Earth vs. Everybody (6 page)

“Very well,” Doug
Rogers said finally, after eyeing our primitive, but huge, Earth weapons.

Buzzy was brought
back down the ladder and everybody started heading for City Hall.

The rest of the
day was taken up with a spirited discussion among our city leaders about what
to do with this space alien we suddenly had. Some said that space aliens were
dangerous, almost by definition, so let’s get rid of it. Others said we
couldn’t pass up an opportunity like this. This was big. New York didn’t have a
space alien. Neither did Phoenix. This could put our town on the map. Nobody
could argue with that. But they did anyway, I noticed.

While this
discussion was going on, news of our exciting capture went out over the wires
and soon the phones in City Hall were ringing off the hook. The whole country
seemed to be interested. But it was the phone calls from reporters in distant
galaxies calling to ask if the trial was going to be held here, and if it was
could they get hotel reservations, that finally decided the matter. No city
lets hotel reservations get away.

The Mayor
announced that nobody was taking our space alien anywhere. Our space alien
would be tried right here in good old Central City where Businesses Were Sound,
Housing Was Affordable, and The Mayor Was Running For Re-Election, or he
wouldn’t be tried anywhere.

Doug Rogers
frowned when he heard this, fingered his ray gun for a moment, then got on his
communicator to his superiors in the Pleiades. He talked for quite awhile,
explaining the situation—I heard the words “puny”, “primitive”, and “childish”
several times—then he told our Mayor that if the Earth insisted on being the
site for the trial, so be it. On two conditions: The Intergalactic Police would
continue to guard the felon to make sure he didn’t get away. And special
prosecutors would have to be flown in from the Lawyer Nebulae to try the case.
The primitive monkey-like lawyers we had here wouldn’t know how to do it. That
was acceptable to the Mayor and the City Council. The lawyers present chattered
in protest, but they were overruled. So it was agreed. The trial would be held
here in two weeks.

All this was
tremendously exciting to the people of Central City, of course. This kind of
thing didn’t happen every day. In fact, only the oldest and least truthful
residents could remember it happening here before at all.

I
was excited too, but for a different reason. With Buzzy out of the way, my job
at CrimeCo would be a pleasure. From now on, if I hid behind machinery it would
be because I wanted to. I could hardly wait to get back to work. But when I got
back to CrimeCo I discovered that there was a pink slip waiting for me. I had
been fired.

I marched angrily
into Larry Laffman’s office and demanded to know what the meaning of this pink
slip was. I thought it meant I was fired. But I could be wrong. I wanted an
answer. And I wanted it now. Or I was going to keep working here forever. He
said I was fired all right. I asked why.

“You broke the
rules.”

“What rules did I
break?” I asked, hotly. “Name me one rule I broke.” I hoped he wouldn’t
remember all the rules I had broken since I started working there. Or noticed
the five rules I broke on the way to his office.

He handed me the
CrimeCo Rule Book. “Page 1,” he said. “Rule 1. The one that’s in capital
letters and has all the exclamation points after it.”

I read it aloud.
“DON’T TURN YOUR BOSS IN TO THE POLICE!!!!!!!!*” I frowned. Well, hell, I had
broken that rule, all right. They had me there. Then I noticed there was an
asterisk. “It lists some exceptions here at the bottom of the page,” I pointed
out.

“None of the
exceptions apply to you.”

“I’ll read
through them myself, if you don’t mind,” I said stiffly. I read through them.
They didn’t apply to me. I threw the book down.

“Do you have any
other questions?” Larry asked.

“No. Just that
one about me being fired.”

I noticed he was
cleaning out his desk. I asked him why. He said he was fired too. He had been
forced out by the stockholders. He said the crime business was a lot like show
business in that way. When the big guy goes down, most of his team are usually
given the boot too. That way a whole bunch of new people get to move up, to
bring the company a fresh perspective, and to get the boot themselves later on.
The stockholders had wanted the company to move in a new, less funny, direction
for a long time anyway. So now he was out and they’d brought in a hit man from
back East to take over the top spot. There were rumors that the company’s name
might be changed too, to KillCo. And the company logo—a pratfall wearing a
mask—was definitely out.

