I was just getting myself settled in—I found a great spot between the slop bucket and the branding irons—when I realized I had forgotten something. Something important.
I headed for the main gate and tried to push my way out through the crowd of people who were being herded in. The guards roughly shoved me back.
“I want to go out,” I explained.
They told me I couldn’t go out. They had just gone to a lot of trouble to get me in. They said I had to go sit back down where I was before. I argued for awhile, but it didn’t do me any good. I went back to my spot and complained about the guards to my neighbor. After he’d heard the whole story he agreed with me.
As soon as it got dark I made another attempt to get out. But this time I didn’t tell the guards about it. I wasn’t letting them in on this one. I couldn’t trust them anymore. Dressed in black, and with my face smudged so if they caught me they wouldn’t know it was me, I stealthily made my way around to the back of the enclosure, where I knew there weren’t as many guards posted because of all the poison ivy and snakes and weirdos. I waited until the searchlights had passed by me, then crashed through the fence and made my escape. Like I mentioned before, us big guys get to make our own doors.
Keeping to the back alleys as much as I could, and only engaging in long philosophical conversations with alien invaders when it was absolutely necessary, I made my way back to my old begging spot near the courthouse, looked around on the ground, found my toothbrush, and stuck it in my back pocket.
“Where to now?” asked one of the several hundred prisoners who had followed me.
“Back to the pen,” I said. “They’ll be slopping us soon.”
The prisoners were dissatisfied with this plan, which they felt wasn’t bold enough. They had a brief discussion about whether to go back to the pen with me or elect a new leader and follow him someplace better. Just as the second ballot was being counted a huge blast knocked us over. We all looked up. What the hell?
More invading alien craft, with insignia I had never seen before, were streaking into the atmosphere, blasting the hell out of everything and everybody, Earthmen and aliens alike.
I saw my house get vaporized. Then my office building was incinerated. Great, I thought. Just perfect. Oh well, at least I didn’t have anything else left to lose. The next explosion took out my toothbrush.
One of the bombs hit the courthouse just as Buzzy’s trial was ending and he was being sentenced to life imprisonment in a big flashlight. The explosion knocked over everyone in the courtroom, blew off Buzzy’s battery case, and opened up a hole in the side wall of the courthouse shaped exactly like him, right down to his mustache. Well, you can’t ask for a better chance than that. And Buzzy took it. He ran for it.
When he reached the spot where I was, he ignored my request for a quarter to help out a disgraced Mouseketeer, grabbed me, and began dragging me along with him, using me as a shield.
“Hi, Buzzy,” I said.
“Shut up,” he said.
As bullets from pursuing policemen swirled around us, he dragged me to a parked Intergalactic News ship, forced open the hatch, got us both aboard, and blasted us out of this world.
As we rocketed out of the atmosphere into the safety of space we passed thousands of attacking space vehicles of all shapes and sizes, from all over the universe, all headed towards Earth. No one paid any attention to us, beyond giving us the traditional “Hey, you’re going the wrong way, stupid” signal. (Two flags: the first one with a picture of a moron on it, the second with an arrow pointing at you). They were too intent on what they were doing to do more than signal.
While Buzzy busied himself firing retro-rockets, switching on the artificial gravity, throwing the ship’s computer out into deep space when it said “I can’t do that, Dave” once too often, and manually setting our course for the spaceport at Alpha Centauri, I monitored the battles going on on Earth by watching the alien broadcasts that were being sent back through space to countless home planets.
All of Earth’s major cities had surrendered by this point. Earthmen everywhere were being rounded up and marched into makeshift prisons. Or, rather, the lower level Earthmen were. The leaders were, of course, far beneath the Earth’s surface, hiding in underground bunkers, wondering whose job it was to keep the air circulating. Because it wasn’t theirs, that’s for sure. Their job was leading. But the fighting on the planet’s surface wasn’t slackening. The aliens were still fighting among themselves, more fiercely than ever now.
It was confusing to watch. An alien flag covered with strange markings would go up over the Earth, then it would be taken down and another flag, representing a different planet, would go up. Then more flags went up and seemed to look at each other. Then the real fighting began.
When the alien news broadcasts had turned into mostly reruns of earlier war footage interspersed with panels of alien experts explaining what we’d just seen—it wasn’t what we thought we’d seen exactly. Current events aren’t that simple. You can’t know what’s going on by just watching it happen. The facts have to be filtered through somebody’s big mouth first—I asked Buzzy what the heck it was all about. Who were these aliens? Why were they attacking Earth? And why were they attacking each other? He told me to shut up. I did.
This pattern continued throughout the voyage: I would ask him something, he would tell me to shut up, and I would do so promptly. A little later I’d ask him something else, then more shutting up. We were getting along fine. But I wasn’t learning much.
A few weeks out from Earth he finally started to loosen up a little bit and talk to me. I think it was because he had been drinking.
“Do you have to stick your finger in your ear all the time?” he asked, suddenly.
“I think there’s something in there,” I explained. “I’m pretty sure there is.”
“Leave it alone.”
“All righty.”
