But this time I thought of one. And it was a trick that might just work. It was based on the well known fact that show business people—unlike regular people—are very vain. If you can get them talking about themselves, they won’t stop until somebody knocks them unconscious. And they won’t pay much attention to anything you’re doing as long as you keep looking at them and saying things like: “Uh-huh… really?... uh huh… that bastard… so what did you do?” while you’re backing up slowly towards the nearest space ship.
“Tell me about yourself, Larry,” I said, then started slowly backing up.
“I was born in Philadelphia,” he began, “with the gift of laughter…”
“Uh huh,” I said, getting smaller and smaller, as I edged towards the ship.
At that moment another ship landed on the asteroid. It was the unidentified ship I’d seen chasing me for the last couple of weeks. Out of it sprang Buzzy, his gun pointed at me.
“Shut up,” he said.
“You’re always saying that to me,” I groused. “Get some new material.”
“You are going to die.”
“That’s better.”
He said he’d had enough of me ruining his life. He was going to put a stop to my constant interference right now. I asked what he was talking about. I hadn’t seen him since Alpha Centauri. Quit talking crazy. He said that for months now every time he set up his headquarters on a new planet, and finally got everything cleaned up to his specifications, I had suddenly shown up and trashed the place.
“You’ve ruined twenty three planets for me now,” he said. “Plus, now I find that I’m no longer Galactic Enemy Number Six. You are. I’ve been bumped down to Number Seven. I’ve never been seventh best at anything in my life. So you are going to die. Now.”
He pumped a couple of bullets into my chest. I don’t care how many times I get shot, or how many cigarette cases I have in my pocket to deflect the bullets harmlessly into my abdomen, it never stops hurting.
The sound of the shots brought Larry Laffman running, his life story temporarily put on hold at the point where he was about to break up with both Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
“What’s going on here?” He saw Buzzy. “Oh. Hi, boss.”
“Back off, Laffman. This doesn’t concern you.”
“I’m arresting this guy,” protested Larry. “You can’t have him.”
“I said back off.”
Larry shook his head. He had his gun out too. Nobody moved. Except for the blood leaking noisily from my chest, and the metallic clanking sounds my brain was making as it tried to think, there wasn’t a sound.
I was in a bad spot. Whichever one of these guys came out on top, I looked to be the loser. Unless I did something very clever very quickly. Fortunately, to pass the time between planets, I had been reading the Bud Abbott Story.
I turned to Buzzy and jerked a thumb at Larry. “He said he’s going to punch you in the nose.”
“What!” said Buzzy.
“I never…” protested Larry.
I turned to Larry. “Buzzy says your material isn’t original.”
Larry did a spit-take with some coffee I didn’t know he had in his mouth. “Why that dirty little liar!”
“When did I say that?” asked Buzzy, frowning.
I kept at it, back and forth, as quickly as I could, so they wouldn’t have much of a chance to think, telling each of them that the other had made some nasty crack about him. It was working, but not perfectly. Sometimes they thought that I was the one who was insulting them. Because the insults were coming out of my mouth. In my voice. Now I understood why Bud Abbott got the big bucks. This sort of thing is hard to do well. But pretty soon they got used to my delivery and realized that it was the other guy who had just insulted them, and that I was merely passing on this information.
“What else did he say about me?” asked Buzzy.
He and Larry both looked at me.
“He says you’re not pure energy,” I said. “He says you’re a big fart in a suit.”
“What!”
“He said somebody farted into a three piece suit and that’s how you were born.”
“Why, you…”
“Oh, boy,” said Larry, ruefully, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
That’s when the big fight started.
Sid was off to the side while all this was going on, still talking on his cell phone, telling somebody that something was totally out of the question. It was illegal, immoral, and would never happen unless somebody came up with another dump truck full of money. He suddenly noticed Larry and Buzzy going at it like Popeye and Bluto. He hurried over to try to stop the fight, while still trying to negotiate his deal over the phone. The main sticking point now, as I understood it, was character payments.
Hurling a few final insults over my shoulder to keep them fighting, I dove into the nearest ship, which turned out to be Larry Laffman’s Intergalactic Police cruiser, and fired it up.
“He said you throw punches like a girl!” I shouted to both of them as I lifted off.
“Oh, yeah?” they both growled, throwing their next punches even harder, and even more like girls, in my opinion.
And that was the last I saw of either of them, as I rocketed up into space, never to return. It was the last I saw of either of them for almost an hour.
CHAPTER TEN
It didn’t take Buzzy and Larry long to realize they had been slickered. The rocket blast that made their hair wave back and forth told them that. And the fact that nobody was insulting them anymore now that I was gone. They traded a few final punches, assured each other that this wasn’t over, then broke off their fight and took off after me.
It took me awhile to get used to the controls on the police cruiser—I ground the gears a couple of times, and put my head through the windshield in half a dozen places—but once I got the feel of it I realized I had picked the right ship to make a getaway in. The cruiser was the latest in space ship technology. An R-43, with a Crimebuster engine. That’s one thing about the police everywhere. They’ve got to have the horsepower to run you down, so their vehicles are built for speed. Which makes them fun to drive. I guess that explains why policemen look so happy all the time. This one had an engine that was capable of pushing the cruiser to near the speed of light, and it also had an overdrive button which promised even more.