I asked Larry
what he was going to do now. He said his agent would line up something. In the
meantime he was going to go to Vegas and do a few weeks there. I said maybe I’d
go to Vegas with him. We could perform on stage together. I could be his
straight man. Or he could be the straight man and I’d be the funny one. It
didn’t matter to me. As long as we were together. He said he worked alone. And
he didn’t like me all that much anyway. I said maybe I’d just go home then. He
said that sounded like a good idea to him.

I went back to my
detective office. It looked even worse than it had when I left it. Everything
was covered with a thick layer of dust, several windows were broken, and,
unless I was mistaken, some vermin were missing. On the plus side, one of the
lamps had been fixed. But that didn’t make up for all the things that were
worse. I started to clean the place up, grumbling.

My business was
in terrible shape too. Clients had moved on, or died of neglect in my waiting
room. My subscription to Lousy Detective Magazine (the only magazine that would
let me subscribe to it) had lapsed. And the bank said my checking account was a
checking account no more. I started making some phone calls to see if I could get
my business going again, but my phone service had been cut off. I started
writing some postcards.

It’s hard to get
a business like mine going at any time, but it was especially hard right then,
because the people of Central City only had one thing on their minds: Buzzy’s
big trial. Everybody was talking about it. Nobody was talking about the Big
Clue Sale at Frank Burly Investigations. Tourists and newsmen were pouring in
from all over the country, and from space too. All of them to see the trial.
None of them to see me. Businesses all over town were jumping on the space
bandwagon. The coffee shops were selling “Space Coffee: The Official Coffee Of
Space”. Other businesses were advertising “Space Burgers” and “Space Paint”.
And the police were handing out “Space Tickets”. Everything was space space
space. I tried to pass myself off as a Space Detective for a couple of days,
walking around in front of my office with feelers on my head, making what I
thought were outer space sounds (“Space! Space! Mweeeeeee!”), but nobody was
buying it.

Every night I
came home from work with emptier pockets. Every day my business was farther in
the red. I started to think maybe I was too old to be a detective now. That’s
the way it works, you know. When you’re first starting out in life, everybody
says you’re too young. Then they start saying you’re too old. There’s only
about five minutes there in the middle where you’re just right. Just my luck, I
was in the can at the time.

I wasn’t the only
one in Central City with troubles right then, thank heavens (misery loves
company). The Mayor and the City Council had suddenly discovered that just when
Central City was finally getting some publicity and had become the center of
intergalactic attention for a change, it wasn’t looking its best. The garbage
wasn’t being picked up. The trains weren’t running on time. No city services
were being carried out. And nobody seemed to know why.

“Why isn’t
anybody picking up the garbage?” asked the Mayor. “We’ve got 92,000 people on
the city payroll. Whose job is it? Because it’s not mine. I’m the Mayor.”

“And I’m the
police man,” said a policeman. “So it can’t be my job either.”

“Maybe we should
ask the public who’s been picking up their garbage,” suggested a councilman.

The Mayor shook
his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Fred. It might give them the idea
that we haven’t been doing it.”

“Hey, yeah, it
might at that.”

“The public isn’t
as stupid as it looks, Fred. I’ve told you that before.”

“Yeah, I guess in
all the excitement I forgot.”

Since garbage was
piling up everywhere, and nobody seemed to know whose job it was to clean it
up, the city decided, as a stopgap solution, to put up false walls along all
the roads throughout the city—they got the idea from a guy named Potemkin—so
visitors would only see what was best about Central City, like its beautiful
walls, and not what was bad about it, like what was behind those walls. Of
course you could still smell the garbage back there, even if you couldn’t see
it, but that was solved with another stopgap measure: the Great Perfume Flood
of 2009, which killed 2007 people.

