These space people are coming to earth, see (don't ask questions, you're wasting your time), and to ensure a friendly reception they detail an advance man to the staff of Time the-weekly-nexus-of-Earth intelligence. But when ""Bing Walter"" -- cleverly prostheticized to look like the man who reads Playboy -- descends in his star-hopping facsimile of a Fedders air conditioner, he meets with a typical terrestrial foul-up involving Cal Tech, NASA, a wise-ass but linear-minded computer named Rufus, chicks who can't resist his plastic body and, most of all, the inner workings of magazine journalism. A lot of the very funny potential goes up in marsh gas, but then this alien world comes from the Time-Life building. Ottum's a senior editor of Sports Illustrated.