Earth vs. Everybody (10 page)

The inhabitants’
biggest fear when I landed on their planet, judging by their panicky news
broadcasts, seemed to be that I might begin to reproduce. But they didn’t have
to worry about that. I couldn’t get a woman to even look at me.

Sometimes I’d run
into a meddling little kid who tried to convince all the grown-ups that I
wasn’t as bad as I seemed to be, and everybody should come out of their hiding
places and surround me. In cases like that, I had to tell the kid to button his
lip or I’d button it for him. I didn’t want people to know I wasn’t as bad as I
seemed to be. I wanted them to think I was considerably worse. Go ruin somebody
else’s business, you little bastard. After I’d buttoned a couple of lips, word
got around and the kids started laying off me.

The job had its
ups and downs, but no more than any other job I’ve ever had. It was a living.
And I was doing what I wanted to do with my life. I won’t say I had always
wanted to do it—I had wanted to be a movie star when I was a kid. Then a
priest. Then a priest watching a movie. Then some other careers. Then came the
day when I found out it didn’t matter what you wanted to be, you were going to
end up standing in line at the unemployment office with everybody else. I wish
somebody had told me that sooner. Before I did all that planning—but being a
space monster was what I wanted to do now. It was a good enough career. I was
getting my three square meals a day, and my bars of gold, that’s the important
thing.

Eventually, as my
notoriety spread, I attracted the attention of the Intergalactic Police. I
usually managed to stay one or two jumps ahead of them, but the constant
pursuit forced me to change my style. Instead of rampaging across a whole
planet, and then picking through the inhabitants’ valuables at my leisure, I’d
just set down in the biggest city on the planet, roar as loud as I could and
get out of there with whatever I could quickly get my hands on—some money,
food, or maybe just a section of the newspaper. It was less satisfying doing it
that way, but it had to be done, at least until I could find a way to shake off
my pursuers.

And it wasn’t
just the police chasing me. There was another ship out there too. It had been
chasing me for weeks. I didn’t have any idea who it was. A fan, maybe. Or an
autograph hound. But I ran from it anyway. That’s one of the things you can
count on with me. If you chase me, I will run.

Eventually I
started getting a little tired of all the police chases. My job was hard enough
without having to avoid the police all the time. I took a day off to sit down
on an asteroid and figure out a way to get the cops off my tail for good. One
of the policemen used that day to catch up to me and stick a gun in my ribs.

“Boing!” the cop
said.

I turned around.
It was Larry Laffman.

As he slammed me
up against a rock-face and told me to spread ‘em, and I laughed myself sick at
the serious way he said it, we swapped stories. He told me how he’d ended up as
an Intergalactic Policeman, and I told him how I had evolved into a space
monster. Then he reminded me that anything I might say, including all of the
things I had already said, could be used against me in a court of law. I said
he might have told me that before I blabbed everything. He said he was sorry.
He was new at this. Also, he pointed out that my hands weren’t up nearly high
enough.

I was surprised
to run into Larry way out here in the middle of outer space. Last I heard he
was in Vegas. He told me he had escaped Earth when the invasion began, along
with his agent, in his own private rocket ship. I asked where he had gotten one
of those. He said he had recently negotiated a new deal with NBC for a spin-off
of his hilariously physical game show: “Take It From Me”. The spin-off was
going to be a more laid-back easy-going version of the same show called: “I’ve
Got To Hand It To You”. NBC had wanted the spin-off pretty bad so Sid got Larry
a good deal, which included a huge salary, an important sounding title (“Vice
President In Charge Of Everything”), controlling interest in the actual
peacock, and a space ship—the only privately owned fully-operational space ship
in Hollywood at the time. (The one owned by the Moe Howard Estate had crashed).
So when the Earth was invaded, he and Sid escaped in the ship. He said once he
got out here he took the police job on the advice of his agent.

“Sid says with
this cop experience I might have a better chance to land some roles in action
pictures, which is about all they make out here. He got me a good contract for
this cop thing too. Cash up front, 20% of the police station, and I get to
break all the laws I want after I turn 80.”

I finally got to
meet Sid. He was standing over by the police cruiser wearing an honorary
deputy’s uniform and talking on a cell phone.

“Hi Sid,” I said.

He waved.
“Beautiful,” he said.

“I’m glad you’re
the one who caught me, Larry,” I said warmly. “Because you’re my best friend.
We go a long way back. We’d do anything for each other. The other cops don’t
know me like you do. They wouldn’t let me go and wish me good luck like you’re
going to do, Friend Larry.”

He shook his
head. “Can’t let you go. I own 20% of this bust. It’s money in my pocket.”

“But…”

“Business. Sorry.
You want to pat yourself down? I’m not sure I want to get that close to you.
They’ve got laundromats out here, you know.”

I started slowly
patting myself down. I didn’t particularly want to touch me either. Besides, I
needed time to think of a trick. A way to get away. I wasn’t too optimistic.
Usually when I try to think of a trick, all I can think of is the word “trick”
over and over. Can’t get it out of my head. I don’t know why that happens. But
it’s not a trick. It’s just the word for it.

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.

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.