. One came so often that he began to be able to distinguish it from the others. This one was Vrijni, and brought him some simple games to play. They were probably children's toys, but at least he had some entertainment. The creature also did some medical tests on him, perhaps in an effort to monitor his condition. Jez wondered if it realised how sick he was, and if it felt sorry for him.

His condition continued to deteriorate. Too sick to rise from his bed, Jez thought about the home he had left behind so many decades earlier. He hoped that his mission was successfully completed, and that the people back home would be able to use the wormhole to reach this system. The Space Consortium scientists would find a way of communicating with these strange aliens. That comforting thought in mind, Jez fell asleep.

"He's dying," said Virginie Journeau, shaking her head sadly.

She observed the strange orange alien on the monitor a while longer. Tentacles, multifaceted eyes, a subcutaneous cartilage structure reinforcing a heavy skeleton; the creature was as different from human beings as could be. Dr Journeau and the other scientists had tried everything they could think of to give him an appropriate diet, but the creature was wasting away.

"But he's old, right?" said Minister Le Bihan, panic clear in his voice. "Even that American doctor agreed with that theory, didn't he? He said the alien seemed to be very old, and near death anyway. So he's just dying of old age."

Dr Journeau turned towards the politician. He was sitting in one of the chairs in the observation room, his small hazel eyes filled with apprehension. Le Bihan was the minister of defence. He knew nothing about aliens and had been in a panic ever since the creature's vessel first crashed in the countryside of the Ardèche, in France. Preliminary investigations had revealed that the alien ship was damaged after colliding with NASA's latest unmanned Mars probe.

"He might be old, but he's dying because we know nothing about his physiology," said Journeau. "The whole scientific world was poking and prodding him on Monday, and we still haven't been able to tell what makes him tick. We don't even know if he was severely injured in the crash. But if anything, the doctors killed him. So you don't need to worry that anyone will blame you."

Evidently relieved, Le Bihan came to stand beside her. He peered at the monitor for a moment. "A creature from outer space, and we... kill it. You know, I do wish you'd been able to communicate with him. It was funny when he called you Virijini."

"Vrijni."

"Whatever. That was quite a breakthrough. The footage will make some historian happy when it's released."

Le Bihan walked out of the room, leaving Journeau to watch the alien on the monitor.

"Poor Jez," she said softly. "Why did your people send you here alone?"

She thought about a recent communiqué the European Space Agency had received from NASA. Apparently, the Mars Orbiter had just caught a glimpse of some kind of construction just beyond Mars. Presumably the work of Jez. A probe was already being designed to go and investigate the object, though it would not be ready for launch for a year at least.

"What if it's a gateway of some kind?" said Journeau to the alien on the screen. "If your people come through it... how will they react when they find you dead?"

Watching the lumpy creature lying still in the other room, Journeau was seized with sudden foreboding.