“And stop singing that song about something being in your ear. It’s annoying.”
“I think singing the song helps me find it.”
“Stop it.”
“Right.”
After a few more drinks he spoke again. “I came to Earth long before you were born.”
“When?”
“1970.”
“Well, actually…”
“Long before you were born, I came to your filthy little planet.”
“In 1970?”
“Yes. January 9th.”
“Well, actually, I was born in 19…”
“It was a flawed world. But I put it right.”
“Good for you. But you see in 1970 I was…”
“Do not interrupt me ever again.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. Go on with what you were saying.”
He finished off his bottle, then looked up at me with bleary, hostile eyes. “Hmm? What’s that?”
“You were telling me your life story. We’d gotten up to 1970. Go on from there. Give me the whole story, in your own words.”
“Shut up.”
So that’s all I found out about him that day: 1970 and shut up. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. I felt I was getting to know the man.
As we began our long approach into the spaceport at Alpha Centauri I asked Buzzy why he had brought me along on this voyage. Did he like me or something? Because I sure liked him. He said he thought the reason was obvious. He had used me as a shield on Earth to get to the ship. And, because he was a wanted man all over the galaxy, he might need to use me as a shield again when we reached the spaceport. And no, he didn’t like me.
When we reached the spaceport and disembarked, Buzzy kept me in front of him at all times, looking around warily. But no one in the crowded terminal paid any attention to us. If an alarm had been sounded about Buzzy’s escape from Earth, no one had heard it here yet. We began re-provisioning the ship and getting it refueled. It looked like we were preparing for a long journey.
When everything was ready to go, Buzzy started cli
mbing back up the ship’s ladder. I followed, saying: “Where to now, Chief?”
He pulled out his gun and shot me. I fell off the ladder, landing on my back on the tarmac. He thought I was dead, and I tried to play possum, so he’d keep thinking I was dead, but I talk too much for a possum.
“You still alive?” he asked, bending over me and examining me closely.
I kept completely still. Not moving a muscle. Not even breathing. “I’m not saying anything,” I said.
He shot me again. This time I really was dead. Or so we both thought.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I came to in my usual pool of blood. Not dead, just wishing I was. Not only was my chest sore from all the ammunition rattling around in it, but I had a splitting headache. I looked around and found that I was on the floor of the terminal, being kicked in the head by busy travelers who were hurrying to catch their flights. They weren’t saving a lot of time by going through me instead of around me, but they were picking up a few precious seconds. I didn’t blame them. I like shortcuts too. Judging by the number of lumps on my head, I had been out for two, maybe three, hours. And judging by the trail of blood, I’d been kicked about 400 yards so far. I was too weak to get to my feet right away, but I found that if I moved just a little to one side, at an angle, the kicks to my head would push me out of the main flow of traffic. I could rest up there.
Buzzy was nowhere to be seen, thank heavens. I’d had enough of that guy’s company for awhile. And he had taken our rocket with him, so there was no way for me to get back to Earth. That was okay with me. Nothing good had ever happened to me there. I was glad to get away from it. Anyplace in the universe had to be better.
I couldn’t stay where I was, of course. Couldn’t stay in the spaceport for the rest of my life. There were signs that prohibited that, for one thing. So I would have to try to make a new life for myself somewhere else.
I looked up at the board where all the day’s flights were listed. I wished I’d studied astronomy when I was in school. And then remembered it until now. But I hadn’t. I didn’t recognize the names of any of these planets. “Nice 3” sounded pretty nice. I asked what the fare was. The ticket people didn’t understand me at first, and I couldn’t understand what they were saying either. Just sounded like a lot of gibberish to me. Finally I said: “Speak English, for Christ’s sake!” Then we could understand each other. They said it was a thousand of some currency I had never heard of to get to that particular prison planet. I checked my pockets, while they looked on hopefully, but I didn’t seem to have any money of any kind on me. Their attitude towards me got a little frosty after that. They said I should quit reading the destination board if I wasn’t going to buy a ticket. This wasn’t a library.
I tried to get money for airfare by begging, but nobody at the spaceport seemed to understand what I was doing—what my business was. I explained that I had no money so I wanted theirs, but they didn’t get it. They kept looking to see what I was going to be giving them in exchange. Maybe I had it behind my back. Let’s all look there. I tried to explain the concept again. I wanted their money, and in exchange for it they would get absolutely nothing. Not even a “thank you”, or a smile, or the back of my hand. Nothing. They still didn’t get it. Finally I stopped begging. It wasn’t going to work here. These people were too stupid.
Since I couldn’t buy a ticket on a commercial flight, I decided to try hitchhiking. I borrowed a space suit from a guy—I told him I would bring it right back, just wait right here—then went outside and stuck out my thumb.
Hundreds of ships came and went over the next few hours, but nobody picked me up. I wasn’t sure whether they didn’t understand the Earth concept of hitchhiking (for giving me a ride you get nothing) or they just couldn’t see my tiny thumb in the vastness of space. So I finally cut off the very end of my space suit so that my thumb was sticking out. Due to the vacuum of space, it expanded to a thousand times its normal size, with the rest of me getting correspondingly smaller. Now they could see my thumb better than they could see the spaceport. I got a ride right away. So there’s a tip for you kids traveling in space. Make your thumbs big.
