Earth vs. Everybody

by John Swartzwelder

  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.

  After I had been at my station for a week or so, the city put a small wall in front of me. Fortunately, pedestrians could still smell me back there, so they weren’t surprised when they heard the wall asking them for money.

  While I struggled to get my new career going, Buzzy’s big trial finally got started down at the courthouse. Everyone in town tried to crowd into the courtroom to witness this thrilling spectacle. Even I sat in on as much of it as my beggin
g business would allow. The people who were waiting to give me money didn’t like it—they were late for work already—but I couldn’t miss Buzzy’s trial.

  On that first exciting day, all sorts of motions were made and testimony was given, but it didn’t turn out to be as exciting as we had expected. Most of it was just plain mystifying. To our surprise, we discovered that we didn’t know nearly as much about Intergalactic Law as we thought we did. What the hell was “Xappyx vs. Zernx”? And how did it serve as a precedent in this case? And what in the hell was a “precedent”? We couldn’t follow that part of the trial—the legal part—at all. We thought it was going to be like the trials we saw on TV, with people pointing shaking fingers at Buzzy and saying: “There he is! There’s your space monster!” And Buzzy struggling to get at the witness and threatening to wreak his awful revenge on everybody. And cops whacking him to get him to settle down and be nice. And the judge banging his gavel to add to the noise. But it wasn’t anything like that at all. It was just a bunch of legal junk. Our local newsmen tried to get a handle on what was going on for their viewers by analyzing the facial expressions of the prosecutor and the defense attorney and the other newsmen. And that seemed to work pretty well. Now we knew when something smiley was happening. Or something frowny. At least we were getting some idea of what was going on. We weren’t completely in the dark like we were before.

  The reporters who had flown in from space for the trial knew what was going on, of course—they were familiar with Xappyx vs. Zernx—but they didn’t seem to be too interested in the opening days of the trial. They were more interested in reporting back to their home planets all the sights and sounds and smells around Central City, busily taking pictures of the trees and lakes and parks and so on.

  The Mayor was excited by this—this is what the city fathers had hoped would happen—and tried to get the reporters to take pictures of the city’s Bustling Business District, its Various City Improvements, and our World Famous Vacant Lots, with him standing in front of them wearing his “Mayor” sash. But the reporters just wanted to take pictures of the sky and the greenery and the water. And they didn’t want the Mayor in the pictures at all. Not even on the edge. He thought they were the worst tourists he had ever seen.

  The courtroom was packed for the first couple of days, but since nobody really understood the legal issues involved, and there was just that one fist-fight, when the jury accidentally picked two foremen, soon everybody was back outside trying to slicker our alien visitors out of as much money as possible. Everyone was renting out their yards for space ship parking at exorbitant prices, and offering the aliens everything from “Space Insurance” to “Space Bums” (that was me) at triple the ordinary prices. It wasn’t long before a number of visitors to our fair city had to send back to space for more money.

  Then, on the memorable afternoon of July 4th 2009, Independence Day, just when Buzzy’s trial was about to reach its stunning prosecutorial misconduct phase, and just when I was finally about to start turning a pre-tax profit with my bum business, Central City was attacked from space. The prosecutors had been promising real “fireworks” for the 4th of July, but they got more “fireworks” than they had “bargained for”.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Since it was the 4th of July, I was asking passersby for firecrackers when the alien warships entered the atmosphere. I looked up, irritated at the interruption. A laser beam took off my hat. Another one hit the bum next to me, who promptly sprang to pieces. Buildings around me began exploding and holes started being punched in the sidewalk by bright green power rays. The sky was full of alien craft of all shapes and sizes, from every planet you could name—and more. I had no idea what it was all about. Nobody tells bums anything. When I’m running things, that will change. We’ll keep the bums informed. In fact, I think we’ll tell them first.

  The public wasn’t alarmed by all the explosions at first. They thought it was the greatest fireworks display ever, and stuck to this opinion even when it was pointed out to them what the “fireworks” were, and that their homes and places of worship were gone. “Whatever it is, it looks great,” one of them said, stubbornly, with what was left of his head.

  Alien ships began landing all over town. Troops poured out of them and began systematically taking over all of the city’s most important buildings. Many of our citizens hurried over to screw them out of their money, but were rudely slapped aside.

