Immediately he was pounced upon by Secret Service men. You don’t pull weapons around the President of the United States unless you want to be pounced on by somebody. But as soon as the Secret Service men touched Buzzy they quickly jumped away again, holding their shocked hands and howling in pain. I drew the special gun I had lifted from the police cruiser and shot Buzzy, instantly slowing him to the speed of molasses.
Everyone stared at the suit on the floor that seemed to be filled with slowly pulsating electricity, and at the unkempt man with the weird ray gun (me). Nobody knew what to do next. It seemed to be up to me, since I had the gun, and appeared to have the drop on everybody. First I asked the President what year it was. He conferred with his aides and said it was 1970 or ‘71. So I’d come too far, as I had suspected. Then I asked the Secret Service men if they had an empty six foot tall battery casing. They said they had, but never thought they’d ever have a use for it. I told them to wrap it around Buzzy.
They got him trussed up in the casing, then looked at me. “Now what?”
“Uh… deep space. Widest possible angle of dispersion.”
They didn’t know what I meant, and, now that I thought about it, I didn’t either. It was just a phrase I had picked up someplace. “Stab him,” I suggested.
While they were trying to stab him, and not getting much in the way of results—each stab just resulted in another nasty shock—I got a better idea: let’s send him back where he came from, back into space, on the next Moon shot. So that’s how Buzzy ended up aboard Apollo 13. There wasn’t a lot of extra room in there, but we managed to stuff him in. I forget where we put him exactly. The number two oxygen tank in the Service Module, I think.
Nixon asked how he could repay me for my timely intervention, and I said how about getting me Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s client records when you get a chance? He said you got it. I never did get them though. I guess he forgot. People have asked me why I wanted them. Hey, I collect psychiatrist’s client records, okay? Sheesh.
Since I was visiting Washington D.C. I thought I’d stop in and watch Congress while it was in session before I left. It was very educational, and I came away with a clearer understanding of how our precious nation works. While I was there I got into the fun by staging a rare Citizen’s Filibuster on the floor of the House, which was only legal that one year. They didn’t think I could keep it up for long—I mean, you’ve got to eat and sleep sometime, right? Wrong, Congressman. Think again, Mr. Speaker. I had a time machine they didn’t know about, so I could have stayed on that floor till doomsday (July 4, 2009) without getting tired or hungry. So I won pretty easy. I’m not sure what the bill I killed was all about, but it was called the “Give Everybody Their Freedoms Back Bill” (HB1621), which I characterized, without bothering to read it, as a “flawed scheme”. Anyway, it was fun taking part in the process.
I intended to just back up to 1934, but I forgot to shift into reverse and when I stepped on the gas the machine shot forward into time, instead of backward. I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop, cursing like the sailor I had always wanted to be. I was about to shift into reverse when I noticed I had stopped next to a newspaper stand. The newspaper said it was July 7th, 2009, three days after the Independence Day Invasion! But there were no aliens to be seen. No one had been massacred. No civilians were being rounded up. No buildings had been destroyed. The town looked kind of crappy, but it was all still there. I asked a passerby why he wasn’t dead or captured by aliens, and he said how do we know anything these days.
Dazed, I got out of the machine, gave the keys to a parking attendant who got in and disappeared into time never to return, and went to see if my vaporized house and office were back. They were, looking as disreputable as ever, if not more so. What the hell?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Larry Laffman was playing at a night club nearby, so I dropped in to see him to find out if A) he still knew who I was, since everything else had changed, and B) if he knew where the alien invasion of Earth went, because I couldn’t find it anywhere. A) He did, and B) he didn’t. He said to check with Sid. He would know, if anybody did. Then he finished the joke he had been telling and the audience, which had been waiting patiently while we talked, roared. I roared too. What a great joke. He still had it.
I found Sid back stage trying to talk a young actor into accepting more money per week than he would ever be worth in a lifetime. If he lived to be a million. The young actor wasn’t sure about the deal. It sounded to him like he might be getting screwed. And he didn’t want that. Sid told him to think about it. The young actor left, his face twisted in a grotesque parody of thought. I went up to Sid.
“I’m Frank Burly. Remember me? You chased me across the universe for millions of years.”
“Sure, I remember. Though I shouldn’t. Didn’t happen now. What’s on your mind?”
“Larry said you might be able to tell me what in the heck has been going on. Everything’s different now. What happened to the alien invasion?”
Sid hesitated, looked at his watch, and decided he had time to explain. “There never was an alien invasion now. You fixed that.”