The guy who picked me up asked me where I was headed. I said I didn’t know. He asked where he should let me off. I said I didn’t know that either. Just drive.
After a couple of days, he asked if we were anywhere near where I was going yet, because I’d already eaten most of his provisions. I said I’d tell him when we got there. Just keep driving, and can the chatter. Later that day he set me down on a small moon and flew off. I couldn’t figure out why he did that. We weren’t there yet.
I spent a week sitting on that moon holding my breath and watching my eyes getting bigger, until I figured out I could get enough air to stay alive by sucking it out of the family next to me. When another ship finally came along and picked me up, I tried to be a little more helpful to the driver. I said I wanted to go to the nearest inhabitable planet—one that had air on it. He said okay, then asked what I was eating back there. It wasn’t his provisions, was it? Just drive, I said.
When we arrived at a planet that had a breathable atmosphere, he let me off. I didn’t want to get off yet—there was still some food left on the ship—but he insisted. I reluctantly disembarked and started taking a look around my new home. The air was all right, no problem there, but all the people were fifty feet tall. And I’m just talking about the normal people here. The basketball players were eighty feet tall. The inhabitants didn’t mind me hanging around with them, since most of the time they couldn’t even see me. But getting work was tough. The first place I went to, to apply for a job, they just smacked me with a flyswatter. The next place they sprayed me with something. After a few experiences like that—with people trying to step on you and yelling “There he goes!”—you start to lose your self-confidence. I kept at it though. You’ve got to keep trying, if you want to succeed on Giganta-Planet.
I never did find a full time job there, but I managed to pick up a few bucks doing odd jobs. I was a ball for awhile in some game they liked to play, which was okay except for the times when they knocked the cover off me. And I got a part time job as a book mark. At one point I tried living in a rich man’s bloodstream, but after a couple of weeks a doctor tipped him off that I was in there, and that that’s where all the loud music was coming from, and he told me to clear out. I was disgusted. The whole thing was turning into a farce. I seemed to be getting smaller or larger depending on what the joke was. That’s no way to live. I finally decided to clear out. That planet was all wrong for me.
Unfortunately, so were all the other planets I visited. Either I was much too big and kept sliding off, or I was far too small and had to dodge more flyswatters. Sometimes I was just the right size, but I made so much noise running around yelling that I’d found the perfect planet they had to ask me to leave. Sometimes the atmosphere was poisonous. Or the atmosphere was okay but I was poisonous. It was always something.
One planet I landed on seemed promising, at first—everybody was about my size, and looked more or less like me—but not only could I not make a living there, nobody was making a living. Their civilization apparently had never made any progress at all. No discoveries, no inventions, they hadn’t even built anything yet. When I showed up they were just standing there, staring. They said they had been standing there like that for thousands of years. I told them they couldn’t live like that. They said they’d been doing all right until I came along. I said maybe so, but they still couldn’t live like that. They shrugged and said: “You’re the boss”. I taught them about fire and agriculture. But I couldn’t remember anything else to teach them. When I left they were still just standing there, but now they were smoking cigarettes.
Another planet that looked all right to me at first—in fact it looked perfect in every way—was a kind of utopian planet, run by a computer, where everybody made the same amount of money and everybody lived exactly the same life. It was completely fair in every way.
The only problem was, nobody talked about anything. And the only jobs on the planet were computer repairman. I don’t know anything about computers. They found that out soon enough. It took them a month after I had left to get all the maple syrup cleaned out of the computer and get their utopia up and running again. But at least I had given them something to talk about.
On another planet it was me that was running things, if you can believe it. Moments after I landed—I was answering an ad that said: “Wanted: A man with a brain”—the inhabitants stole my brain and used it to control everything on their planet: making the air circulate, regulating the temperature, and so on. The whole place died out in a week. I’m not sure how my brain got out of there and got back into my head, but I’m sure glad it did. We’ve got to get out of here, my brain said. This place is dead. Right behind you pal, I said. And we got out of there fast.
Finally I realized I needed help. I couldn’t do this on my own. I went to a government resettlement agency that specialized in finding the right planets for people who were too stupid to find things for themselves. The lady there, a Mrs. Jacobson, interviewed me. I told her about my skills, my education, my experience, that I’m half alligator and half snapping turtle, a ring tailed roarer, that I’ve been everywhere and done everything, and that I spit lightning and crap thunder.
She turned to the computer on her desk. “Computer?”
“Bullshit,” said the computer.
She told me to start again, telling the truth this time. I asked if we could conduct the rest of the interview somewhere else. Somewhere away from that c-o-m-p-u-t-e-r, but she said no. So for the rest of the interview I mostly had to tell the truth, which, I don’t know about you, but that always puts me at a disadvantage.
After I had given her all my real information and she had cross-checked it with her database of inhabited planets, she shook her head.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see any planets here that need your particular skills, or lack of them.”
Earth vs. Everybody Page 6