How I Conquered Your Planet (9 page)

When there was no response from the menacing craft, except to
turn up their theremins, the people of Earth began to panic. Everyone began to
run, ignoring the fact that they were running around on the target.

A cable news tracking poll taken at the height of the hysteria
showed that 67% of Americans said they were running as fast as they could,
while 32% felt they could run faster.

Earth’s leaders weren’t running. They were diving into
underground bunkers which had been specially prepared for moments just like
this. Everywhere people went they saw government officials hiding under or
behind things. I guess that’s what makes them leaders, hiding like that.

Earth defenses sprang into action. Supersonic jets shot up into
the sky from nearly every nation on Earth. Missiles were launched from land,
sea and air. The Martian fleet suddenly found itself flying through a sky
filled with bad-tempered jets, deadly missiles and massive explosions.

The first skirmish was a revelation to the leaders on both
sides. The Martian saucers were not only armed to the teeth, with energy beams
that never seemed to run down, their pilots could employ their mental powers to
make the devastation seem even worse than it was. Many enemy pilots bailed out
of planes that hadn’t been hit at all.

On the other hand, the Earth forces were setting off explosions
that made the Martians’ death rays seem like parlor tricks by comparison.

On board my flagship, the Chiefs of Staff started giving me
worried looks – worried looks I’ve grown to recognize as Worried Look #4 and
Worried Looks #s 7-25. I was the source of a lot of their information about
Earth weaponry, and we were all starting to worry I might have been seriously
full of shit.

After the battle had been raging for nearly an hour, it became
obvious to everyone that the Martians were overmatched. Their stylish but
underpowered weapons and mind control methods and magic tricks, which were
dazzling at first, and still good at short range or on the stage, were nothing
compared to the titanic explosions Earth science had developed.

Our saucers broke out of what was increasingly looking like a
losing battle in the air and came in low to start strafing things on the
ground. People were running from us in terror, with me pointing out the best
targets. “There’s an Earthman there!” I would yell. “His name is Jerry! Get
him!”

I had briefed the other saucer pilots about targets of
importance they would find on Earth besides the usual military bases, missile
silos and so on. So there was a lot of fighting around the Alamo and Iwo Jima.

Some of the ships in my wing spent too much time chasing after
and strafing one gangster who kept dodging them and firing back as he ran,
downing three saucers before he was nailed by a hail of death rays. As he died
he started saying something that sounded like “Crime does not pay” or “You were
right all along, Father O’Malley”, some important speech like that, but our
saucers were long gone by then. So I don’t know for sure which one of those two
things he said.

I wasted my share of valuable time too. I tried to use my death
ray to replace George Washington’s face on Mount Rushmore with my own face, but
you know, that’s harder than it sounds. It’s not enough to be a brutal
trigger-happy maniac with no sense of history, you’ve got to be an artist as
well. There haven’t been many guys like that. Hitler and Rembrandt are the only
ones I can think of. I finally got the face to look something like me, but by
then the mountain was only two feet high. The tourists didn’t like that. They
kept tripping over it.

Our saucers were circling the Earth at tree-top level, blasting
everything that moved and a lot of things that didn’t. Even if we weren’t
exactly winning, we were sure scaring the hell out of everybody, and doing a
lot of damage.

Teams of government experts, who must not have had much to do
up until now, were called in to figure out how to deal with us. This was their
moment. Now they would start earning all that pay they had been getting all
these years.

They captured one of our men, pulling him out of a downed
saucer, and examined him to find our weaknesses biologically. Fortunately for
us, the man they captured was a professional boxer known as “Rufus, The Martian
Strongboy”. After a lengthy examination, in the course of which they received
several bloody noses and had all of their eyes blackened, they determined that
the Earth should fight somebody else. Martians were dynamite.

After having taken considerably more losses in the air than we
expected, we finally managed to get our troops onto the ground for the land
battle. After all, you can’t surrender to a flying saucer. You have to
surrender to the space monster that slithers out of it.

I put down my saucer a few miles outside of Central City. We
slithered out and immediately ran into some teenagers who were necking in a
convertible. The girls were horrified by our appearance and screamed so much we
had to drag them into our saucer to get them to shut-up.

My men liked the way they could make teenage Earth girls
scream.

“
Let’s make more girls scream,” said one of them.

“
Aye aye, Private,” said another.

“
Belay that order,” I said sternly. “We’ve got work to do.”

We formed into columns and struck out for the city. We met
little resistance at first; a few small Earth scouting parties, a suspicious
farmer who we finally managed to kill, and a few more teenage girls. So before
long we could claim a string of unimportant, but important, victories.

The main reason for these victories was my battle strategy, or
lack of same, which I’ve already described to you (The Burly Maneuver). I kept
my men going straight for our objective, ignoring the roads and bridges,
climbing trees we easily could have walked around, and so on. This is
unorthodox, because it is a bad idea, and it confuses the enemy, who were
expecting to be fighting something that made sense. Think again, Earthman.

Since the Earthmen knew they were fighting aliens from another
planet, they tried various experimental methods to defeat us. They tried
different sound frequencies on me but none of them worked. I like sound
frequencies. Nonetheless, I discouraged that sort of thing as much as I could.
You never know - the next crackpot idea might work. “Form a protective cordon
around me men,” I told my boys. “We can’t afford to lose me. I’m getting paid
the most.”

As we got closer to the city, we ran up against fewer
suspicious farmers and more trained troops. During these battles I kept
coughing on the enemy by mistake as I was fighting with them. That Martian Flu
just wouldn’t go away.