  Our local military men were taken aback by this sudden onslaught. They hadn’t had anything to do since 1945, and had gotten complacent. They weren’t as ready for a fight as they were in, say, 1946. Central City Air Force Base managed to scramble a few fighters, but most of our planes were destroyed before they could get off the ground. Our ground forces were mostly destroyed on the ground too—though some of them managed to get part way under the ground before they were destroyed.

  After the first few hours, it was obvious that we were no match for these invaders from space. They were superior to us in every way. And didn’t they know it! They brushed us aside like we weren’t important at all, usually adding some derogatory comment like: “Stand aside, runt!” or “One side, shorty!” or sometimes even “Go home, boy! Go home!” which was possibly the biggest insult of them all. The real fighting that was going on was between the aliens themselves over who was going to be taking over the Earth and who was going to be taking their sorry green asses back up into space where they belonged, while our men mostly just stood helplessly off to one side, like the runts they were.

  Similar battles were raging all over the globe. All of Earth’s major cities were being taken over just as easily as ours was. And nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it.

  Occasionally, somebody who thought he was wise and important, and could handle this all by himself, would go out alone to talk to the aliens, carrying a copy of the Holy Bible or A Folk Guitar. But none of them ever came back. When we looked out to see what was taking them so long, what the big holdup was, we saw that there was nothing left out there but their sneakers, with little wisps of smoke coming out of the top. So being wise doesn’t work. We know that now.

  Our scientists were very excited about all this, of course. They love stuff like this. Now they had proof there was life on other worlds. It was right here, wiping out the life on our world! It was breaking in to the scientist’s laboratories and beating the daylights out of them, knocking over their experiments, punching them in the belly, and twisting their scrawny necks for them. You can’t have better proof of life on other planets than that.

  Through all this, Buzzy’s trial continued on determinedly. Central City wasn’t going to let anything stop this great trial we had going. This was the goddamn trial of the century, God damn it. But most of the spectators and reporters had already lost interest in the proceedings, and were outside watching the interplanetary war instead.

  To revive interest, the prosecution tried charging Buzzy with additional crimes, including weird sexual felonies of a highly titillating nature. Buzzy’s lawyers didn’t object too strenuously to this. They wanted to see where this was going. They wanted to get a good look at whatever sex evidence the prosecution had before they started objecting.

  Since all the aliens were fighting among themselves and seemed to have completely forgotten about us, our military men decided the time was right for a counterattack. After all, this was the kind of military situation—where your enemies are all looking the other way—that generals dream of when they’re kids.

  Our counterattack had a chance. On paper, anyway. We had the element of surprise on our side. Everybody thought we were beaten already. In fact, they’d forgotten we were even around. But we were. And they were under the impression we had surrendered. But we hadn’t actually signed the surrender document yet. Oh no, not yet. We also had a secret weapon they didn’t know about. It was a Flame-Throwing Atomic-Powered Jumping Poison Rocket Cannon. It was six or seven weapons in one, and was guaranteed by the company that had sol
d it to us and then moved on to the next town to be utterly devastating. Our boys chuckled as they loaded it. This was going to be good. Or we would get our money back.

  Unfortunately, this superweapon was made of recycled materials, like just about everything is these days, with the recycled materials guaranteed by the faulty printing on the package to be every bit as strong as the real thing. That guarantee was the first thing to fly apart when the cannon blew up. The explosion also leveled what remained of our army. And knocked our navy over. It didn’t surprise me. I’ve warned people about recycling. Our products are bad enough when they’re made out of new materials. They’ve got to be even worse when we make them out of garbage. Think people, think!

  After our glorious counterattack had failed so miserably, Central City realized it was all over and surrendered, becoming the first Earth city to do so. I guess we shouldn’t have been proud of that, but we kind of were. Hey, only one city could be first. And it was us.

  The aliens began rounding up the city’s civilian population. I was one of the first, probably because I kept waving my arms and yelling: “Me! Me! Pick me!” I’m pretty easy to round up when I’m hungry. I figured wherever they were taking us there had to be food there. I mean, they’ve got to feed us, right? Damn right, they do.

  I was penned up along with a few thousand others from my area in a kind of large cattle enclosure. It wasn’t bad. It certainly was better than the life I’d been living recently.

  “Hey look, everybody!” I said. “We’ve got a slop bucket!”