Earth Vs. Everybody

Frank Burly 5

John Swartzwelder

CHAPTER ONE

I can’t afford both a vacation and a bathing suit. It’s one or the other. So that’s why I was lying on my back on the beach in my street clothes. Sure, it’s a little uncomfortable, but a guy in my income bracket can’t afford one of those fancy bathing suit vacations you read about in the travel magazines. I’m not made of money. I have to cut corners. And, to save money, I was lying on a blanket with people I didn’t know. Cheaper that way. Look it up.

I was vacationing in a place called “Mexifo”, which the ads said was every bit as good as Mexico, but for a lot less money. It was even better than Mexico in some ways, they said. Better for you. Because it had no sugar. No toilet paper either. In fact, there were a lot of things Mexifo didn’t have. It didn’t have its own language or traditions, for example. It couldn’t afford to—not at the prices they were charging. And it didn’t seem to be part of any country per se. The travel agent I talked to was kind of evasive about the geographical details and seemed to want to change the subject, so we talked about basketball instead. Then crop rotation in the Midwest. He didn’t know anything about crop rotation in the Midwest, and neither did I, but he plainly was more comfortable talking about that subject than about the shadowy details of my trip.

After looking over the different packages available, I opted for the “No Frills Vacation Package” which included no food, no fun, just vacation.

I thought I’d paid for a plane flight, but the machine I boarded definitely wasn’t a plane. I wasn’t sure what it was. It took us a long time to get to Mexifo, and we sure cut a lot of grass along the way, but we finally arrived. That’s all that really matters, I guess.

My package didn’t include a hotel room as such. That would have been the “Deluxe Package”, which I’d decided against. For my package I had to sleep standing up in front of the hotel wearing a doorman’s uniform. Boy, I thought, opening the door for a couple of newlyweds, this is a cheap room.

Still, I kept reminding myself, I’ve had worse vacations. That two weeks I spent lying under those postcards of Hawaii comes to mind. And that month I spent in a drawer at the County Morgue—that was a bad vacation. I couldn’t get any rest at all. People kept identifying me.

Anyway, comfort wasn’t what was important to me on this trip. I just needed to get away from my job for awhile. I wasn’t physically tired. I was mentally worn out. The daily grind had been getting to me. I needed to recharge my batteries.

It hadn’t been a good year so far for Frank Burly Investigations. I hadn’t solved any cases at all. I was 0 for 59. That’s a .000 batting average, which is bad in any business. But especially in my business and baseball. And it wasn’t like the cases I had been asked to solve were particularly hard either. “The Crime That Solved Itself” shouldn’t have been that tough. But it was for me. And “The Mystery That Isn’t Such A Mystery After All” should have been a snap. But it had me baffled for months. My clients couldn’t decide whether I’d lost it, or never had it. But they all agreed I didn’t have it now. A monkey could do it better, they felt. Some of my clients even dropped me and went to a monkey. That hurt. But I guess they meant it to hurt. I can’t think of any other reason they’d hire a monkey.

I finally decided I needed a vacation after I struggled unsuccessfully with the case of “The Amazing Electric Thief”. In that one, a man came to me claiming that the light socket in his house had been stealing his money. The electrical outlets were in on it too, he said. He’d lost 800 bucks so far. I said he had come to the right detective agency. I was 0 for 58 this year. I was due.

When I got to his place I saw coins, checkbooks, rare stamps, and even a fur coat moving slowly across the floor and disappearing into an electrical outlet, while my client hopped from one foot to the other in dismay. I tried to stop one of the checkbooks with my foot, but it just gave me a shock and kept going.

“What in the hell is going on?” I asked, scratching my head.

“You tell me,” said my exasperated client. “I’m not the detective, you are.”

“Not anymore I’m not,” I said, putting on my hat and heading for the door. “I’m on vacation.”

A week later I was relaxing on the beach in sunny Mexifo, taking it easy and trying to forget what a lousy detective I am.

I say it was sunny, and it was, but there was something a little cheap about the sunlight. I didn’t know what it was exactly. The sun seemed to be dripping, for one thing. And it had flies buzzing around it. And if you didn’t keep shoving quarters in it, it would shut off. And the suntan I got was blue. That seemed like the wrong color to me, but I’m no expert. At least I was getting a suntan. That’s what’s important on a vacation. Never mind what color you’re turning.

I might have enjoyed my vacation, despite all the inconveniences, if it hadn’t been for the pricey resort right across the bay from mine. That place had everything my resort didn’t. It was in a real country, for one thing. You could find it on a map. And it had real scenery, not just a painted board that moved along with you when you walked, so you felt like you were in a cheap cartoon. And the clouds they had over there were floating in the sky, not hanging from a crane. I knew I couldn’t afford a ritzy place like that, so I tried to not let it bother me. It was obvious that the people over there were having a lot more fun than I was, but that was okay, because they were obviously better people than me. They were the elite. I wasn’t. As long as life is fair you won’t get any squawk from me.

But then I noticed that I recognized some of the “elite” people vacationing in that resort. They were well known Central City criminals! I didn’t see how they rated a better vacation than me. They weren’t better than me. If anything, they were worse. I decided I had to look into this.

There weren’t any boats available, but that turned out not to matter. The bay was made out of blue plywood. So I just walked across.

When I got to the other side I found that the whole resort was full of criminals, all of them having a wonderful time. They were eating the finest foods, drinking the most exotic drinks, and lounging around in front of their 5-star hotel in skimpy and somewhat revealing masks, soaking up the sun and letting their rat-like minds drift. They were getting a really top notch vacation. And it was all paid for, I found out from one of them—a guy named “Shifty” because he never seemed to be around when you were looking at him—by “The Organization”.

“Last year we went to Atlantic City,” said Shifty. “I stole ninety dollars.”

“The real Atlantic City?” I asked, “Or…?” Before I decided on Mexifo, I was considering a vacation in Ratlantic City.

“Sure the real one. Right on the Boardwalk. Three weeks, all expenses paid.”

“Gee…”

He asked me why I was vacationing on the landfill over there. I said it wasn’t a landfill. It was a very popular resort. And I was having a very nice time there. He shrugged.

As I walked back across the bay to my landfill, I got to thinking that maybe I was on the wrong side of the fence, as far as the law went. It certainly was a possibility. Usually if there’s a fence you’ll find me on the wrong side of it. Maybe there was something to be said for crime after all. Criminals certainly got better vacations. It was something to think about anyway.

I went back to my blanket, climbed up to the top of the pile of people lying on it, and stretched out to work on my tan a little more.

After a few more days of this I decided to cut my vacation short and head on back. I figured I was as relaxed as I was ever going to be. And I could get unusual bowel disorders at home. I didn’t have to take a lawnmower to Mexifo for that.

When we arrived back in Central City and they had emptied me out of the grass bag at the terminal, I headed for my office, refreshed and rejuvenated, I hoped, and ready to get back to work.

But the moment I sat back down behind my desk I realized it had all been for nothing. I wasn’t relaxed. My batteries weren’t recharged. And my suntan was already fading from blue to a kind of muddy turquoise. I guess I’m not any better at taking vacations than I am at anything else. My vacation photos were disappointing too. Just pictures of me trying to get my camera back.

To make matters worse, my business was in an even bigger mess than it had been in when I left. More bills, thanks to my expensive vacation. And less money, thanks to that same vacation. What was I thinking? I guess it just proves the old saying: “He who is his own boss has a fool for an employer”.

While I was brooding about this, the sheriff came in to attach some of my possessions and turn them over to my creditors. This had turned into kind of a monthly ritual.

“Hi, Sheriff,” I said. “Is it the first of the month already?”

“Get off of that chair, Frank.”

I got up and he wheeled my chair out, taking the calendar off the wall and the knob off the door as he left. I thought I had paid off that knob, but I guess not.

I looked around to see if there was anything left to sit on in the office. There wasn’t. I tried to get some work done standing up, but it hurt my back leaning over the desk like that. Lying on my belly on the desk didn’t work either. Got too many pushpins in my face. I gave up trying to get any work done. This was turning into a lousy day.

Of course misery loves company, so I decided to go outside and see how miserable everybody else was. Maybe that would cheer me up.

The first person I ran into was the criminal I had met at the resort—Shifty.

“I guess when you got back from your vacation your business was quite a mess, eh?” I asked, chuckling. I knew what the answer would be. Everybody’s business was a mess when they got back from vacation these days. Not just mine.

“No,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Our business is doing fine. I don’t see how anybody could be doing bad in an economy like this. How’s your business doing?”

“Fine.”

I looked at all the swag he was lugging down the street. “You stole all that in one day?”

“Sure!”

“But it’s not even lunchtime yet!”

“Our organization is very efficient. Can you help me get this stuff into my car?”

“I guess.”

We started loading up his trunk. I noticed it was a more expensive car than I owned. Shifty said he was thinking of getting rid of it and getting a new one. The ashtrays were full on this one. And it didn’t have that new car smell anymore. It smelled like him now. He had better clothes than I did too, I noticed. And dames? He had dozens of them, he bragged. All he wanted. Okay, most of them were kind of scraggly, but they were dames. It’s like the poet says, he reminded me, they all look alike on the census form.

Shifty wanted to stay and talk, but he had to go pick up that new car while he was thinking about it. So he headed for the Cadillac dealership and I went back to my office and laid face down on my desk again. Whoever said honesty is the best policy and crime doesn’t pay must have just got here, I decided. That’s not the way it works around here. I don’t know why we listen to guys who say stuff like that. Let’s wait until they get something right once before we start listening to them all the time.

That was my problem, I suddenly realized. My honesty was holding me back. Well, honesty and incompetence. And my surly attitude. And that unpleasant smell I give off when someone shakes my hand. A lot of things were holding me back, but honesty was certainly one of them.

I glumly stared out of my window. A parade was going by on the street below. I saw criminals on floats, waving to the people lining the parade route. The Organization was celebrating the return of the first criminal to sneak across the Atlantic by himself.

The enthusiastic cheers of the crowd decided it for me. Criminals get all the money and all the fame. All us honest guys get are cases we can’t solve and bills we won’t pay. Screw that.

I started looking for the business card Shifty had given me that had the Organization’s address on it. It took awhile to find it. They say it’s always in the last place you look, but I always look a few other places after I find it. You can never tell. It might be there too. You might have two of them now. After I had found the business card I looked for another hour. Sure enough. There was another one. I had two of them. Always in the last place you look, my ass!

I closed up my business, put my detective stuff in mothballs, put my few remaining clients up on blocks, gave my secretary her freedom, and went out to start my new life of crime.

CHAPTER TWO

I went down to the address written on the card. It was a large building for a hideout. Twenty stories. There was a shop at street level that sold crime oriented novelties like rubber gangster vomit, but there was no indication anywhere of what the other nineteen stories were for. Sometimes a policeman on his beat would stop and look up at the building and wonder, but he never went in. Going into buildings wasn’t his job. His job was walking on sidewalks.

When I got there, there were a couple of tough looking thugs hanging around the entrance to make sure nobody made a mistake and accidentally went into the wrong building—like the one they were guarding. I watched them toss out a blind man who had tapped his way a little too close to the entrance. He landed in the gutter and started throwing punches in all directions, while me and the thugs laughed our asses off. Then it was my turn.

Between slaps to my face and punches to my belly, I explained that I was here for a job interview. One of them got on the phone and checked upstairs and apparently got an okay from somebody. They turned me upside down and shook me a couple of times to relieve me of any weapons or dangerous valuables I might have on me, gave me a rather vaguely worded receipt that didn’t mention either my possessions or them, then let me pass.

