Earth vs. Everybody (8 page)

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 9
^th
.”

“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 climbing 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.

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.