Another new
addition to the streets during this exciting time was me. I had given up trying
to get my business going and was out on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse
trying to pick up some extra money begging. There were so many tourists around
town now, with so much money burning holes in their pockets, I figured maybe I
could get some just by asking for it.

I wasn’t a very
good bum at first. It takes time to learn any new trade. But I did the best I
could, like I always do. Always remember that, kids. In this world you’ve got
to work hard to be all that you can be, and then pretend to be the rest. Or,
you can just go straight to the pretending part. Either way. I don’t really
care what you do, to be honest. Don’t even know you. Do what you want.

I picked out a
good spot in the gutter, mussed up my hair, and tried to look needy. Everyone
started making wider circles around me than they had been making before. I
checked myself out in a mirror. I looked too needy. I looked like I was so
needy I was about to kill somebody. I combed my hair back the way it had been
before. Then I sat down on the cement and held up a sign that said “Bum”. I
also had a sign that said “Bum Back In 5 Minutes”, which I used if I wanted to
get something to eat or go to the can or something, and a “Last Bum For 35
Miles” sign, which wasn’t quite accurate, but it had a compelling message.

After awhile my
first customer showed up—an elderly gentleman with a suspicious face. He
stopped and looked down at me doubtfully. I rattled my tin cup and asked him
for ten cents for a cup of coffee.

He frowned. “A
cup of coffee costs fifty cents.”

I frowned. “Next
you’ll be telling me I’m not a bum.”

He asked me if I
was blind or disabled or something. Was that why I was out on the streets? I
said no, I’m just a lousy businessman. I rattled my tin cup at him again, a
little more forcefully this time. He scowled, then moved on and gave some money
to someone else, a few bums away, giving me a nasty look as he did so. Gee, I
thought, this is harder than it looks. I decided I needed a better story to
tell. The truth wasn’t working.

I told the next
passerby that I was blind and deaf and couldn’t speak, the doctors had given me
fourteen seconds to live, and that was thirteen seconds ago, my teeth were
animal teeth, and I had a spring for a brain. And that it would take at least a
buck to fix all that. He gave me the money, but when I didn’t get better right
away, and said now it was going to be another eight hundred bucks, he moved on
without contributing any more. I was disappointed. I thought I was going to be
able to make a nice comfortable living off this one guy alone. I thought I had
struck the mother lode. But no such luck.

The other bums on
the street were doing a lot better than I was, I noticed. Some had long
pathetic stories of hardship to relate—stories I found hard to believe in some
cases. Like the bum who said he was a former child star and U.S. President, and
the current Miss America, and that he’d lost everything and had to start living
on the streets after the Soviet Union forced liquor down his throat. I didn’t
believe more than half of that story—Miss America, my foot! That’s a girl’s
job!—but I had to admit he gave customers a lot of story for their money.

Another bum, who
was doing even better, didn’t even bother with a story. He just sat down a
little too close to the foot traffic and waited to be accidentally kicked. When
that happened his arms and legs would spring off of his body, his eyes would
fall out, the top of his head would fly off and skid down the sidewalk, and his
heart would explode out of his chest and go through a window. The horrified
pedestrian who had tripped over him would quickly apologize, help him retrieve
his body parts, and usually put a liberal amount of spare change into his cup
before hurrying off. Within two minutes the bum would be back together again,
waiting for another chance to burst apart. The man was a genius, in his way. I
tried his technique, but no matter how many times I got kicked, the best I
could do was lose some front teeth.

Eventually,
though, after I’d been out on the streets for awhile, I started making a little
money. My pathetic claim to passersby that I couldn’t do anything right had
just enough of a ring of truth to it to generate some sympathy. And some
donations. I wasn’t making a fortune, by any means, but I was getting by.

I didn’t just ask
people for money either. I needed everything. “Luggage?” I would ask. “Can I
have some luggage, mister? How about some toothpaste, ma’am? Theater tickets!
Who’ll give me front row theater tickets?” People didn’t give me things very
often, but it didn’t hurt to ask. I got a nice pair of pants out of it. And
somebody gave me a cat, which I named Russell.