I went up to the second floor. There was a glass door with the words: “CrimeCo (formerly Crime & Sons)” painted on it. I went in and explained to the scarfaced receptionist that I was here to apply for a job. She looked at me with that bored sinister expression all receptionists have, then gave me an employment application to fill out.

Most of the questions on the application weren’t hard—I knew what my name was, of course, it’s “Frank”, and my phone number was sewn into my underwear. The phone company hadn’t wanted to do it, but I had insisted—but some of the more probing questions required some thought. “Are you a police informant or a crybaby?” asked Question 14. “Police informant”, I wrote. Then I scratched that out and wrote in “crybaby”. Finally I crossed the whole question out. Maybe they wouldn’t remember that one was in there.

I handed in my completed application, then waited. A little while later I was called in to a large conference room. Half a dozen criminals were seated around the table, glancing over copies of my application.

“You look familiar,” said the man at the head of the table. “Didn’t you break into my office with an ax last month?”

“Well, yes,” I admitted, “but that was back when I was an honest man. Before I went bad.”

“What are you, some kind of cop?”

“I was a private investigator. But I am no longer.”

“When did you stop being one?”

“When I came in here.”

Everybody stared at me. I winked at them. When nobody reacted, I winked at everybody again, this time going around the table the other way, using the other eye.

Fortunately for me, Shifty was at the table. He stuck up for me. “He’s okay, boss. He’s definitely not honest.” I gave him a high five.

The criminals didn’t seem to attach too much importance to what I had done before in life. They didn’t seem to think anything about me was very important. I was thankful for that. Offended, too.

“Do you have any experience in our kind of business?” asked the man at the head of the table.

I nodded. “I have experience.”

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

I nodded. “I have killed everyone.”

“Is there anything you wouldn’t say or do to get this job?”

“There is nothing I wouldn’t say or do to get this, or any other, job.”

The criminals looked at each other, impressed. I heard one of them mutter: “That’s the kind of man we want.” And another said: “Where has he been all our lives?”

They asked me a few more questions about my background, checking to make sure I was giving them truthful answers by slapping me around a little. I didn’t mind. That’s how I find out stuff too. It works.

After they finished interviewing me they had me wait outside while they talked it over. When they called me back in they told me that I was hired. In deference to my age and experience they were going to start me out quite a ways up the criminal ladder, as a bank robber.

“Welcome aboard,” the man at the head of the table said. “Any questions?”

“Yes. When do I get my vacation?”

“Not yet.”

“Shit.”

“Any other questions?”

“About that vacation…”

“We’ll tell you when you get your vacation.”

“But…”

“Report to work at nine a.m. tomorrow morning.”

“Yes sir.”

On my way out of the building I asked the thugs at the door for my valuables, but they played dumb.

“What wallet?” asked one of them innocently.

“What picture of your mother?” asked the other one.

I didn’t press it. I had a job. That was what mattered. I could always take another picture of my mother if I wanted one.

The next morning I was shown around the operation and got to meet some of the guys I would be working with. They were a colorful group, and I could tell I was going to like them.

“Scarface here was thrown off the most wanted list because of some nice thing he did,” I was told when I was introduced to one man.

“Say it ain’t so, Scarface,” I said.

“I ain’t saying nuttin’.”

I turned to the criminal next to Scarface. “I guess they must call you ‘Gorilla Face’, eh?”

“No…”

“They don’t? Why not? Haven’t they seen your face?”

“Let’s go,” said my guide, nervously.

“Okay. So long, Gorilla Face. You too, Pig Eyes. Catch you later, Shit-For-Looks.”

I enjoyed meeting and chatting with the men. I felt I was getting a rare insight into the inner workings of the criminal mind. Criminals, I discovered, don’t think like we do. They’re greedy. And selfish. Always looking out for themselves instead of the other guy. They’re not like us at all.

The more I saw of the operation, the more impressed I was. This was Organized Crime at its most organized. Everything was done quickly and efficiently, to a timetable that never varied, the criminals were always impeccably dressed, and the building was kept spotless at all times. There were even recycling cans on every floor, with the legs sticking out of them positioned “just so”. I could tell I was going to fit in well here. I’m pretty organized myself.

After my orientation tour was completed, I was taken to the office of my new supervisor—Mr. Knuckles. He handed me a blueprint of a large building and told me to memorize it. He said that would be my first assignment. I was to take 20 men and rob the 1^st National Bank of Central City.

“No sweat,” I said, sweating.

I glanced at the complicated blueprint, then asked if I could study it later, when no one was watching me, and he said that would be okay—that was when everyone around here did their studying. I felt I was going to like this job. These were my kind of people. All I had to do now was rob that bank.

“This is a robbery!” I announced menacingly the next morning, as all the children and clowns screamed and lined up against the wall of the nursery. “Esto es un robo! Dies ist ein Bankraub! Il s’agit d’un vol de banque! Put all the money in… is this 425 Wells Street?”

It wasn’t, of course. I know that now. Along with the layout to the bank, somebody should have given me a map. I guess we must have busted into a dozen different places that morning—including the Federal Prison twice—before we finally got the right address. And I suppose I’ll have to take a lot of the blame for that, because I was the one who kept saying: “This is it, everybody, let’s go.”

When we did finally get to the 1^st National, it didn’t go well at all. We didn’t get any money, for one thing. The only thing that was in the money bags we brought back were a couple members of the gang who had gotten stuffed in there somehow during all the excitement. And our getaway car had been stolen, so we had to hitchhike back. And I had forgotten to do the first thing I was supposed to do when we entered the bank, which was to disable the security cameras. So the police had about 22,000 pictures of us.

Even though the robbery had been a failure, I felt that the important thing was that no one had gotten hurt, and everyone had had a good time, and no banks had been robbed. My supervisor didn’t agree. He read me the riot act when he found out how badly I had botched the job, and warned me that I’d better shape up and fly right if I wanted to succeed in a demanding business like this one. Blah blah blah. The usual stuff. Why do all employers talk the same? Always giving the same boring speech. When he had finally calmed down a little bit he said he guessed that everyone was entitled to one mistake.

“Does this count as my mistake?”

“Yes.”

“Crap.”

Over the next few weeks I made at least a dozen more attempts to rob the 1^st National Bank. But something always went wrong. Sometimes we forgot our guns. Sometimes we remembered our guns but forgot what we wanted. Sometimes the bank tellers couldn’t read my holdup note. Sometimes they wouldn’t read it—said they were busy. Sometimes I got the wrong address and we were at that kid’s birthday party again. It was always something.

The people who worked at the 1^st National got to know me real well after awhile. “Hands up everybody, here comes Frank,” someone would say as I came around the corner and started heading for the door. “Hi, Stan,” I would say as I entered, waving my gun around dangerously, and hoping this robbery would turn out better than the others. But it never did.

After a month of this, the bank decided to reduce the number of guards they employed from six to two, through early retirement and buyouts. They knew now that they didn’t need so many.

Eventually, my superiors at CrimeCo came to the conclusion that the 1^st National might be too tough a nut for me to crack, so they assigned me easier banks to rob. First the 2^nd National, then the 3^rd, and so on down the line. Each one was easier in one way or another—quieter alarms, sleepier guards, money closer to the door, there was always something easier about them. But I never managed to rob any of them either. I had high hopes for the 20^th National, that’s the one I was waiting for, but we never got that far.

I was arrested a number of times during this stretch. You can’t make as many blunders as I was making without getting arrested. But the Organization’s crack legal team always managed to get me out fast. Always on some technicality that they knew about but the cops didn’t. You’d think society would teach policemen what the laws are, but I guess they never think of it. Or maybe there isn’t time. Even with the legal trickery I had going for me, I still should have been locked up for good after awhile, because I got caught so many times. But I was saved by the city’s controversial “3 Strikes And You’re Free” law.

Finally I was informed that I was being demoted from bank robber to thug. My superiors were a little embarrassed about it. They blamed themselves for starting me up too high on the ladder in the first place. They felt it was their mistake that I couldn’t succeed at such a high level right away, not mine. I agreed. C’mon, everybody, I thought, let’s get our acts together here. I can’t run this place by myself.

They started me off, as usual, at the highest tier—1^st Thug. And, as usual, this was a mistake.

The 1^st Thug is the guy who stands closest to the boss at all times. He’s the one who says things like: “You better listen to what the boss is saying” and “You’re just not getting it, are you, pal?” That part of the job was no problem for me. I can stand next to people. Easy. And I can talk tough with the best of them. But a 1^st Thug also has to know when to act—when the time for talking is over and the time for action has arrived. I couldn’t tell the difference. Still can’t. So I would suddenly start hitting the guy the boss was talking to while the boss was still talking to him. Or I’d hit the guy when he had just agreed to do what we wanted. Or I’d hit the wrong person, like the boss.

Because of this inability to think on my feet, I was quickly demoted to 2^nd and then 3^rd, or Buck, Thug. The 3^rd Thug is the one who piles on after the first two classes of thugs have already gone to work and it’s certain that this is the guy to hit, and this is the time to hit him. No thinking required for us 3^rd thugs. And you never have to decide when to stop pounding on the guy either. The boss will tell you that. “Okay, that’s enough,” he’ll say, or “hey, knock it off stupid, he’s dead”, something like that. That’s when you stop.

When you’re not actually pounding on somebody, 3^rd Thugs are supposed to stand in the back looking tough and kind of chewing something. Gum, most guys used. Sometimes I forgot my gum, so I’d just chew my shirt tail. That worked just as well, though I guess it didn’t look as professional.

I thought I was basically doing a pretty good job, but one morning when I showed up for work I was told to report to the boss’s office to meet with the higher-ups. I knew what that meant. There weren’t any jobs in the Organization lower than the one I had now. And evidently I had blown it again. I was going to be fired.

I had learned from being fired from other jobs that times like this are your last chance to stand up for yourself and have some self respect. Show some backbone. As soon as you find another job somewhere else people will start walking all over you again. The only time a person ever gets a chance to have any self-respect is when he’s being fired. That’s when you can stand tall and be a man. That few seconds there. So from the moment I walked into the boss’s office I was my own man again.

“Take a seat, Mr. Burly,” said one of the bosses.

“Take it yourself, asshole.”

I leaned up against the water cooler and glared at everybody.

“This meeting…” began the personnel manager…

“Shove this meeting up your ass.”

“Er… yes… would you like some coffee, Burly?”

“In your ass I would. Along with the meeting and the chair.”

My supervisor, Mr. Knuckles, cleared his throat. “I think we’re straying from the point of this meeting. Perhaps if Mr. Burly would stop telling us what to shove up our asses, we could…”

“Screw you, boss.”

“Hey look, Burly…”

“No, you look! I’ve been taking crap from you big-shots for weeks now. And now it’s my turn to tell you a thing or two.” I pointed to each in turn: “You’re incompetent, you’re stupid, you don’t like fingers being pointed at you, and you two I don’t know.”

While I paused to catch my breath and try to think of a few more choice things to say—maybe tell them what I thought of their so-called scheduling abilities. Why hadn’t I gotten my God damned vacation yet?—Mr. Knuckles managed to get a word in.

“We’re promoting you,” he said. “We’re making you a bodyguard. It will mean a raise in pay, better hours, and a bigger locker.”

“Like I said before,” I said, “like I’ve been saying all meeting, thank you, boss.”

CHAPTER THREE

Well, I was as surprised as you are. More, probably, because I know me better than you do. It’s not very often Frank Burly gets a promotion. All my life it’s just been down down down. But not this time.

My employers had discovered that I had a hidden talent they hadn’t known about. Ever since I joined the Organization everyone in the gang had been instinctively ducking down behind me the moment trouble started, because I was so big and so slow to react. I was like a parked car with a brain. Plus, it took a lot to knock me over. It was so hard to knock me over, sometimes it was easier just to wait until I fell over on my own. Because of these natural abilities, my employers felt I would make a perfect bodyguard.