“
Sorry,” I said as I coughed repeatedly in an attacker’s face.
“Sorry. Sorry.”

“
Cough the other way when you’re fighting can’t you?”

“
I’ll try.”

But in the heat of the battle, I often forgot to cough the
other way.

The more I fought and coughed, the more the enemy troops
started to cough.

The battles had all gone our way at first, but in the long run
being unorthodox is no match for knowing what you’re doing, so soon my various
battle groups began losing. The enemy would hide behind a tree, for example,
then wait for my men to start climbing it. Then they would set fire to that
tree.

My subordinates were afraid to tell me when things started to
go wrong. They started bringing in overly optimistic battle reports.

“
How’d that battle go, Lieutenant?”

“
Great!”

“
Is there something wrong with your leg?”

“
No, it’s great.”

“
Because it looks like it’s bleeding.”

“…
it’s great.”

Well, warfare shouldn’t be all work. It’s bad for morale. Since
we were winning so handily, according to the glowing reports I had been
getting, I decided to show my men I was a regular guy just like them, not the
battle hardened thinking machine I appeared to be.

“
Since everything’s going so great, Lieutenant, order the men to
put down all their weapons in a big pile and have a party.”

“
Uh…” He hesitated.

I became impatient. “Now, Lieutenant.”

“
Yes sir.”

Before the party could really get going, while the first record
was still playing in fact, we were attacked again. This time in force. We
quickly found ourselves pinned down and being fired upon from all sides.

I began firing off commands: “Third Battle Group – stop
dancing!... Burly’s Rangers – turn off that music!... All units – find your
weapons!”

My men began sorting through the pile of weapons for theirs.
Meanwhile, more Earth columns began arriving and joining in on what was turning
out to be a turkey shoot.

The commander of the Earth forces didn’t enjoy shooting down
people who were wearing party hats. It didn’t seem right to him somehow. He
ordered his troops to stop firing, then demanded our surrender.

Since our situation was obviously hopeless at this point, my
men began unhappily putting down their glasses of punch and surrendering. I
couldn’t believe it. My boys had let me down. Then I found myself surrendering
too. I couldn’t believe that either.

But we still had an ace up our sleeve. An ace we didn’t even
know about.

As we were being marched to Area 51 to be secretly imprisoned,
our captors suddenly started feeling sick. It was the Martian Flu and it was
spreading quickly through the ranks. Fortunately, my men weren’t affected. All
Martians are vaccinated against the Martian Flu at birth. Occasionally, one
child is passed over, as must have happened in my case, but most Martians never
get the unpleasant disease.

As the stricken Earthmen started doubling over, they sent off
coughing messengers to alert other Earth battalions of this new danger.

Soon we weren’t being marched anywhere anymore. Our captors
were lying on their backs, throwing up on their equipment, and hollering for
thermometers.

Delighted, my men confiscated all of the enemy’s weapons and we
began marching them in to the city.

When we got there, we found that everyone in Central City had
also come down with what was beginning to be known as the Burly Flu. They were
quick to surrender when we promised them hot water bottles and something warm
to put over their shoulders.

The Burly Flu was spreading rapidly around the world. Nothing
could be done to stop it or even slow it down. Medical science knew nothing
about it. It didn’t seem to be a virus or any kind of bacteria they had ever
seen. They didn’t even know where to start. Great professors from the worlds of
physics, biology and astronomy were called in to try to find the key to this
baffling alien disease, but they couldn’t figure it out either. And pretty soon
people stopped calling them “Professor” and started calling them “Dimwit” or
“Jerkoff”.

Meanwhile, the Martian Army marched on, taking city after city,
usually without firing a shot. All they usually had to do was give the opposing
army some Kleenex and a nice place to lie down and the battle was over.

When it looked like America was about to surrender, I was there
to spot the phony and say: “That’s not the real President!” It turned out it
was the real President. I had forgotten about the last couple of elections. The
guy I was thinking of wasn’t even alive anymore. I guess I should read the
papers more.

So the Martians had won. And it was the smallest thing the
Martian God Zog had created – germs - that was the undoing of the Earthmen.

The great Martian victory celebration began. There were
handshakes and slaps on the back all around, congratulatory phone calls from
dignitaries back home, and parades of marching troops and flower-covered flying
saucers down the Main Street of every important city. I rode in the vanguard of
as many parades as I could.

The only one not joining in the merriment was Arthur Gremlin. I
slapped him on the back to get him into the party spirit, but he just hissed,
rubbed his back, and said he had phone calls to make. I didn’t mind, really.
Even though we were both on the same team, and great buddies officially, the
guy gave me the creeps.

At the end of that exciting first week of the Martian
Occupation, a special ceremony was held to honor me. I was congratulated for my
brilliant military victory and was made a Triple Double General, which on Mars
is the equivalent of an Octuple Movie Star. I was now 4
^th
in line to be King
of Mars.

“
Well, that worked out pretty well,” I said to the press. “I
guess all’s well that ends well. Assuming this is the end, of course.”

The Martians quickly turned the Earth into one big manufacturing
and slave colony. Soon it was the number one exporter of feeler covers, cheap
trinkets, grasshopper food, and green paint in the Solar System.

All Earthmen had to work in Martian sweatshops, in slave-like
conditions. There was no longer any free will. No one had even a shred of human
dignity. All Earthmen had to jump when the Martians said jump. The Martians
quite enjoyed this and used the word “jump” in their sentences a lot when there
were Earthmen within hearing.