I needed all the speed I could get because within an hour, thanks to police radio, I was being chased by just about every police ship in the quadrant. This shouldn’t have happened because the police radio was in the ship I was driving—Larry and Buzzy didn’t have one in their ships—and there was no reason in the world for me to turn it on. They wouldn’t be able to hear me. But I had been taunting them for fifteen or twenty minutes before I realized my mistake. At that point the damage was done, I felt, so I just kept taunting them. I still had a few zingers left that I hadn’t used yet. A little while after that is when the other police ships tapped into my signal and joined the chase. So I guess I played that one wrong. I wish I had that one to do over again.
The good thing about being pursued by thousands of space ships, instead of just one or two, is that they tend to get in each other’s way, resulting in all kinds of comical pileups. In my rear viewing screen I saw ships running into each other, forcing each other off the road into the path of oncoming comets, comically crashing through space malls, sending customers flying, and, in one particularly memorable scene, landing on top of each other in one big silly pile. If there had been anyone watching all of this—if there were a studio audience in space—they probably would have laughed their asses off at this point. I know I did.
Throughout the chase, I kept getting urgent messages from the police over my police radio advising me to give up, reminding me that I couldn’t keep running forever—the universe was finite. I’d be reaching the brick wall at the end of it pretty soon—and giving me dozens of other good reasons why my continued flight was pointless. They even put a priest
on the radio who told me he was really disappointed in me. So disappointed he was thinking of quitting the priesthood and becoming a cop. So if I saw him wearing a police uniform in my rear view mirror, that’s how that happened.
The constant demands to pull over and give myself up got tiresome after awhile. Finally I turned the radio to a different station. Let’s get some music in here. That wasn’t much better. It was police music. (Though I did quite like the “You’re Breaking Your Mother’s Heart March”.)
The police were right about one thing though—there didn’t seem to be any way this chase could end up in my favor. There was apparently no limit to the number of police ships in the galaxy. And none of them seemed to have anything better to do than to chase me. They just kept coming—suddenly appearing from behind asteroids, lifting off of planets as I passed them, and just popping in from hyperspace as if by magic. It seemed like they had to get me in the end. Which is what they had been telling me all along. I guess I should have listened. The police don’t talk to you just to be exercising their gums. If they exercise their gums at all, they do it at a gym. When they talk to you they’re talking to you for a reason.
Then I had an inspiration. I realized there was one place I could go where no one would dare follow me. The Earth. The good old Earth, my good old polluted birthplace, and friend. No one would be able to follow me there because the whole planet was poison. It meant instant death to anyone stupid enough to set foot on it. Once I got inside the Earth’s protective doomsday shroud, they would just have to turn around and go back the way they came. Ha! If I had taken the time to think about the downside to my idea, I would have realized that the poisonous atmosphere would kill me just as quickly as it would kill them. Quicker, probably, because that’s the way things had been going for me this week. But I didn’t have time to think. I only had time to act.
As I started looking over the star charts to see where the Earth was from here—I was pretty sure it was “down”, but “down” where?—several hundred more police cruisers appeared out of hyperspace slightly ahead of me and to my right. Their sirens were cranked up so loud I could hear them in the vacuum of space. Now those are loud sirens, I thought. At our present speed, they were in a perfect position to intercept me. Of course, that was easy to fix. All I had to do was change my present speed to one no one in their right mind could match.
I disconnected all the engine’s safety devices, pointed the ship towards the Earth and hit the overdrive button as hard as I could, quickly accelerating the ship to beyond the speed of light, a speed at which no one is supposed to go. I hated to break the rules of physics, but this was an emergency.
I glanced down at my speed indicator. The needle had already gone beyond all the numbers and was now passing “Are you kidding?” and heading for “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” Ridiculous is right! As soon as I passed the speed of light, all sorts of screwy things started appearing outside of my window. I started seeing kaleidoscopic colors, and strange wavy lines, geometric shapes, big babies in bubbles, a woman on a bicycle turning into a witch on a broomstick, more kaleidoscopic colors, two men in a rowboat tipping their hats to me, then a final wavy line, the waviest of them all. Now I understood why you weren’t supposed to go past the speed of light. A guy could go nuts seeing all that crap going on outside his window. Maybe go nuts and crash. I guess I was supposed to understand all the symbolism of what I was seeing, but I didn’t. I think the big babies might have been symbolic of youth in some way, but that was as far as I got.
And strange things weren’t just happening around me. They were happening to me too. My arms were getting longer and shorter, my eyes were opening and closing, my antlers were turning different colors, and my nose was running backwards. I guess I was quite a sight. I probably could have gotten quite a few laughs with a screwy face like I had right then. I was a regular Larry Laffman. But laughs wouldn’t do me any good out here. I was a long way from Hollywood.
I looked in my rear view mirror, which was melting and burning and yelling: “What’s…happening…to…me?” The ships behind me were falling back a little. They didn’t have super-light speed like I did. Plus, I think they were a little afraid of all the colors and babies.