I don’t know that I’d say I was perfect—nothing in this world is perfect, except, okay, maybe me—but I was pretty good at it. I never got any complaints from the people crouched down behind me, that’s for sure. They were safe back there. And they knew it. And after I’d been doing it for a little while, I realized I liked being a bodyguard. It was a nice restful job. Most of the time I just had to stand there being big. I can do that. I don’t have to do anything to be big. I am big. So the main part of my job was already done.

Of course I had to take my lumps from time to time. All bodyguards get hit occasionally with fists, clubs, knives, even bullets. It’s part of the job. I didn’t mind. I’ve been getting knocked around like that all my life for nothing. Now I was getting paid good money for it. Life doesn’t get any better than that. Not for me, anyway.

On the rare occasions when I did get seriously hurt, the Organization took good care of me. Made sure I got the best of everything. Why, I remember one time, when it looked like I might die, they had a famous baseball player visit me in the hospital to cheer me up. I asked him to hit a home run for me. He said you got it, just get better, Phil. Frank, I said. Huh, he said. The dying patient’s name is Frank, I said. Phil, Frank, what’s the difference, he said. Right, I said. He didn’t hit the homer, despite what he had promised. Struck out three times then got thrown out at home trying to stretch a triple into an inside the park home run. They had to carry him off the field on a stretcher he tried so hard. He ended up in the hospital bed next to mine. When they got the tubes out of his mouth, he said he was sorry he didn’t hit the homer for me. And I said I was sorry too because I lost a two thousand dollar bet.

Even with all the beatings I had to take, I was pretty happy with my new job. I was good at it, and everyone could see I was good at it. So I rapidly climbed the ladder of success, guarding more and more important people. Each move upward gave me more prestige, nicer working conditions, and more money.

I was making a name for myself too. Younger bodyguards started coming up to me for advice. Just be yourself, I told them. This is always good advice, because it’s so easy to do, and so easy to say. But it would usually make their faces fall when I told them that. They didn’t want to be themselves. They wanted to be me. But they couldn’t be me. I was me. I was taken. They had to be them. They said okay they would, but I could tell they didn’t like it. I could tell they thought it was bullshit.

Then one day I was told I was moving up again. From now on, they said, I would be guarding the top man in the Organization. I was told to report to his office immediately. I was a little nervous about this. I’d never met the Big Boss before. Didn’t even know who he was.

When I opened the door to his office and went in, I was stunned. It was Larry Laffman, The Million Laff Boy, the funniest man in show business. When he saw me he said: “Howareya!” I laughed so hard I had to sit down and he had to give me some water.

“You’re the mastermind who runs organized crime in Central City?” I asked, when I could get my breath.

“That’s me! Hey hey!” He made his eyes go around and his front teeth stick out straight. “Wocka wocka! Boing!” His pants spun around, his hair jumped up and down on his head, and his right eye shot out and rang a small bell on his desk. This made me laugh even more.

He did his famous spit-take when I told him I was his new bodyguard, another when we shook hands, and two more when I sat down. I couldn’t stop laughing.

“How are YOUUUUU feeling now?” he asked, giving me another glass of water, and rolling his eyes in all kinds of hilarious directions.

“Stop it, you’re killing me,” I protested, holding my sides.

I was dazzled to meet the one and only Larry Laffman in person. I knew all about him, of course. He was the master—some say the originator—of all forms of comedy. He could make one eye go around like a phonograph record. And he could make his ears flap like crazy. And satirical? How about that eye going around? If that isn’t satire, I don’t know what is.

He had dozens of stock laugh lines that were funny every time he said them, like: “Why are you dooooing this to me?”, “That doesn’t sound like my mother”, “I don’t like yewwww at all”, and so many more. Sometimes he’d add “asshole” at the end, if he needed an extra big laugh, or if he happened to be talking to an asshole.

And he could imitate anybody. He did an imitation of me that had me rolling in the aisles for almost an hour. In fact we were both rolling in the aisles because he was still imitating me then.

I asked him what he was doing here in the world of crime. I always thought he was strictly a show business guy.

“My agent, Sid, set up this deal for me,” he explained. “The Crime Industry is a great tax dodge. You’d be surprised how much you can write off of your income tax if you’re a big crook. And it’s an investment, too. You’ve got to do something with your money, Sid says. You’ve got to plan for the future when you’re not as hilarious anymore. When your eyes only go part way around, and it’s not as funny because old age is making them go around, not you.”

“But why not put your money in a business you’re more familiar with, like Organized Entertainment?” I asked. “I’ve heard that’s pretty crooked too. Couldn’t you make just as much of a profit there?”

“Don’t ask me. Ask Sid. He knows all the financial angles. Me, I do the jokes. Boinnngg!”

Guarding someone as important as Larry Laffman was quite a responsibility for me because he was such a great man, but it was a million laughs too because there’s nobody funnier than Larry. No, sir. You could always tell he was coming from several blocks away, because you could hear me next to him busting a gut. I thought he was the greatest. And he liked me too, because he didn’t have to be “on” all the time when he was around me—I laughed at everything he did. He even cleared his throat funny. Ah-hnnn! Hilarious. Top that, Shakespeare! Give it up, Wordsworth!

After I got to know him better I discovered he had his serious side, too. The first time he started talking real serious about injustice, I laughed my head off for a full minute, then said: “Wait a minute. What’s so funny about that?”

“It’s not funny,” he said. “This is my serious side you’re seeing now. Boing!”

“Wow, you’ve got two sides?”

“Sure.”

“Let me see that serious side again.”

He made a face and pointed at it with his finger. “Check it out.”

And you wouldn’t believe how serious his face looked at that moment. I hardly laughed at all.

And he didn’t just look serious when his face was all screwed up like that, he acted serious too. Sometimes he’d spend a whole afternoon fighting injustice. Fighting it like mad. This confused me a little bit at first, because I always thought another comedian, Jokey Johnson, was the one who fought injustice. Larry shook his head. “No, I traded him starving children for that last month.”

“I guess starving children are important too,” I hazarded.

He shook his head. “Not to me. Not anymore. I fight injustice now. Every other Thursday afternoon.”

“God bless you, Larry Laffman.”

“Wocka.”

I figured I could learn a lot of inside stuff about show business from Larry. And I was right. He told me all about the money and the women and the drugs and the credit grabbing and the whining. I found out show business is just like we think it is: all play and no work. Which is why their work is so bad, I guess. It all made sense to me now.

“I tried to get into show business once,” I confided to Larry one day, after we’d gotten to know each other pretty well.

“You went to Hollywood?”

“No.”

“Show business is in Hollywood.”

“Yeah, well, the way I figure it, they should have discovered me here in Central City. At my house. That’s what talent scouts are for. To scout around, looking for talent wherever it might be. If they were looking for talent, they should have looked in that chair in my living room. The one in front of the TV. That’s where I was. If I’m not in show business it’s the talent scouts’ fault. Not mine.”

“Do you have any talent?”

“Huh? Uh… probably… what do you mean?”

“I mean, have you mastered any kind of craft that would be useful in the entertainment industry, in case the talent scouts ever do find you?”

“No. But I guess I could master a useful craft easy enough, if I had to. I’d have to see some money first.”

He nodded. “Well, you’ve got the right attitude to be in show business, that’s for sure. I’ll see if my agent can find something for you.”

“Hurry up. I don’t have all day.”

Usually I did a pretty good job of protecting Larry from all the people who recognized him on the street and wanted to run up to him and beat his brains out, but sometimes a rock or a bullet or a tomato would get through and nail him. This usually happened when I suddenly doubled over with laughter because I just remembered one of his great jokes. He would always complain when this happened, but, hey, it’s not my fault. Quit making me laugh.

Every once in a while I would see something that made me think that maybe Larry Laffman wasn’t really the top dog in the Organization—that there was someone above him. That office on the floor above his, for example. And the way he ran his finger around his collar when he got a memo from that office. And his code name: “Number Two”. I asked him about this, but he denied there was anyone more important at CrimeCo than he was. And since he never lied to me unless there was a good reason for it, unless there was something in it for him, I dropped the subject.

Then one day when I reported for work I noticed that Larry seemed kind of nervous. I asked him why. He said he had been summoned to see the Big Boss. This made me laugh because, hey, he’s the Big Boss. We’d already established that. We’d already had this discussion. I said great, now let’s have another joke. You’re in great form today, boss. But he said he wasn’t joking. There really was someone above him in the Organization, though he usually didn’t like to admit it. And he had to have a meeting with this guy right now. I could hardly wait to meet someone more important than Larry Laffman. He had to be the funniest guy in the universe.

Larry had me in stitches all the way to the meeting, pretending he was scared and didn’t want to go. I tried to get him to do a funny imitation of the Big Boss, but he seemed nervous about the idea, and said no. The way he said it made me bust a gut.

I was still laughing when we arrived at a door marked “Mr. Theremin”. Larry paused for a moment, ran his finger around his collar, then my finger, then opened the door and we went inside.

Seated at the desk in the middle of the office was a cloud of energy in a suit. Small lightning bolts moved around its “body” periodically, and there was a smell of burned wiring in the air. The cloud of energy was dictating a letter.

“Yours of the 15^th inst. received, bzzzzz,” it said.

“What the…?” I said.

CHAPTER FOUR

I might as well admit right now that I don’t understand electricity. Spit, I understand. And dirt. And enriched flour. Those three things. Not electricity. If you can’t hold it in your hand, or get it on your pants, I don’t get it. And if I did understand electricity, I wouldn’t understand electricity that was wearing a suit.

“You sent for me, Boss?” asked Larry, nervously.

“I did.”

Larry lit up a cigarette and started puffing on it. I could tell he was nervous. He wasn’t a smoker. And he didn’t have any cigarettes. I guess it just shows what you can do if you’re nervous enough. I reminded Larry out of the side of my mouth that I was here. If things got rough, he could count on me. He told me to be quiet, for God’s sake. I said I would. You got it, boss, I said. Quiet it is. Quiet quiet quiet.

Mr. Theremin started giving Larry hell about something he’d done wrong—some big operation that hadn’t worked out right, or too much overtime being paid out in the third quarter—something like that. I didn’t pay much attention. It wasn’t my business. Pretty much nothing is. But I didn’t like seeing my boss taking it on the chin like this.

I sidled over to Larry. “You want me to slap him around a little, boss?”

“No!”

“Okay.”

I went back to where I had been standing before and put my brain back on hold. It began humming “The Girl From Ipanema”, as usual. I’m starting to get tired of that song. And yet, it’s kind of catchy.

When I started singing the song out loud, Mr. Theremin seemed to notice me for the first time. He asked Larry who the big lug yelling in the corner was. Meaning me. Larry said I was his new bodyguard, and that my name was Frank. Mr. Theremin and I shook hands. I giggled uncontrollably as we shook.

Theremin asked me if we had met before. I was pretty sure we hadn’t. I would have remembered a ball of lightning in a suit, I’m sure. Usually when people say “Didn’t I meet you somewhere before?” to me, I get cagey and say no. But in this case I really didn’t remember meeting him before, so I didn’t just say no, I yelled it.

Mr. Theremin gave me one more searching glance, then resumed chewing out Larry, screaming so loud at one point during his tirade that Larry did a spit-take.

Theremin frowned. “I told you not to do that in my office.”

“It’s my trademark. It’s funny.”

“It’s funny on your carpet. Not on mine.”

Theremin got up from his chair and cleaned up the area around Larry. Then he looked at me. “Let me vacuum up that dandruff. Fart out the window, please.”

