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Authors: John Swartzwelder

Tags: #General, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Humorous

How I Conquered Your Planet (10 page)

BOOK: How I Conquered Your Planet
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I hear you JUMPED into the semi-conductor market, Jerry.”


Yes, I JUMPED at the chance to JUMP into that.”


Let’s sing the “JUMP-JUMP Song”.


Okay.”


JUMP-JUMP-JUMP-JUMP…”

All through this, long-suffering Earthmen would be tragically
springing into the air in all directions.

Of course there was some resistance to this slavery and
degradation. Bricks were thrown through windows. Policemen were pushed over.
There was even the occasional deadly explosion. None of it was very big, but
the irritation to the Martians was cumulative. That is to say, it accumulated.

The Martians had to delegate a lot of their resources to chase
after the troublemakers. They caught some of them, but most of them just
disappeared somewhere. It was suggested that these underground fighters might
be living underground someplace, but this suggestion was viewed as too
simplistic.


The world is more complicated than that, Jenkins,” said one
high official, gruffly.


I realize that now, sir.”


Stop living in a dream world.”


Consider it done, sir.”

Since there were no actual wars to fight anymore, most of the
army was demobilized and I was given a new job. A job that fit in perfectly
with my powerful physique and short temperment. I was put in charge of kicking
slaves in the ass to get them going. And believe me there were plenty of Earth
slaves who needed to get going.

This was a great job for a guy like me, a dream job, except
there was no room for advancement. You couldn’t move up to kicking more
important people’s asses. Or something more important than asses, like, I dunno,
museums or something. I was kind of stuck where I was professionally. Still, I
was good at it, so I enjoyed it.

I kicked the downtrodden. I beat up the poor. I slapped the
helpless. And people yearning to breath free I walloped good.


You’ll never beat the little people,” a few defiant slaves
assured me.


I’ll beat you then,” I replied, and started doing so.

Sometimes as I walloped I got to wondering if I was still the
good guy here, but then I decided I was. I was just a good guy with a dark
side. An edgy kind of good guy. A good guy with an attitude. Like a Bargain
Basement Humphrey Bogart.

I did try, whenever possible, to be a benevolent and
kind-hearted ass-kicker.


Do not think of yourselves as prisoners,” I told my charges
kindly. “You are free to move about just as freely as you always… get back
here! I’m not finished. You are free to move about… god dammit get back here!
I’m going to kick your asses so hard…”

Like I said, it was a good job and I was good at it, so I guess
my story would have finally come to its happy ending right about here if I
hadn’t suddenly found myself kicking some old friends one morning: Dottie and
Chuck Steak. Of course I didn’t recognize them right away. To a Martian like me
they were just more slaves. All Earthmen look alike to us. Did you ever notice
that? They greeted me joyously and, between kicks, asked me why wasn’t I
detecting things? Why was I kicking them instead? I didn’t know what they were
talking about, and told them so in a kind of kicking code I had developed.

Dottie thought I must have amnesia again. Chuck was sure of it.
So, when I had my back turned to slap somebody whose face I suddenly didn’t
like, they bashed me repeatedly over the head with their shovels. It was then
that I discovered that hard blows to the head might not work for amnesia, but
they work great for brainwashing. I could suddenly remember everything. I
looked down and saw I was wearing Martian clothes and kicking Earthmen. So far,
so good.

I noticed a slave who was lagging behind the others. His aged
hands were nearly useless for digging. I gave him a couple of kicks to remedy
that. “Dig faster, asshole.”


Ah-SHOLEY,” he said, automatically correcting the
pronunciation.

I looked at him more closely. It was my old landlord!


Help me, Burly. It’s your old pal, Jack Asshole.”


Are you going to lower my rent?”


Never!”


Then keep digging.”

I was glad to see that I had managed, after all that had
happened to me, to land on my feet. But was the rest of my life this good? Over
the next few days I discovered that it wasn’t.

My Martian-provided apartment, now that I could see it through
un-brainwashed eyes, if you follow me, was crap. I had no possessions beyond
some style-less State-provided clothing and a small lamp that told me when to
go to bed, made me do calisthenics every morning, and I’m pretty sure ate some
of my food.

The Martians kept everybody working all the time. Even
big-shots like me. They had a pill that kept you alert and working hard day and
night. And they had another pill that made you take that first pill.

There were propaganda trucks roaming the streets 24 hours a
day, blaring out uplifting slogans like: “Work is Not Work. At Least Not
Anymore.”, “Slavery Is Freedom, Even Though They Appear To Be Spelled
Differently”, and “Get Back To Work”.

There was a painting of the Martian Military Governor on the
wall of my apartment which stared at me all the time and occasionally asked me
where I was going, or what I had there in my hand. When I found its presence
had gotten a little tiring, I asked for it to be removed. The next day forty
more identical paintings were installed in my apartment. So now they could not
only watch me everywhere in the apartment, they could watch me from many
exciting different angles. And they could watch each other too. And have long
loud conversations with each other that kept me awake at night.

Every time I tried to take one of these paintings down it
screamed and started yelling for guards to come help the painting – the
painting was in trouble. So I left them up.

Curfew was from dusk to dawn. And then again from dawn to dusk.
That didn’t leave much time for screwing around. I tried pointing that out to
the sentries but they just pointed to their watches and said it was past
curfew. They said if I didn’t know what time it was they would gladly burn the
current time into my forehead. I said no, that was all right. I guess I’d buy a
watch.

I hadn’t had a watch since my friends had broken mine, banging
me over the head with it to cure my amnesia.