As I passed the Earth’s moon, the pursuing ships began to slow down and fall back even more. I listened in on their chatter over the police radio. The way they had it figured, I was as good as dead the moment I entered the Earth’s atmosphere. So once I passed into that doomsday shroud, they could all go home. Their work would be done. I smiled in triumph. That’s what I wanted them to think. Then my smile faded. Hey, they were right!
Moments later my ship dove screaming into the Earth’s atmosphere. Actually, it just sounded like it was screaming. That was actually me doing the screaming.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I didn’t know what to expect when I entered the Earth’s poisonous atmosphere. Death, of course, but what else? As I got closer to the ground I was surprised to see that the Earth’s surface didn’t look like the Moon at all. It wasn’t dead. There was greenery everywhere. I was even more surprised when I landed and found that my ship’s sensors didn’t indicate any toxic substances in the atmosphere at all.
I hesitated before I opened the airlock. The ship’s sensors didn’t indicate any life threatening conditions outside, but I was taking no chances. If I was going to die, I wanted to die slowly, like my parents, not all at once, like a sewer explosion. I suited up in a police survival suit I found in one of the storage compartments, cautiously opened the airlock, and climbed down the ladder to the surface.
The planet looked great. Flowers and trees everywhere. Blue sky. Blue water. And no signs of the contamination I had heard about at all. My tricorder—a futuristic gadget that I had picked up at Roddenberry’s in the Pleiades, the same place that I got my Spock Neck—indicated that the atmosphere was safe to breath, so I took off my helmet and took a deep breath. The air was fine. My tricorder said it was okay for me to give it some oil, too, if I had time, but I didn’t bother. What am I—Uncle Fixit?
I wandered around looking at all the greenery and wondering what all those gloom and doomers had been talking about. Earth was as nice as it had ever been. Maybe even a little nicer, since I hadn’t been there for awhile. I didn’t see any reason for it to be condemned. Some bureaucrat had really dropped the ball on this one. And that newspaper article I had read was baloney. Pure unadulterated baloney. There was nothing wrong with this place.
Then I noticed something wrong. There were plants everywhere, but no people. I hadn’t seen anybody since I arrived. No buildings either. No roads. No signs of civilization at all. At first I thought maybe I was in some kind of park, but there were no signs telling me all the things I couldn’t do, so I knew it couldn’t be a park.
The more I looked around, the more alarmed I became. I seemed to be all alone on an empty planet. Then I remembered my tricorder. I took it out of my pocket and switched it to dating mode. It said I was currently crapping my pants in the year 300,612,209. Three hundred million years in the future! Yikes.
I’m not known for my cursing. I only curse to make a point. Or to let off steam. Or to kill time before church starts. But I cursed now. I cursed a blue streak. Of all the blankety blanks this was the blankiest, I said. Blank blank blank blank blank shit blank.
When I had calmed down a little bit, I took another look around the blankety blank area, this time with an eye for changes the passage of centuries might have brought about. Sure enough, now that I was looking for them, I could see the changes. There were changes all right. Blackberries were bigger now, for one thing. Much bigger. The size of apples. And they weren’t black anymore. They were apple-colored. And the apples were as big as watermelons. And they didn’t grow on trees anymore. They grew in patches. But the biggest change was in the people. There just weren’t any.
Then I found them. They weren’t exactly people as you and I know them. They were just huge brains in jars. I had walked past
these jars a number of times. In fact, I had tossed an empty Coke can into one of them, but I hadn’t noticed there were brains in there.
I went over to talk to them.
“Hiya,” I said.
“Greetings, Frank Burly,” said the oldest looking, most wrinkled brain, who I took to be their leader.
“Who are you, and how do you know my name?” I demanded.
“We know all. And your name is embroidered on your shirt.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s right. Well who are you then?”
“Our names are on our jars.”
I looked closer at their jars. Someone had stuck labels on the jars to identify their contents. “Oh, I see the names there now. Hello, Mr. Rosenbloom.”
“Hello, Frank Burly.”
“How do you know my… oh, yeah, we covered that.”
The brains were glad to fill me in about what had happened to the Earth since I left. They enjoyed showing off their knowledge. The doomsday shroud hadn’t destroyed all life on Earth, they said. The most obnoxious managed to survive, as they always do. But no one outside of the Earth knew that there were any survivors because they couldn’t see through the poisonous shroud, which had gradually moved up into the upper levels of the atmosphere. There it harmed no one, and kept out dangerous ultra violet rays and maintained a constant year round temperature of 75 degrees all over the world. I always figured pollution had to be good for the environment. People are wrong about everything else. Why not that?
I was glad the Earth was okay, but I was horrified by what mankind had come to.
“This is horrible,” I said, genuinely moved. “Is this the future of life on Earth? A bunch of smelly brains in jars?”
Mr. Rosenbloom’s brain got more wrinkly. “What do you mean smelly?”
“If you were a giant nose instead of a giant brain you’d know what I meant.”
“Perhaps,” he admitted.
Earth vs. Everybody Page 8