“Yes, sir.” I moved over to the window as requested and stood there quietly, wiping my nose on the drapes.

Now I understood why there were recycling cans all over the building. And why everybody had to take their turn pushing a broom around the neighborhood. This guy was a real neat freak. The fussiest guy I’d ever seen. The sooner I got away from him, the better I’d like it. I’m not comfortable farting out of a window. I feel like an idiot.

When the meeting was over and we were walking back to Larry’s office, I said: “I notice the Big Boss is made of electricity.”

“Yeah. 200,000 volts. More, if he’s mad.”

“He’s not from around here, is he?”

“Him? Naw. He’s from outer space.”

I wasn’t too surprised to hear that. Most people from this planet aren’t made of electricity. We’re made of meat or something. Pork, I think. And most of the electricity we have around here can’t—or won’t—talk.

“He’s doing pretty good for somebody who wasn’t born here,” I observed. “For a foreigner, I mean.”

“I’ll say. Self-made man, too, or so they say. I heard he came to this planet with nothing. No money. No clothes. Didn’t even have a shape. Got his start as a burglar, getting into people’s homes through power lines. He used the money he got from that to start CrimeCo. Now he’s one of the richest formless alien entities in the state. He still burgles occasionally, to keep his hand in, but he mostly just does executive stuff now, like yelling at me.”

I was stunned. I suddenly realized I had just solved the case of “The Amazing Electric Thief”! My batting average had just rocketed up to .017! I briefly considered quitting the crime game and going back to being a detective. Maybe I was on a roll. Maybe I’d solve them all from now on. But after catching a glimpse of my dull witless face in the mirror, I decided this was probably just a fluke. Something that wouldn’t be repeated.

“The only other thing I know about him,” Larry continued, “is that he doesn’t like being called ‘Buzzy’. So when you call him Buzzy, make sure he’s not around. When he’s around he’s ‘Mr. Theremin’ or ‘Boss’. Not ‘Buzzy’ or ‘The Buzzmeister’.”

“Gotcha.”

I’d like to say that that was the end of that, and that I thought no more about what I had seen in the Big Boss’s office, and lived happily ever after as a crook, with this being the happy ending of the book, or maybe the start of some great crime adventure of mine—“The Unfired Crook Strikes Again” or something like that—but it didn’t turn out that way. Much as I tried to fight it, my detective training eventually kicked in. I found myself getting curious about this space alien who lived among us and controlled all of our crime for us. Just because I wasn’t a detective anymore didn’t mean I had stopped being nosy.

So, despite the fact that it was none of my business, and no one was paying me to do it, and it could bring me nothing but grief, I started to investigate. Discretely, of course.

“May I help you?” Buzzy asked, when I snuck into his office and began creeping along the floor on my belly towards him.

“Is the elevator broken?” he asked, when he saw me scaling the side of the building and looking in his office window with five pairs of binoculars.

“Did you lose something?” he asked, when he found me with my head in his car.

I always had a glib answer to these questions, of course. You know me. But none of them were very convincing. Just glib. After awhile I got the feeling Buzzy was beginning to suspect me a little. But I didn’t have time to worry about that. I was too busy snooping.

During the course of this snooping, I noticed a secret inner office Buzzy had behind his regular office. It had all sorts of odd looking furniture in it—furniture with no fixed shape and plenty of extra plugs—and there were some paintings of electricity on the wall (relatives, probably), and a poster I couldn’t quite read from the window sill I was clinging to. I tried to gain access to this office, first by telling Buzzy’s secretary that I was a Secret Inner Office Repairman, then, when that didn’t work, by claiming to be part of the office. That didn’t work either. I finally decided the inner office wasn’t important.

I began making discrete inquiries about Buzzy among the other employees. “Have you noticed anything odd about the Big Boss?” I would ask them. “Anything worth snooping into?” Most said no, but one guy said he had seen something.

“Well, now that you mention it,” he said, “I’ve noticed that he’s been spending a lot of time investigating you lately.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, he’s got us doing all kinds of background checks on you, questioning your neighbors, and watching you pretty much around the clock.”

Well, that was news to me. And pretty ironic too, when I thought about it. All the time I had been investigating him, he had been investigating me! And it had been done with such subtlety I hadn’t even noticed it. I noticed it now though—now that it had been pointed out to me.

Now, when I looked around a corner to snoop on Buzzy, I noticed all the faces looking back around that same corner at me. With all of us taking notes and trying unsuccessfully to be quiet.

And on my way home, if I turned around quickly, I could see the whole company following me. They were taking up most of the street back there. Couldn’t miss them, if you knew what to look for.

Now, you would think that this general lack of trust on both sides would have indicated that my job might be in jeopardy. But no such thing, apparently. A month after I started my investigations I was surprised to discover that I had been selected to take part in the Organization’s biggest job of the year!

We were planning to knock over the Central City Mint, the place where they make all the Yogi Berra Quarters. And I was told I had been hand-selected by Mr. Theremin himself to play a key role in this caper. This surprised and delighted me. I was confused and proud.

Everyone involved in the caper got packets that contained their individual instructions, detailing the parts they would play in the operation. Mine said “Fall Guy” on it. I hoped it didn’t mean that literally. I hoped it was just a code name for something else. I was pretty sure it was.

All the guys at work looked sad when they found out I had been selected for the job. Some busted out crying. I wondered what it was all about. I asked one of them but he just cried louder.

Shifty said it was nice knowing me. And I said it sure as hell was. It was about time somebody noticed how nice it was knowing me. I didn’t think to ask what he meant by that until months later. It was too late by then.

So that’s how, on the day of the robbery, I found myself standing outside the Central City Mint, as the rest of the gang ran out of the building carrying sacks of shiny new quarters. As they passed me they handed me whatever incriminating evidence they had on them—masks, notes, guns, even fingerprints somehow. I put the fingerprints in my pocket. This was my chief role in this caper—to collect everything in one spot so that in the event our men were caught they wouldn’t have any incriminating evidence on them. It would all be on me. And I would be safe too, because… because… I took out my packet and read my individual instructions again, frowning.

After the rest of the guys had all gotten safely away, and I found myself still standing there alone holding all the incriminating evidence, shifting some of it occasionally so I could hold it better, and looking through my instructions again, it occurred to me that I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. They had carefully briefed me up to this point, but either they hadn’t told me what to do next, or I had forgotten it. And my instruction packet didn’t mention anything about me getting away at all.

By this point the police had begun arriving on the scene, and the guys who worked at the Mint were all jumping up and down and yelling and pointing at me, so I figured I’d better do something, even if it wasn’t strictly according to the approved plan. It looked to me like I was going to have to start improvising at this point. I hated to do that. That wasn’t the way we did things at CrimeCo (formerly Crime & Sons). But I didn’t know what else to do.

I turned and started to move away from the front door of the Mint. I figured that would be a good start. To get away from here. Go stand in front of some other building—one that hadn’t just been robbed. But before I could go five feet I stepped into an open hole in the pavement and fell for a half a mile. At least, it seemed that far. Might have been less. There had been a large water leak the day before and it had eaten out a lot of the ground under the sidewalk. The city hadn’t gotten around to fixing it yet and had just put a traffic cone there to warn people—a cone that would explain the whole thing. I guess it was this cone that I had tripped over. I wondered, as I fell, if I was setting some kind of record. I mean, what was the record for falling to your death before this? Then, suddenly, I stopped wondering about anything. Then I hit the bottom.

When I regained consciousness and realized where I was, and what had happened to me, I started looking for a way to get back up the shaft. I saw a handhold about forty feet above me, but I couldn’t quite reach it, not even after I took off my coat and stood on it. I was still thirty four feet short. I thought of yelling for help, but then I remembered there were only cops up there. I didn’t want their help. Not today, anyway. Anybody but them.

While I was thinking over my predicament, the police started looking down the hole and shouting at me to come out of there. I didn’t think they could see me—it was pretty dark where I was—so I decided to play possum. Pretend I wasn’t there. Or that I was dead. Maybe they’d go away if they thought I was not there and dead. I tried to be as quiet as I could. I even shifted over a little to my right where it looked like it was darker and quieter.

“Did you hear something?” asked one of the policemen.

“Probably just a possum,” said a voice from far away.

That’s when they started shining lights down my hole. I tried to edge a little closer to the side, and, even though I was already at the bottom, I somehow managed to fall another twenty feet. More lights shined down the hole. More playing possum.

After they hadn’t heard any noise from me for awhile—I had quit shifting around to better spots by then, and my burping fit had stopped, and my stomach had stopped growling—some of the cops started wondering if I was still down there. The bottom of the shaft might connect to the sewer or the subway or something. I might be long gone by now. I could be anywhere—maybe even sitting in their offices with my feet up on their desks making long distance telephone calls, or sitting in their living rooms watching TV with their wife and kids, while they were wasting their time here looking into empty holes.

It was finally decided to see if I was still down there by dropping rocks down the shaft. Over the next two hours they dropped hundreds of them, of varying sizes, waiting and listening after each rock had been dropped to hear if I yelled. But I didn’t make a sound no matter how many rocks they threw down, or how hard they threw them. This wasn’t because I wasn’t there. I was. And it wasn’t because I was a man of iron will and discipline. I wasn’t. It was because the first rock had swollen my mouth shut.

CHAPTER FIVE

I finally managed to climb out of the hole several hours later, after almost getting to the top a half a dozen times, only to fall all the way to the bottom each time and then having to start back up again. I guess it would have been pretty comical if it had been happening to somebody else. Some other slob. Seeing them get almost to the top and being so happy, and then suddenly down they go again, end over end, screaming their guts out. I guess it was funny. I dunno. I’d have to watch somebody else do it and see if I laugh. I probably would. Anyway, like I said, I finally got out.

I was relieved to find that there was nobody waiting for me at the top. The cops had evidently gotten bored and gone away. They were probably off throwing rocks at something else, something that made a more satisfying noise when they hit it. Damn cops.

I made my way back to CrimeCo, took a shower, changed clothes, and got a cup of coffee. What a day. My co-workers seemed surprised to see me.

“Hey, Burly,” one of them said, “what are you doing here? Did you sleep in and miss the double-cross?”

“Yeah,” said another, “I thought you were being double-crossed today.”

When I didn’t answer, another one looked at my face. “Hey, what happened to your mouth?”

“Rocks.”

Eventually, after enough people had expressed surprise that I wasn’t in prison or dead, I began to get suspicious. Maybe, I thought, maybe I had been set up to take the fall from the first. Maybe that’s where my code name “Fall Guy” came from. A lot of “maybes”, admittedly, but it got me thinking.

For the rest of the day I wasn’t much of a bodyguard for Larry. I had too much on my mind. People would jump on him and start slugging him as I wandered on ahead, lost in thought. He’d say something like “Help me, Frank!”, or some such thing, and I’d come back and shoo them away. Then I’d wander away again and pretty soon I’d be thumbing absently through some magazines at the newsstand as Larry was being kidnapped and driven away screaming. I just wasn’t paying attention to my job, is what it comes down to.

“If you weren’t the best bodyguard I’ve ever had, I’d fire you,” Larry told me.

“If I wasn’t the best, I’d quit.”

The next morning I noticed all my co-workers were looking at me with those sad double-cross eyes again. Uh-oh, I thought. I know what that means. Sure enough, the gang’s next caper was posted on the assignment board, and once again I was to play a key role in it. We were going to raid the weapons depot at the Armory, and they were planning on opening the gate by wedging me into the keyhole and blowing me up. My code name for this one was: “Dead Guy”.