“How?”
He looked at his watch again. I took the watch off his wrist and put it in my pocket, then repeated my question: “How?”
He sighed and then began: “Well, it’s like this: in the late 1940’s…”
I looked at my watch. “Hey, couldn’t we speed this up?”
“You’re the one who wanted the explanation.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Go ahead. Start in the 1940’s if you want.” I looked at my watch again. It was almost lunch and we had only gotten up to the 1940’s.
He waited until I had stopped looking at my watch and muttering to myself, then continued: “In the late 1940’s when the early space explorers first visited the Earth, they went away holding their noses. Dirty air, dirty water, trash and Communists all over the place. The Earth was a dung heap. That’s why the flying saucers stopped being sighted here. For most alien species, one look at this place was enough.
“Because aliens seldom came here, it was a perfect place for an intergalactic criminal like Buzzy to hide out. But all the filth everywhere drove him crazy. He’s a neat freak, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. And this place wasn’t neat.
“He had his gang go to work to clean up Central City, and make sure it was well run and efficient, so he could live here in comfort. The city officials didn’t know how the city got so clean all of a sudden, or what was keeping it clean, but they didn’t question it. ‘Leave Well Enough Alone’ is the city’s motto. Did you know that?”
“Yeah,” I said, glancing at my watch.
“Everything was fine until Buzzy noticed that filth was seeping in from nearby cities through the air and water, and being carried in on tramps and birds and slobs. That’s when he realized he was going to have to clean up the whole damn planet. So he met with Nixon and, using bribery and psychology, convinced him to enact all the environmental laws and standards we grew to accept as just plain Nixonian common sense. You think Nixon would have done all that on his own? Not likely. Too busy bowling and being sneaky all day.”
I frowned. “The bribery angle I understand. I saw Buzzy stuffing money into Nixon’s pocket myself. But how did psychology enter into it?”
“People will respond to any suggestion, no matter how hare-brained it sounds, as long as you make them think it was at least partially their own idea, and that they were smart for thinking of it. But you knew that, being so smart as you are.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, I knew that.” I was glad he had noticed I was smart. So glad, I decided to believe everything he ever said from now on.
“That’s what Buzzy did to Nixon,” he continued. “What I just did to you. He told him how smart he was for thinking of environmentalism. Nixon’s vanity did the rest. He pushed through all those environmental laws and set up all those new regulatory agencies, even though he wasn’t sure why he wa
s doing it. Didn’t know what it had to do with bowling. Then Buzzy began organizing environmental groups and putting thoughts into their heads. Thoughts of cleaning. And arranging. If you approach it right, you can get somebody who wouldn’t wash his own face to go outside and wash his garbage.”
I said I had always thought recycling was a bad idea. And look where it got us. It destroyed the Earth. Doomsday shroud, and so on. Sid said I couldn’t condemn an entire program for a single slipup, and I said oh yeah, just watch me.
What he’d just told me explained something I’d never understood—why Buzzy had pictures of Nixon all over his office. I assumed he liked him because he was a crook, but then I remembered that Nixon revealed in that speech of his that he wasn’t a crook. So that couldn’t have been it. Now I realized that Nixon was his hero for another reason. The EPA. That also explained why the Nixon Estate had so much Space Money in it.
“But what does any of what you’ve just told me have to do with the invasion of the Earth?” I asked. “And stop looking at me like I’m stupid. You just got through saying I was smart. Both can’t be true.”
“When Buzzy was put on trial here, TV viewers from all over the galaxy got to see how nice the Earth looked now that it had been all cleaned up. It was much nicer than the planets they were living on. And everybody got the same idea at the same time. So they all showed up here, fought over the place, and ended up destroying the whole planet, and themselves in the process.”
“That’ll learn ‘em,” I said, with satisfaction.
“But when you went back in time and broke up Buzzy’s meeting with Nixon it made it so none of that ever happened. Without Nixon’s initiatives, the Earth never got cleaned up. It just kept getting dirtier and dirtier, until it’s the way you see it now. With garbage all over the place, dirt in the air, and chocolate on everybody’s faces. No one will ever try to take over this place now. I doubt if you could give it away.”
“Hey, how do you know all this?”
“Oh, I get around. Hear things. And I’m not just Larry Laffman’s agent, you know. I represent a lot of talented people in a variety of fields.”
“You mean you’re Buzzy’s agent?”
“That’s right.”
“But… he’s an evil criminal alien.”