I went to the old Earth Quarter and found an antique shop that
still sold watches. The Martians had phased out timepieces for personal use on
the theory that slaves didn’t need to know what time it was. For them it was
always “time to work”.

The shop didn’t have anything fancy, but I finally found and
purchased a serviceable watch. I also bought, on a whim, a diary.

At first most of what I wrote in this diary was pretty harmless
– comments about the weather, what I had eaten that day, and which episode of
“My Favorite Martian” I had watched on TV that night.

But soon I was using the pages to voice my concerns about the
Martian Administration: “Martians are a little too ruthless and efficient for
my taste,” I wrote. “And they look a little too much like grasshoppers.” I underlined
“grasshoppers” and drew a finger pointing at it to draw attention to it. Then I
put the word “nasty” in front of “grasshoppers”. In retrospect I probably
should have gone a little easier on all that insect stuff. I got the impression
later that that offended them more than anything else I had written.

I bought some more diaries and wrote down my most important
thoughts in each one. I still wasn’t sure which one I preferred, so I kept
buying them. When I finally decided which one was best, I didn’t want to have
to rewrite everything. I’m not stupid.

Of course I couldn’t leave incriminating writing like that
laying around in my apartment in plain view. So I hid them. Soon I had diaries
squirreled away everywhere. I even hid a few of them behind the paintings. The
faces in the paintings turned, trying to see what was behind them, but they
couldn’t quite do it. All of the hiding places I had chosen were good, but
there were so many of them the floor was starting to buckle.

To solve this problem, I tied them all together and hung them
out of my window. But I stopped doing that when I went outside and noticed they
were dangling in front of my boss’s window.

One night I came home and all of my diaries were gone! I looked
accusingly at the nearest painting. The figure in the painting smirked.

I found the diaries the next morning. They were piled on the
Military Governor’s desk. And I was in front of it, looking worried.


Do these diaries belong to you, Mr. Burly? They have your name
on them.”


I cannot recall, your honor. Probably not. They’re on your
desk. My guess is, they’re probably yours.”

He picked up one of the diaries and read from it. “When you
wrote ‘The Martians are a pain in the neck, and the Governor is a big fat
slob’, what exactly did you mean by that Mr. Burly?”

This was a trick question, of course. My story, as both of us
well knew, was that these weren’t my diaries. He was being clever. I had to be
just as clever. “I didn’t mean those things I wrote,” I said.

He stared at me for awhile, then dismissed me. So I figured I
had bluffed my way successfully through that one. Score one for me. That’s
twelve now. But it was too close. The next time I might not be so clever.

A week passed without incident. The Governor said no more about
my diaries, but I could sense that I wasn’t as trusted a member of the
administration as I had been before. My security clearances were all cancelled.
And there were so many paintings in my room now the government had to add more
walls. Time to go, Burly, I thought.

I surreptitiously started sending messages to the Earth
Underground asking what kind of a deal I could get for switching sides. There
didn’t have to be a lot of money involved, I stressed. I wasn’t trying to get
rich on the deal. Though, of course, any money they might have to offer would
certainly help me make my decision.

My messages never got any farther than the Military Governor’s
desk. That’s the Post Office for you. Each morning the Governor would read them
and frown while he was having his morning coffee. As each day passed, more bags
of them arrived, being dumped on his desk like letters to Santa Claus. As the
Governor leafed through them, Arthur Gremlin would sit in the corner watching
and hissing.

I kept checking my mail, but I never got an answer. I should
have been getting thousands of replies. Something was wrong. I decided to try
to contact the Underground in person. I took off my uniform and feelers and
dressed up in some Earth-style clothes I found on a slave, then headed for the
Earth Quarter. Thanks to my unusual build and the fact that I was actually born
on Earth, I felt I could pass myself off as an Earthman easy enough.

As I walked through the Earth Quarter, eyes turned to watch me.
Hundreds of eyes. There were eyes lined up for blocks. Finally I got tired of
it and poked a couple of those eyes. That stopped that for awhile.

I told people I needed to contact the Earth Underground. They
asked me why. Thinking fast, I said it owed me money. I hadn’t been paid for
some tunnels. They said there was no such thing as the Earth Underground. I
said then who has been blowing up all us Martians’ stuff? They didn’t have an
answer to that. That shut them up. But I still didn’t know where the Earth
Underground was.

Since no one would help me, I decided the only thing to do was
to stand next to something important until it blew up and then try to remember
who did it. The only problem with this idea is that it’s hard to remember
things when you’ve just been blown halfway across the street. I was forgetting
the information as fast as I was getting it.

After I’d been blown up a half a dozen times and was standing
determinedly in front of an arsenal, one of the Earthmen took pity on me. He
sidled up to me and handed me a business card, then hurried off. I looked at
the card. It was for the Earthman Club Café. On the back of the card was
written in pencil “Go to the Earthman Club Café”. The same message was written
carefully along the edges. Somebody wanted me to go to the Earthman Club Café.

I knew where the café was. It was right between the “Don’t Go
Here Café” and the “Not This One Either Café” What I didn’t know until I got
there was that it was a major meeting place for leaders of the Underground.

I went in and sat down at a small table in the back and waited,
only occasionally yelling “Hey! Where’s the Earth Underground?” and “I haven’t
got all day like the cops do.”

Finally an enormous shadowy figure approached my table and,
without introducing himself, sat down and looked me over. “So it’s the
Underground you’re looking for, is it?”


Yes. Is that you?”


You flatter me. Let’s say that I’m its most visible outer
manifestation.”


Okay, we’ll say that. But from now on let’s try to use smaller
words.”

BOOK: How I Conquered Your Planet
10.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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