That’s when I realized Buzzy was definitely out to get me. It wasn’t just my imagination. It couldn’t be. I don’t have an imagination.

I decided I’d better do something pretty quick—get Buzzy before he could get me. Fortunately, there was an easy way to do that.

I called the police, told them who I was, said I was fine, thank you, then told them I was working for a space alien who was the head of a huge crime syndicate. And that he was the brains behind the recent Mint Robbery and many other unsolved crimes. Then I gave them CrimeCo’s address. They thanked me for the tip and told me they’d be right over. Cops like getting tips like that. Makes their jobs easier.

But when the police arrived and I triumphantly led them into the building, CrimeCo had been miraculously transformed into an ice cream manufacturing plant. All the machinery was ice cream machinery. All the records were ice cream records. And everybody, including me, was wearing an ice cream man’s hat. It didn’t look like a criminal operation at all now. It looked more like an ice cream place. I went outside and checked the address to make sure me and the cops were in the right building. It was the right building all right. I went back in to make sure everything was still ice cream. It was. I was impressed. I knew I was dealing with organized criminals here, but, wow.

“This wasn’t like this before, officers,” I assured them, indicating all the ice cream they were seeing. “All this ice cream you’re seeing.”

“It wasn’t, eh?”

“No.”

“Do you know what the penalty is for turning in a false alarm?”

“I ought to by now,” I said, sourly. “I’ve turned in more false alarms than... wait! There’s one thing he can’t have changed. His evil alien body. Follow me.”

I led the cops up to Buzzy’s office.

His secretary, Debbie, said Mr. Theremin was in, but wasn’t seeing anyone today. Especially not any cops. One of the policemen started making an appointment for early next week, but his superior cancelled the appointment and kicked the door open. We went in.

The office was empty. The cops looked around, checking in the closets and under the furniture, but they couldn’t find anybody.

“Look in the light socket, officer,” I suggested helpfully, as they searched. “Or maybe he’s in that electric pencil sharpener.”

One of the cops started looking in the pencil sharpener, then looked at me. “Say, are you kidding me?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t kidding him. I wanted him to look.

After an hour of fruitless searching, the cops left, warning me never to call the police again. I said I sure wouldn’t, not if this was all it was going to get me. After they had gone, Buzzy began struggling out of an electrical outlet that was near the floor behind his desk. He didn’t look happy. I hurried out of the office before he could get all the way out and see me any better than he already had.

Later that afternoon, while I was at my locker changing to go home, Shifty came up to me. He had a gun in his hand. It was pointed at me.

“Hi, Shifty,” I said, buttoning up my sports shirt.

“Hi, Frank,” he said cheerfully.

“What’s that you’ve got in your hand?”

“It’s a pistol. I’ve been promoted to assassin. The Big Boss told me to put a bullet in your brain.”

I frowned and stopped buttoning my shirt. “Why did he tell you to do that?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t say.” He started pulling the trigger.

“Hold on, Shifty. Did he say when to shoot me? I mean exactly when?”

Shifty thought about this. “No, he didn’t, now that you mention it. But I got the impression he wanted it done right away. Then I’ve got to kill…” He took a notebook out of his pocket and consulted it. “Oh, here it is: ‘Myself’.”

I shook my head doubtfully. “I dunno, Shifty. You do what you think is best, of course, but if it was me, I’d check to make sure about the timing on all this. You know how important these little details are around here. I’d hate to see you get into trouble on account of me.”

His cheerful smile faded a little. He started to look a little worried. “Hey, that’s right. Maybe I better check.” He pocketed his gun and walked off. “Catch you later, Frank.”

“So long.”

I had bought myself some time, but probably not a lot. I didn’t think Shifty’s conversation with the Big Boss would last very long.

Figuring it still might be possible to get Buzzy hauled in on some kind of criminal charges if I could just find something incriminating enough, I snuck back up to Buzzy’s office and waited for him to leave. He finally came out, dragging Shifty along by the scruff of the neck. I started looking for a way into that inner office I knew he had. I couldn’t find any secret panels or hidden doors, so finally I just made a door with my shoulder. That’s a handy thing about being big—more doors.

To my disappointment, Buzzy’s inner office didn’t yield anything incriminating. At least not at first glance. Just more ice cream equipment. Then I looked closer at the framed poster on the wall I had seen earlier through the window. It was a wanted poster with Buzzy’s picture on it. It said “Galactic Enemy Number Six”. The poster had darts in it, and the words “Ha ha” scrawled on it. I took it down from the wall and saw that “Ha ha” had been written on the back also. I turned it back over again and saw that there was a phone number to call to reach the Intergalactic Police in the Pleiades. It had 2000 numbers. And 23 area codes. I picked up the phone on Buzzy’s desk and started dialing.

When I finally got through and explained that I had captured Galactic Enemy Number Six, Bernard Buzzman, aka Buzzy Barrow aka Fussy Fortesque Jr., aka Bernard Theremin, they told me to hang onto him, they’d be right there. I said great, and hung up 2000 times.

I spent the next several hours waiting impatiently for them to show up, hiding behind various pieces of machinery so I wouldn’t be seen by Shifty, who was wandering through the building with his gun out calling: “Frank! Hey, Frank!” I didn’t answer. I knew better than that.

I called the Intergalactic Police back every fifteen minutes or so to remind them to hurry up. They tried to explain to me about the vast interstellar distances involved and how the speed of light works and so on, and urged me to be patient. I said I wasn’t interested in their outer space doubletalk. And I didn’t want to take any science lessons over the phone. I wanted them to get down here right away. Never mind the excuses. They said they weren’t excuses, they were explanations—scientific explanations of… but I had hung up by then. I didn’t want to listen to any excuses, scientific or otherwise. Just get down here, stupid.

Finally, just as I was about to give up, and maybe say “here I am” the next time Shifty said “where are you, Frank?” there was a sudden flurry of excitement outside the building. I went to look.

I got to the lobby just in time to see the two thugs guarding the entrance being knocked aside and blasted into another dimension by a Buck-Rogers-looking-character in a silver suit, whose name coincidentally turned out to be Doug Rogers (no relation. I asked). He stormed into the lobby with his men, demanding to know where Buzzy Theremin was.

I stepped forward to introduce myself and personally lead them to Buzzy, but before I could say anything, Buzzy raced out of the elevator dragging a suitcase full of Earth money and sweating sparks. When he saw Doug Rogers he stopped, then quickly grabbed me to use as a shield. Doug Rogers holstered his ray gun and pulled out an even more dangerous looking weapon, pointed it at Buzzy’s head, which at that moment was hiding behind my head, and started blasting away.

Fortunately, the weird cosmic rays, or whatever they were, that came out of the special gun didn’t have much of an effect on me. I guess it was because I was the wrong species. It just felt like a BB gun to me. Just BB’s hitting my face. But after I had been nailed about fifty times, I decided I’d had enough. I dropped to the floor and rolled away into the furnace room, giving Doug a clear shot at Buzzy. The “BBs” that hadn’t been bothering me very much proved to be devastating to him. They slowed the electrical currents that his body was made of to the speed of molasses. He instantly became almost entirely immobile. After a few more shots he was flat on his back, wheezing slowly, with his electrical charge fitfully fading in and out.

Doug Rogers stopped shooting and had his men slap a kind of metal straightjacket on Buzzy. It was like the casing for an oversized size-D battery. They picked it up, with Buzzy still buzzing weakly inside, and began carrying it to their space ship. I followed.

When they had reached their ship and gotten Buzzy half way up the ladder, the Central City Police arrived.

“Hold it right there, buddy,” said Sergeant Dobson. He indicated the battery casing with the feet sticking out of the bottom. “What’s that you’ve got there in the box?”

Doug Rogers looked at the policeman for a long, appraising moment, then spoke: “You speak for Earth?”

“I do. What’s this all about?”

Doug began to slowly and patronizingly explain that this was an intergalactic felon, puny Earthlings, that they were the Intergalactic Police, and that they were taking this felon away to be tried on their world, if we, with our primitive minds, could grasp such an advanced concept.

He might have been allowed to go on his way with his prisoner if it hadn’t been for his superior attitude. Our cops bristled at his snide condescending tone. Sergeant Dobson said hold on a minute there, Silver Boy. Nobody goes anywhere with anything just yet.

That’s the thing about us Earthlings. We know we are inferior—it’s so obvious even we can see it with our puny eyes—but we don’t like having it pointed out to us by guys prancing around in silver pants. If some big bruiser twice our size wants to call us names, okay, he’s entitled. He’s bigger than us. But we don’t take that kind of abuse from just anybody. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. We have our puny pride.

Sergeant Dobson said this whole situation needed to be checked out thoroughly before anybody could leave. Doug Rogers protested, saying he was on a tight schedule, if we were advanced enough to know what that was. He told our cops not to meddle in things their backward Earth minds did not understand. Like law enforcement. That settled it. Guns were drawn and the space policemen were told to come down their fancy space ladder with their superior hands in the air, and bring the prisoner with them. All this would have to be sorted out downtown. Wherever he came from originally, he was our space alien now, and we would decide what was going to be done with him.

“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.

CHAPTER SIX

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.

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 begging 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 4^th 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 4^th of July, but they got more “fireworks” than they had “bargained for”.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Since it was the 4^th 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 sold 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!”

I was just getting myself settled in—I found a great spot between the slop bucket and the branding irons—when I realized I had forgotten something. Something important.

I headed for the main gate and tried to push my way out through the crowd of people who were being herded in. The guards roughly shoved me back.

“I want to go out,” I explained.

They told me I couldn’t go out. They had just gone to a lot of trouble to get me in. They said I had to go sit back down where I was before. I argued for awhile, but it didn’t do me any good. I went back to my spot and complained about the guards to my neighbor. After he’d heard the whole story he agreed with me.

As soon as it got dark I made another attempt to get out. But this time I didn’t tell the guards about it. I wasn’t letting them in on this one. I couldn’t trust them anymore. Dressed in black, and with my face smudged so if they caught me they wouldn’t know it was me, I stealthily made my way around to the back of the enclosure, where I knew there weren’t as many guards posted because of all the poison ivy and snakes and weirdos. I waited until the searchlights had passed by me, then crashed through the fence and made my escape. Like I mentioned before, us big guys get to make our own doors.

Keeping to the back alleys as much as I could, and only engaging in long philosophical conversations with alien invaders when it was absolutely necessary, I made my way back to my old begging spot near the courthouse, looked around on the ground, found my toothbrush, and stuck it in my back pocket.

“Where to now?” asked one of the several hundred prisoners who had followed me.

“Back to the pen,” I said. “They’ll be slopping us soon.”

The prisoners were dissatisfied with this plan, which they felt wasn’t bold enough. They had a brief discussion about whether to go back to the pen with me or elect a new leader and follow him someplace better. Just as the second ballot was being counted a huge blast knocked us over. We all looked up. What the hell?

More invading alien craft, with insignia I had never seen before, were streaking into the atmosphere, blasting the hell out of everything and everybody, Earthmen and aliens alike.

I saw my house get vaporized. Then my office building was incinerated. Great, I thought. Just perfect. Oh well, at least I didn’t have anything else left to lose. The next explosion took out my toothbrush.

One of the bombs hit the courthouse just as Buzzy’s trial was ending and he was being sentenced to life imprisonment in a big flashlight. The explosion knocked over everyone in the courtroom, blew off Buzzy’s battery case, and opened up a hole in the side wall of the courthouse shaped exactly like him, right down to his mustache. Well, you can’t ask for a better chance than that. And Buzzy took it. He ran for it.

When he reached the spot where I was, he ignored my request for a quarter to help out a disgraced Mouseketeer, grabbed me, and began dragging me along with him, using me as a shield.