He shrugged. “Agents can’t afford to only represent Mary Poppins types. There aren’t enough of them. We learn not to think too much about whether our clients are nice or not. We just think about how much nice money they can make us. Hell, I represent Jack the Ripper too.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“Aw, he’s all right. Just don’t offer him sex.”
“Gotcha.”
“He’s available for birthday parties, if you’re interested.”
I said I wasn’t.
He took his watch out of my pocket and looked at it. “Hey, I’ve got to go.” He stood up.
“One more question. What happened to Buzzy?”
“Well, you got him off the planet on Apollo 13 all right, but he got out of the ship somehow on its way to the Moon, waited around in open space, then came back on one of the space shuttles. He told me he had to pry off some tiles to get in. But by the time he got back there had been a change of administration and the new President wouldn’t see him, so he hasn’t done as well this time around.”
“Where is he? What’s he doing?”
Sid jerked a thumb at the stage. “It’s just a temporary thing. I’m looking to get him something better. He’s the stooge in Larry’s act.”
I looked around the curtain and watched Larry pull out Buzzy’s nose until it buzzed with anger. Then he hit him with pies until he shorted out. The audience howled. Buzzy didn’t look too happy. But at least now he could tell his friends that he was in show business. And I thought he was pretty good.
Before he left, Sid suggested representing me too. He wanted to run me for Congress. He said I was the kind of one-dimensional blowhard who could really go far in politics. I had to say no. My message of “More Power To The Fatcats” has never gained much traction. And every time I kiss a baby it dies. So I don’t think politics would be a good career for me.
So everything is back the way it was, pretty much, though there are some differences. With no EPA or endangered species lists to slow technological development down, all the gadgets the people of the 1950’s thought would exist by the 21st century are here: hover cars, robot maids, teleporters, silver suits, everything. Of course the silver suits don’t look very silver because they’re covered with crud all the time. And all the dirt and food particles in the air gets in the hover cars’ engines so they don’t hover much. You have to push them wherever you’re going. But at least we’ve got them. That’s the important thing. The future is here.
I tried several times to send a thank-you note to 300 million years in the future, expressing my thanks to the brains for the use of the time machine, and to see how they were doing, but the first two came back stamped ‘Time Period Not Known” and the last one came back stamped “Refused”. So I guess they’ll never know how grateful I am.
I told the Central City officials what I had done, and how I had saved the Earth and defeated the environment and everything. Most of them didn’t believe my story, but a few key gullible members of the administration felt that if what I was saying was true, I deserved a reward.
“How can we thank you?” they asked. “What would you like? Just name it. Anything.”
“I’d like to rob the 1st National Bank.”
“Well, we said anything,” they said, unhappily, “so, go ahead.”
So I did. There wasn’t as much money in there as I thought there would be. A bank should have more than ten bucks in it, I would have thought. But at least I finally robbed the damn thing. So I can stop worrying about that.
So that’s how I saved the Earth, more or less, after causing most of the trouble in the first place. Some people consider me a hero. Others aren’t so sure. Depends on how you look at it, I suppose. 12% of the people say I’m worse than Dracula. I don’t see how they can say that. Read Dracula’s story again before you make wild statements like that. What’s the matter with you people?
This isn’t exactly a happy ending, unfortunately. The Earth is so filthy now that the rest of the galaxy has sent a big garbage truck here to haul us away to some dump they have out there. Oh well, it’s a happy ending until the truck gets here for us. That’s pretty good, I guess.
BOOKS BY JOHN SWARTZWELDER
THE TIME MACHINE DID IT (2004)
DOUBLE WONDERFUL (2005)
HOW I CONQUERED YOUR PLANET (2006)
THE EXPLODING DETECTIVE (2007)
DEAD MEN SCARE ME STUPID (2008)
EARTH VS. EVERYBODY (2009)
THE LAST DETECTIVE ALIVE (2010)
THE FIFTY FOOT DETECTIVE (2011)
Copyright © 2009
by John Swartzwelder
Published by:
Kennydale Books
P.O. Box 3925
Chatsworth, California 91313-3925
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
First Printing March, 2009
ISBN 13 (paperback edition) 978-0-9822736-0-9
ISBN 13 (hardback edition) 978-0-9822736-1-6
ISBN 10 (paperback edition) 0-9822736-0-6
ISBN 10 (hardback edition) 0-9822736-1-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008911680
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America
EARTH VS. EVE
RYBODY
John Swartzwelder
Kennydale Books.
Chatsworth, California
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BOOKS BY JOHN SWARTZWELDER
Earth vs. Everybody Page 10