“Hi, Buzzy,” I said.

“Shut up,” he said.

As bullets from pursuing policemen swirled around us, he dragged me to a parked Intergalactic News ship, forced open the hatch, got us both aboard, and blasted us out of this world.

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.

CHAPTER EIGHT

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.

Finally I realized I needed help. I couldn’t do this on my own. I went to a government resettlement agency that specialized in finding the right planets for people who were too stupid to find things for themselves. The lady there, a Mrs. Jacobson, interviewed me. I told her about my skills, my education, my experience, that I’m half alligator and half snapping turtle, a ring tailed roarer, that I’ve been everywhere and done everything, and that I spit lightning and crap thunder.

She turned to the computer on her desk. “Computer?”

“Bullshit,” said the computer.

She told me to start again, telling the truth this time. I asked if we could conduct the rest of the interview somewhere else. Somewhere away from that c-o-m-p-u-t-e-r, but she said no. So for the rest of the interview I mostly had to tell the truth, which, I don’t know about you, but that always puts me at a disadvantage.

After I had given her all my real information and she had cross-checked it with her database of inhabited planets, she shook her head.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see any planets here that need your particular skills, or lack of them.”

“Check some other universe.”

She shook her head again. “There are no other universes.”

I thought about this. “Can I have your job?”

“No. I need it.”

We both sat there glumly. This wasn’t working.

Mrs. Jacobson glanced over my personal information again. The word “detective” stopped her. “Were you ever really a detective,” she asked, “or was that another of your pathetic lies?”

“Oh, I was a detective, all right. The pathetic lies start after the word ‘detective’. Just before the words ‘Army Chief of Staff’.”

“Detective… detective…” she murmured, as she looked through the data on her computer. “Ah, here’s what I was looking for. Betelgeuse 13 has an opening for a detective.”

I grabbed the printout, put on my hat, and opened the door to the airlock. “Betelgeuse 13, here I come!”

Well, I suppose you can guess what happened. Yeah, they ended up hanging me.

When I first arrived on Betelgeuse 13 and told them I was a genuine Earth detective, everyone got very excited. They’d heard about Earth detectives from our TV broadcasts. Earth detectives are great. They never miss. Everyone lined up around the planet to hire me.

But after the initial excitement, my business quickly fizzled. I wasn’t what they were looking for at all. They were expecting one of those smart British-style detectives who carefully reasons things out and then walks over and points at the criminal. Not the blockheaded film-noir type like me, who just blunders around with a bottle of liquor in his hand, knocking people down and firing off guns, and never solving anything. But just because I wasn’t what they were looking for was no reason to hang me. The reason they hung me was all those sacred traditions I violated, the “people” I killed, and the historic documents I ate (hey, they looked good). So there’s another lesson for you teens. Eat at the diner.

Fortunately, the people of Betelgeuse 13 aren’t all that up on Earth physiology, so when they hung me, it didn’t kill me. After a few days they said it was a miracle I hadn’t died (though some argued that I had been hung by the wrong leg) and cut me down.

I stayed on Betelgeuse 13 for awhile after that, seeing if I could make a living with any of the other skills I had, now that we had all agreed I wasn’t a detective.

I tried getting jobs lifting things, which is something I’m pretty good at, but everybody on Betelgeuse 13 had robots for jobs like that. Even the smallest robot could lift more than I could. And they didn’t complain as much. Or smell as bad. Or get caught stealing things as often.

And I wasn’t a good bodyguard there either because everybody’s body was so irregularly shaped compared to mine. Parts of them—usually the parts that were paying me—always seemed to be sticking out around the edges where they could get shot. So that career didn’t last very long either. “I can’t do anything,” I thought to myself. And God damn it, I was right.

It began to dawn on me that I had the same problem in space that I had had on Earth. I was unhirable there, and I was unhirable here. But out here it was even worse. I couldn’t compete with these space people on any level. Everybody was just too far ahead of me.

They were all smarter than me, for one thing. Everybody in space has these chips in their heads that are full of information on every subject. Just try winning a bar bet with one of those guys. Just try it, wise guy. You’ll lose. I got one of those information chips put into my head—cost me all the money I had made as a detective—but my body rejected it so violently part of my brain came out with it. So I just ended up knowing less than I knew before. I tried carrying the chip in my pants pocket instead of my head, but that didn’t work. Just made my pants real hot.

They all have these special kinds of pills too. Pills that do everything for you. Instead of eating or sleeping or exercising or going to a movie, they just take a pill. And if their hair gets too long, there’s no need for any of your so-called “Earth Haircuts”. They just take a pill and instantly there’s hair all over the floor and everybody looks great. But people from Earth can’t take these pills. Don’t ask me how I know. I don’t want to talk about it. And don’t ask the doctor who put my butt back together either.

And, even though I consider myself a pretty modern guy, everyone in space was miles ahead of me technologically. Even the kids. A lot of the younger trendier types on Betelgeuse 13, for example, routinely traveled from place to place by downloading themselves onto the galactic internet. That was the latest thing, when I was there. They thought interstellar rockets were old fashioned and corny. They could travel from one end of the galaxy to the other in the time it takes to click a mouse. The only time I tried that I forgot my password and couldn’t get out. I finally had to kick my way out through somebody’s keyboard. Next time I’m going to write my password down.

If they weren’t surfing the galactic internet they were getting places by using Star Trek style transporters. I tried that and, on my very first trip, due to a magnetic disturbance in the planet’s atmosphere, I got split into two Frank Burlys. One good and one evil. I told the good Frank Burly to go get us both some coffee, then I took off before he got back. I was afraid that we might be put back together at some point, but we never were. We weren’t that much different anyway.

After awhile I started to get the feeling that maybe Earth wasn’t so bad after all. At least on Earth I had a chance to compete. Up here my puny mind didn’t get me very far. I started getting nostalgic, telling aliens I met in bars how great the Earth was.

“On Earth everyone had puny minds,” I told one alien, “and primitive thoughts, and a limited understanding of the world around them. A guy could really compete with pea-brains like that.”

“Sounds great,” he said.

“And where I come from nobody was really very good at doing anything,” I said, dreamily. “In most instances, a monkey could do it better.”

“Wow.”

“And the trees, they weren’t ordinary trees, they were watermelon trees.”

“Why don’t you go back there then? If you like it so much.”

“I didn’t say I liked it. I just said it was easy. And, anyway, I can’t go back there. The whole place has been overrun by a bunch of smelly aliens.”

“Watch it, mister.”

I looked at the alien. He was bigger than me. “All right, I’ll watch it,” I said, “since you’re so big, and I’m so small.” I took another drink. “But, whether your people are smelly or not…” I held up a restraining hand, “and I’m sure they’re not, it wouldn’t do me any good to go back to Earth now. The same know-it-alls I’ve been running into out here are down there now too. I couldn’t compete with them. I might as well stay where I am. Starve here. Save some shoe leather.”

Now I know what you’re thinking: Hey, Burly, you’re thinking, we all know you’re a hero. This is your chance to prove it. Why don’t you roll up your sleeves and get out there and save the good old Earth? To that my answer is screw you, gentle reader. Up yours, also. I don’t work for you. I don’t do things just because you think they’re a good idea. Let somebody else save the Earth, if it needs saving. Or you do it, if you think it’s so God damned important. It isn’t my job. Screw you. Screw everybody.

On the other hand, I suddenly thought one day when I had really been drinking a lot, if saving the Earth was my job, I wonder how much that job would pay? I mean, they’ve got to give you something if you’ve just saved their worthless butts for them, right? They’ve got to show their appreciation in some tangible way. Stands to reason. I never saw Paul Revere in an unemployment line. And I’ll bet you didn’t either. If I was a hero, I probably wouldn’t have to work for the rest of my life. I’d get everything for free, just like Paul Revere does. And Sgt. York—remember all of that free bottom land he got? Well, they’d damn well have to give me some bottom land too. Better yet—bottom land for everybody. Anyway, that’s the way it looked to me after about forty drinks.

So I decided to go back and take a crack at saving mankind. The money was right. The problem was, how to do it. The Earth was crawling with aliens. I couldn’t overpower them all—that was my first idea. Knock ‘em all on their cans and tell them to hit the road or they’d get worse. I didn’t think I could pull that off. I’m tough, but I’m not that tough. I couldn’t outsmart them all either. I’m very smart, but I’m not that very smart.

Then I decided maybe I should just do this the way the heroes in the movies do it. “What will you do?” people ask them. “I’ll know that when I get there,” they say. And everybody figures that answer is good enough. And, sure enough, when the hero gets there he does know what to do. Or sometimes the hero would say: “I’ll explain on the way.” And people always think that’s a good answer too. I decided that was the way I’d do it. I’d explain it to myself on the way.

But before I had a chance to even leave for Earth, I happened to see a newspaper that had an article about dead planets in it. The Earth was mentioned. I started reading this article, frowning.

“Remember the Earth?” it began. “Home of the foot long hot dog and racial hatred? Well, it’s still around, but no one goes there anymore because of the doomsday shroud surrounding it and the total lack of life on its charred surface.”

I read the rest of the article with growing anger. In their ferocious no-holds-barred battle to gain control of the Earth the aliens had ended up destroying all life on it, including their own. And now the Earth was as dead as the Moon.

That’s when my mind snapped, I guess. At least I think it snapped. I heard a loud snap coming from the direction of my mind. Other people heard it too, and turned to look to see where all the racket was coming from.

Enraged at seeing all my planning come to nothing, and my big chance to return to Earth as a hero gone forever, I threw the newspaper down, kicked over the newspaper rack, pushed over the newspaper building, dumped the town’s only bridge into the river, and started tearing up the expressway. After a couple more drinks I got really mad. When my rage finally subsided a few days later, I realized I had completely trashed Betelgeuse 13.

While I was sheepishly looking around at all the destruction I had caused, I noticed that all of the inhabitants were huddled together out near the horizon, some of them holding up crosses to keep me away (and they did keep me away, too. Crosses! Yuck!). I suddenly realized that with no one around and all the shop windows smashed, I could take what I wanted without—and this was the important thing—paying for any of it. So I grabbed an armload of stuff. No, make that a double armload. And with the spaceport abandoned, I could take any ship I wanted. Free of charge. So I commandeered the newest fastest one they had. And no one tried to stop me from doing any of that. They were too afraid of me. I was nuts. It was all so easy, I couldn’t believe it. Hey, I thought, how long has this been going on?

Like most successful careers, it had happened entirely by accident. If I hadn’t seen that newspaper, I might never have realized that with my limitless anger, mindless brutality and frightening other-worldly appearance, I had all the tools it took to be a successful space monster.

Dazzled by this realization, I took off into space and headed for another planet to pillage, roaring with excitement.

CHAPTER NINE

I’m not proud of the next eighteen months. But a man has to eat. And he has to have bars of gold. And motorboats, a man needs those too. And if a man can only get those things by scaring the shit out of another man, he has to do it. Right? Right. Anyway, that’s the way I had it figured. It made sense to me. And during that period of my life it wasn’t a good idea to argue with me. I’d scare the shit out of you if you did.

For the rest of that year and into the next, I was the terror of the galaxy. I’d land on an unsuspecting planet, stamp around, roaring my head off, scare everybody away, get some food, and whatever loot I fancied, maybe take in a movie or do some ice skating, and then high-tail it back into space before the inhabitants could regroup.

I thought of working up a scary costume to wear, something with horns and claws and maybe a long spiky rubber tail, but most of the frightened inhabitants I encountered assured me I didn’t need it. It was gilding the lily, they said. They were already afraid of my size and strength and the crazy way I acted. Plus, they were put off by the aura of filth, decay and disease I gave off. Whatever I had, they didn’t want to catch it too. So my bad grooming habits helped me there.

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.

CHAPTER TEN

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.

The constant demands to pull over and give myself up got tiresome after awhile. Finally I turned the radio to a different station. Let’s get some music in here. That wasn’t much better. It was police music. (Though I did quite like the “You’re Breaking Your Mother’s Heart March”.)

The police were right about one thing though—there didn’t seem to be any way this chase could end up in my favor. There was apparently no limit to the number of police ships in the galaxy. And none of them seemed to have anything better to do than to chase me. They just kept coming—suddenly appearing from behind asteroids, lifting off of planets as I passed them, and just popping in from hyperspace as if by magic. It seemed like they had to get me in the end. Which is what they had been telling me all along. I guess I should have listened. The police don’t talk to you just to be exercising their gums. If they exercise their gums at all, they do it at a gym. When they talk to you they’re talking to you for a reason.

Then I had an inspiration. I realized there was one place I could go where no one would dare follow me. The Earth. The good old Earth, my good old polluted birthplace, and friend. No one would be able to follow me there because the whole planet was poison. It meant instant death to anyone stupid enough to set foot on it. Once I got inside the Earth’s protective doomsday shroud, they would just have to turn around and go back the way they came. Ha! If I had taken the time to think about the downside to my idea, I would have realized that the poisonous atmosphere would kill me just as quickly as it would kill them. Quicker, probably, because that’s the way things had been going for me this week. But I didn’t have time to think. I only had time to act.

As I started looking over the star charts to see where the Earth was from here—I was pretty sure it was “down”, but “down” where?—several hundred more police cruisers appeared out of hyperspace slightly ahead of me and to my right. Their sirens were cranked up so loud I could hear them in the vacuum of space. Now those are loud sirens, I thought. At our present speed, they were in a perfect position to intercept me. Of course, that was easy to fix. All I had to do was change my present speed to one no one in their right mind could match.

I disconnected all the engine’s safety devices, pointed the ship towards the Earth and hit the overdrive button as hard as I could, quickly accelerating the ship to beyond the speed of light, a speed at which no one is supposed to go. I hated to break the rules of physics, but this was an emergency.

I glanced down at my speed indicator. The needle had already gone beyond all the numbers and was now passing “Are you kidding?” and heading for “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” Ridiculous is right! As soon as I passed the speed of light, all sorts of screwy things started appearing outside of my window. I started seeing kaleidoscopic colors, and strange wavy lines, geometric shapes, big babies in bubbles, a woman on a bicycle turning into a witch on a broomstick, more kaleidoscopic colors, two men in a rowboat tipping their hats to me, then a final wavy line, the waviest of them all. Now I understood why you weren’t supposed to go past the speed of light. A guy could go nuts seeing all that crap going on outside his window. Maybe go nuts and crash. I guess I was supposed to understand all the symbolism of what I was seeing, but I didn’t. I think the big babies might have been symbolic of youth in some way, but that was as far as I got.

And strange things weren’t just happening around me. They were happening to me too. My arms were getting longer and shorter, my eyes were opening and closing, my antlers were turning different colors, and my nose was running backwards. I guess I was quite a sight. I probably could have gotten quite a few laughs with a screwy face like I had right then. I was a regular Larry Laffman. But laughs wouldn’t do me any good out here. I was a long way from Hollywood.

I looked in my rear view mirror, which was melting and burning and yelling: “What’s…happening…to…me?” The ships behind me were falling back a little. They didn’t have super-light speed like I did. Plus, I think they were a little afraid of all the colors and babies.

As I passed the Earth’s moon, the pursuing ships began to slow down and fall back even more. I listened in on their chatter over the police radio. The way they had it figured, I was as good as dead the moment I entered the Earth’s atmosphere. So once I passed into that doomsday shroud, they could all go home. Their work would be done. I smiled in triumph. That’s what I wanted them to think. Then my smile faded. Hey, they were right!

Moments later my ship dove screaming into the Earth’s atmosphere. Actually, it just sounded like it was screaming. That was actually me doing the screaming.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I didn’t know what to expect when I entered the Earth’s poisonous atmosphere. Death, of course, but what else? As I got closer to the ground I was surprised to see that the Earth’s surface didn’t look like the Moon at all. It wasn’t dead. There was greenery everywhere. I was even more surprised when I landed and found that my ship’s sensors didn’t indicate any toxic substances in the atmosphere at all.

I hesitated before I opened the airlock. The ship’s sensors didn’t indicate any life threatening conditions outside, but I was taking no chances. If I was going to die, I wanted to die slowly, like my parents, not all at once, like a sewer explosion. I suited up in a police survival suit I found in one of the storage compartments, cautiously opened the airlock, and climbed down the ladder to the surface.

The planet looked great. Flowers and trees everywhere. Blue sky. Blue water. And no signs of the contamination I had heard about at all. My tricorder—a futuristic gadget that I had picked up at Roddenberry’s in the Pleiades, the same place that I got my Spock Neck—indicated that the atmosphere was safe to breath, so I took off my helmet and took a deep breath. The air was fine. My tricorder said it was okay for me to give it some oil, too, if I had time, but I didn’t bother. What am I—Uncle Fixit?

I wandered around looking at all the greenery and wondering what all those gloom and doomers had been talking about. Earth was as nice as it had ever been. Maybe even a little nicer, since I hadn’t been there for awhile. I didn’t see any reason for it to be condemned. Some bureaucrat had really dropped the ball on this one. And that newspaper article I had read was baloney. Pure unadulterated baloney. There was nothing wrong with this place.

Then I noticed something wrong. There were plants everywhere, but no people. I hadn’t seen anybody since I arrived. No buildings either. No roads. No signs of civilization at all. At first I thought maybe I was in some kind of park, but there were no signs telling me all the things I couldn’t do, so I knew it couldn’t be a park.

The more I looked around, the more alarmed I became. I seemed to be all alone on an empty planet. Then I remembered my tricorder. I took it out of my pocket and switched it to dating mode. It said I was currently crapping my pants in the year 300,612,209. Three hundred million years in the future! Yikes.

I’m not known for my cursing. I only curse to make a point. Or to let off steam. Or to kill time before church starts. But I cursed now. I cursed a blue streak. Of all the blankety blanks this was the blankiest, I said. Blank blank blank blank blank shit blank.

When I had calmed down a little bit, I took another look around the blankety blank area, this time with an eye for changes the passage of centuries might have brought about. Sure enough, now that I was looking for them, I could see the changes. There were changes all right. Blackberries were bigger now, for one thing. Much bigger. The size of apples. And they weren’t black anymore. They were apple-colored. And the apples were as big as watermelons. And they didn’t grow on trees anymore. They grew in patches. But the biggest change was in the people. There just weren’t any.

Then I found them. They weren’t exactly people as you and I know them. They were just huge brains in jars. I had walked past these jars a number of times. In fact, I had tossed an empty Coke can into one of them, but I hadn’t noticed there were brains in there.

I went over to talk to them.

“Hiya,” I said.

“Greetings, Frank Burly,” said the oldest looking, most wrinkled brain, who I took to be their leader.

“Who are you, and how do you know my name?” I demanded.

“We know all. And your name is embroidered on your shirt.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s right. Well who are you then?”

“Our names are on our jars.”

I looked closer at their jars. Someone had stuck labels on the jars to identify their contents. “Oh, I see the names there now. Hello, Mr. Rosenbloom.”

“Hello, Frank Burly.”

“How do you know my… oh, yeah, we covered that.”

The brains were glad to fill me in about what had happened to the Earth since I left. They enjoyed showing off their knowledge. The doomsday shroud hadn’t destroyed all life on Earth, they said. The most obnoxious managed to survive, as they always do. But no one outside of the Earth knew that there were any survivors because they couldn’t see through the poisonous shroud, which had gradually moved up into the upper levels of the atmosphere. There it harmed no one, and kept out dangerous ultra violet rays and maintained a constant year round temperature of 75 degrees all over the world. I always figured pollution had to be good for the environment. People are wrong about everything else. Why not that?

I was glad the Earth was okay, but I was horrified by what mankind had come to.

“This is horrible,” I said, genuinely moved. “Is this the future of life on Earth? A bunch of smelly brains in jars?”

Mr. Rosenbloom’s brain got more wrinkly. “What do you mean smelly?”

“If you were a giant nose instead of a giant brain you’d know what I meant.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted.

I asked him how I had ended up here in the future. I was in the past a minute ago. He said that’s what happens when you exceed the speed of light. The years flow faster on your planet of origin than they do for you in your ship. Read Einstein, Mr. Rosenbloom said. You read it, I said. I didn’t want to read anything. I wasn’t in the mood.

I asked the brains what they did for fun around here. They said “squat and think”. That didn’t sound like so much fun to me. They said that’s because I hadn’t tried it. They had me there. I hadn’t tried it.

One of the smaller brains—one that had lipstick on it—volunteered to help me have a good time, if that’s what I was looking for. She was apparently a hooker of some sort, because she kept calling me either “sailor” or “handsome” and kept offering to give me a good time in exchange for four hundred quatloos. But, try as I might, I just couldn’t get what she was offering to do for me.

“Look,” I said, fingering the quatloos, “if you want the quatloos, you’re going to have to better explain what it is you’re offering me.”

“A good time!” she said, almost shouting. She was starting to get as frustrated as I was.

We never did get it sorted out, and the money ended up staying in my pocket.

It didn’t take very long for me to realize that this future Earth was no place for a guy like me. There was nothing going on here at all. I was bored stiff already, and it wasn’t even 2:30 yet. And if I thought I was over-matched in the brain department in space, it was nothing compared to here. These guys were all brain. I couldn’t understand half of the things they were saying. I kept telling them to use smaller words, but they said there weren’t any smaller words.

I decided to head back up into space—take my chances there. I didn’t know what was out there at this late date in history, but whatever it was, it would have to be better than this.

I said goodbye to the brains, told them that I would write often, and made my way back to my space ship. But when I got there I found that the engine wouldn’t turn over. Driving it nonstop in overdrive for so long, and pressing the “Burn Out Motor” button so many times, had burned out the motor. It was a good thing I had gotten to Earth when I did. I must have had only a few seconds left before the whole ship blew apart. I confirmed this when I manually overrode all the safety systems, kick-started the engine, and blew the ship apart, with some pieces of it landing up to half a mile away, and other pieces only traveling a few feet before they lodged in my head.

I went back and asked the brains if any of them knew how to repair an R-43 with a Crimebuster engine. I needed it by Thursday. They said they knew all, of course, especially how to fix an R-43, but the ship could not be repaired. It was in too many different places now. They said it looked to them like I was stuck here. I said it looked like that to me too.

After conferring among themselves, the brains invited me to stay with them forever. They said I could never really be one of them—never be their intellectual equal—but they had always wanted a dog. I could be that. They would call me “Scruffy”, if that was okay with me. I said it sounded all right. They told me to pick out a jar, get in, screw the top tightly closed (remembering the air holes), and start living it up—like them.

“Okay”, I said, doubtfully. I climbed into the nearest empty jar. “Now what?”

“Think.”

I sat there and thought. I must have thought for over an hour. But it wasn’t very entertaining. All I could think of was that I was in a jar.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I tried to make the best of my life in a jar, of course. You know me. Mr. Positive. I tried to concentrate on what was good about being in a jar, like the tremendous 360 degree view, and the free pickle smell. And I spent a lot of time fixing up my jar so it looked real nice. I put a label on it so people would know I was inside. I put a porch on it. And I strung up some Christmas lights on the lid. But once I’d gotten all that done I started to get bored again.

There was just nothing to do. No movies, no prize fights. I tried to get a couple of the larger brains to fight, then sell me tickets to this fight, but they weren’t interested. I couldn’t get them to put on a Broadway show for me either. There was just no entertainment around here at all. All of the entertainment here in the future took place in people’s minds. Other people’s minds, though, not mine. Once, when the brains seemed to be having a particularly good time, I asked if I could get into their minds somehow and see what was going on in there that was so hilarious, but they said no, stay back.

“Well, at least tell me what you’re doing in there,” I said. “You’re driving me crazy out here.”

“We are thinking of how much we know,” said one, “and how thoroughly we know it.”

“We know all,” agreed another brain.

I couldn’t let that one pass. “Who was the 17^th vice president of the United States?” I asked.

“Schuyler Colfax.”

“Shit, that’s right.”

“We are always right.”

“I guess so.”

“Ask another one. A harder one this time.”

“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck…”

“Fourteen.”

“Shit.” These guys knew everything. “Well, that’s right,” I admitted, “but I’m going to have to take off some points for attitude.”

“We understand. We understand all.”

Boy, talk about big heads!

I kept trying to get them involved in some kind of outdoor activity, so we could have some real fun. But they didn’t want to play.

“C’mon, catch the ball,” I said.

“Ow! You hit me in the brain!”

“Well catch it, stupid.”

Every time I tried to get a game going they just screwed their lids on tighter and pretended they weren’t home. I could see them in there though. They weren’t fooling anybody.

I got pretty tired of just sitting around thinking my same three thoughts over and over. There had to be something else to do.

“Don’t you at least have any books here?” I asked. I’ve never been much of a reader, but I knew a guy, who knew a guy, who said that he had found something interesting in a book once. I was bored enough by this point that I was willing to try anything. “This is supposed to be an advanced civilization,” I said, poking Mr. Rosenbloom’s jar with an accusing finger. “Where are all your books?”

“We did have books,” he replied stiffly, “but you have been wiping your nose and butt with them ever since you arrived here. That’s the last one we had you’re blowing your nose on now.”

So there went my book reading idea. I asked if they had any phonograph records. Same answer.

I put up with the endless boredom for as long as I could, because I’m such a good sport, but finally I decided I’d had it with the future. There had to be some way to get out of here. No, don’t try to stop me, I’m leaving.

I made my way back to my ship and looked it over. Maybe I could figure out a way to fix it. Maybe hanging around with all those giant brains had made me smarter. I certainly felt smarter. I confidently started screwing the nose cone onto one of the fins. Once I got it on, it didn’t look exactly right so I pried it off and nailed it to a piece of the tail I had found in the river. That’s better. Almost there. Only nine million pieces to go.

But then I noticed the gaping hole in the fuel tank. I stuck my head in through the hole and lit a match. That’s when I got the bad news. My ship was out of astronium, a fuel made from the fossilized remains of astronauts, which is a dwindling natural resource in the universe, and is difficult to come by in the best of times. I doubted if there was any of it around here. And I’d just blown up the last of what was in the tank with my match. I reluctantly concluded that even if I managed to get the ship put back together, it wasn’t going anywhere. And that meant neither was I.

I went back and spent the rest of the day moping around tossing a ball up against my neighbor’s jar, and reflecting on what a bad break I had gotten and how unfair it all was, and that there should be a law.

Like most people, when something bad happens, my first reaction is to pass a law so it didn’t happen. But passing laws like that never works, even though people keep trying it. It’s the flow of time that makes these laws toothless. If the laws had been passed earlier they would have worked fine. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the law itself. So, like everybody else who makes these kinds of laws, what I really had was a time problem.

Then I remembered that, hey, I was in the future here. They’ve got to have time machines. Right? Couldn’t call themselves the future if they didn’t have time machines. I could get out of here in a second with one of those babies.

I excitedly asked the brains where the nearest time machine was. I didn’t need anything flashy. Just as long as it worked, and had bucket seats, and was sort of flashy. They said they didn’t have time machines here in the future. Didn’t need them. They could travel through time in their minds, which, they pointed out, saved money for tickets and lodging. Money they end up losing in telephone real estate scams, pointed out one of them sourly, but he was told to quit harping on that.

I’d like to say that I deliberately started annoying the brains because I didn’t believe their story that there weren’t any time machines around here. And that I was trying to make myself as unpleasant as possible so they would break down and tell me where the nearest one was. I’d like to say I had a reason for the things I did. But I didn’t. I was just bored. And, say what you like about being a big jerk, at least it isn’t boring.

I spent the next few weeks doing everything I could think of to make the brains’ lives hell for them. I threw rocks at their jars, tossed firecrackers into them, rolled their jars down the hill to make the brains inside dizzy, mooned the occupants of the jars individually and in groups, used lighted matches to give each of them a “hotbrain”, and so on. I was the Juvenile Delinquent Of The Future. A 3 Millionth Century Dennis The Menace. I never had so much fun in my life.

The brains kept telling me to quit it, that they weren’t kidding this time, and not to make them come out there, but I didn’t stop. I was having too much fun.

Finally—a little to my dismay—the brains relented. I was having a pretty good time in the future now. I didn’t really want to leave anymore. If the rest of my life was going to be like this, count me in. But they had had enough. They told me that there was, in fact, a time machine less than a mile away, in a cave. A 19^th century novelist had left it there. They didn’t know if it still worked, but if it did, they would be obliged if I would get in it and piss off into any time period in Earth’s history except this one.

They said the reason they hadn’t told me about this before wasn’t because they were worried about me tampering with time or anything. They just didn’t like helping people. But my boorish behavior had forced their hand.

I thanked them for the information, tossed a goodbye firecracker into each of their jars, then headed for the cave.

When I got there I found that the cave opening was covered with fallen rocks and debris. About a million years worth. I hefted one of the rocks. It was heavy, just as I suspected. I tried another one. It was almost as heavy. At that point, I had half a mind to forget the whole thing and go back and throw stuff at the jars some more. Maybe run a hose into the jars and fill them up with water. See if brains can swim. But the thought of the long walk back, and then having to listen to a bunch of criticism from my brainiac neighbors, spurred me into starting to dig.

When I finally got enough rocks out of the way to squeeze into the cave, I wished I had remembered to bring a lantern. It was dark in there. Damned dark. Just my luck I got one of those dark caves. The brains had told me that this was part of an ancient coal mine, so I whipped out my lighter and set fire to the walls.

Now I had plenty of light. More than I wanted, actually. And lots of nice heat too. I went a little farther into the cave and found a cave painting on the wall that would be confusing to anthropologists if they ever happened to see it. It showed some brains killing an antelope. A little farther on, I found what I was looking for.

It was a time machine graveyard. Almost two dozen old time machines, in various stages of disrepair, were scattered around the cave. All of them were apparently built by 19^th century novelists, who had then abandoned them here, I never learned why. Probably had to get back to their writing, and were in such a hurry they decided to walk. That’s the way I reasoned it out. That’s what I think probably happened.

I didn’t like the look of most of the machines. Charles Dickens’ time machine was a wreck. So was Fenimore Cooper’s. Mary Shelley’s machine seemed to have been fashioned out of cannibalized parts from other machines and then torched. Mark Twain’s time machine was so stupid I’m amazed he got it this far. Too many of the parts were obviously just there for laughs. The machine needed more plot. This is why, as a general rule, we shouldn’t let novelists design powerful machinery. It’s not their specialty. They should stick to their writing. But H.G. Wells’ time machine was the exception. It looked like it was well designed, and still seemed to be in working order. Some of the controls were out—I wouldn’t be putting the top down this trip—everything was covered with centuries of dust, and I decided not to eat the ham sandwich I found under the seat. But the engine made a nice confident humming noise, the leather seat was still comfortable, and on second thoughts, maybe I would eat that ham sandwich.

So, with nothing to lose that I could think of, I hopped in, stepped on the gas, and streaked off into time and space.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

As the years flew by, and civilizations fell and then rose before my uninterested eyes, I noticed that the machine seemed to be working fine except for the year indicator, which evidently had been corroded away by the elements. So it looked like I was going to have to eyeball that part of the trip. Fortunately, in a time machine it doesn’t really matter how long a trip takes. When you finally get where you’re going, you’ll be on time.

My first idea had been to go forward into the future. I figured if I went far enough all those brains would be dead. Then I could live in my jar in peace. But I finally vetoed that idea. You never know what the future will bring, that’s what’s wrong with it. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into when you go there. We already know what’s going to happen in the past. It’s been written down for us by some guy in a library. Plus, if I went farther into the future I’d probably have to deal with people who were even smarter than the know-it-alls who had been giving me such a hard time here. I had to find a place where everybody was approximately at my mental level.

So I decided to head back into Earth’s past to live out my life there. I knew 1941 was a little too advanced for me—I’d been there before—so I decided to try 1934. That sounded like a pretty stupid year. Plus, if I started in 1934, I’d, with any luck, be dead by 2009 when the Earth got invaded and everything went to hell. If not, I could just go back and try again—maybe start in 1912 or something.

That’s the nice thing about having a time machine. You can make almost all the mistakes there are and still end up with the life you want. You keep getting more chances. For example, with a time machine you can bowl a 300 game every time. Just keep going back and trying again on each frame until you’ve got a strike. Then move on to the next frame. People will wonder why your hair turned gray during the game, but you don’t have to tell them about that. Tell them you want to talk about your 300 game, not your rapid aging.

When I figured I must be pretty close to 1934, I stopped the machine and asked a guy leaning against an oxcart what year it was. He said I was in the year 1693. I was also a witch, he informed me severely. I thanked him for the information and said he was a witch too, which startled him no end, then took off again, this time heading back towards the future as fast as I could. I’d wasted enough time. I wanted to get home.

I raced through the Revolutionary War and the Texas War of Independence without even slowing down. I heard both Nathan Hale and Davy Crockett yelling to me for help, but all I had time to do was tell them to sit tight, I’d be there in a minute. I advised Nathan Hale to stall for time—make a speech or something. I’d be right there. And I told Davy Crockett to wait for me in the Alamo.

I streaked through New Jersey in 1872 and heard someone ask Thomas Edison: “Hey Tom, why don’t you invent that electric light you’ve been talking about?” And he said: “Why don’t you shut up?”

“Coming through!” I yelled, knocking Edison on his ear, and shoving the machine into overdrive.

In 1881 I took a shot at Garfield to get him out of my way. Just because you’ve been elected President doesn’t mean you can block the road. I don’t think I hit him though. I did hit McKinley with a bullet a few years later, but I don’t think he was seriously hurt. I heard him yell “I’m okay!” as he fell.

In the mid 1920’s I accidentally knocked over Frank Roosevelt with my time machine.

“You bastard,” he yelled. “I’ll be in a wheelchair for months!”

“Sorry,” I called, as I whizzed away through the years.

When I started hearing the word “bummer!” over and over and saw that I was knocking hippies down, I figured I’d gone too far. I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop.

I could see that I was in Washington D.C. but I wasn’t sure of the year. I figured since I was in our nation’s capitol, I’d ask the President. The President should know what year it was, if anybody did. His aides would have to keep him informed on something like that.

I was near the White House, so I got out and hid my machine behind some rose bushes. I was surprised to find a rocket ship hidden behind the same bush.

When I opened the door to the Oval Office, I got an even bigger surprise. A younger version of Buzzy was standing there, looking cool, with sunglasses, a Beatle haircut, and long sideburns, whispering into Richard Nixon’s ear and shoving Space Money into his pocket. Buzzy saw me, looked startled, said “You!” and drew his gun.

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 7^th, 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 was 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 21^st 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 1^st 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. EVERYBODY

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