How I Conquered Your Planet (15 page)

“
You couldn’t pronounce it.”

“
Let’s hear you pronounce it.”

“
Johnson.”

“
John-man,” I repeated carefully.

I thought about everything the Gremlin had told me.

“
Say,” I said, unhappily. “I’ve got to stop you.”

“
Too late. Far too late.” He resumed pulling the trigger.

I looked for something to throw at the Gremlin, but there
wasn’t anything close enough for me to grab. So I grabbed the Gremlin and threw
him across the room. It was so sudden and uncharacteristic it took us both by
surprise. I remember we both yelled “Wow!” His gun skittered away from him, we
both dove for it, and that’s when our big super-hero fight started.

I had a size advantage, and I was physically much stronger than
Arthur Gremlin (or ‘John-man’), but he had the advantage mentally.

He used his mental powers to make me think he was a giant
monster, or a bomb that was about to explode, or that he was over there reading
in the corner instead of right here biting me in the arm. Fortunately, the
illusions didn’t last as long with me as they would have with anyone else. My
brain doesn’t retain false information any longer than it retains any other
kind of information. He kept thinking he had me now and would start looking for
his gun to finish me off. That’s when the illusion would fade and I’d be on him
again. He’d make me think I was a chicken, for example, but then I’d forget I
was a chicken, or I’d start thinking chickens were really tough. It was very
frustrating for him.

Finally I managed to neutralize the Gremlin’s powerful mind by
slamming a desk drawer on it about twenty times. I tied up his limp body and
started heading back out to re-join the others.

As I was locking the door I saw the Gremlin had regained
consciousness and had dragged himself over to a transmitter. He was frantically
tapping out a message to somebody.

I found out later that he was trying to get out the signal:
“Burly at large. Earth forces possible danger again. Abort attack.” But at the
time I didn’t know what he was signaling. I went back into the room and stood
next to him as he frantically tapped on the transmitter.

“
What’s that you’re signaling? Stop signaling for a minute. I
want to talk to you.” He tapped harder. I laughed. “Will you stop?”

Suddenly I realized he must be signaling for his Neptunian
friends to attack our planet and come to his rescue. I wasn’t going to let him
send messages like that.

I tore the signaling device out of the wall and whacked him
with it. He fell back and laid on the floor, hissing slightly like a tire going
flat. I found his gun, stuck it in my pocket, resisting his mind’s insistence
that I “fire it. FIRE IT!”, locked the door and went to find my Earth buddies.

They had long before finished with their sabotaging and were
out looking for me. They asked what had taken so long and I explained that I
had had to beat up an old friend. They looked at me, impressed. No wonder I did
so well in the Army.

I led them to the hangers where the flying saucers were kept.
The Earthmen shied back a little when they saw them. They are formidable
looking machines, especially up close. I told them to come aboard and I’d show
them how they worked.

I took them into my flagship, which I was most familiar with,
and which still had some of my stuff stored in the locker, and showed them how
to operate the controls. It’s not too difficult. If you can fly a B-2 Stealth
Bomber and drive a dog sled at the same time, I told them, you can fly a flying
saucer.

Once I’d given everybody a rudimentary knowledge of how the
machine operated, I gave them a few tips on what to watch out for. “This is the
lever that sends the engine back to the factory for servicing. Don’t pull that.
And this button sets fire to your finger. I don’t know if it was originally
supposed to do that, but that’s what it does now.”

At this point, alarms were starting to go off all over the
base, so I sent the others to their saucers, sat down at the controls of mine,
and we fired up our engines.

On the tarmac a Martian General watched us taxi down the runway
and smiled. “Wait!” he told his men. “They won’t be able to fly them.” The
troopers watched us until we had flown out of sight, then looked at their still
smiling General. “They’ll be back,” he said.

The Big Battle For The Earth was a bit of an anticlimax, I’m
afraid. I’m tempted to put in a bunch of exciting lies here, because I’m sure
they would translate into exciting book sales, and I’m probably going to Hell
anyway, but I just don’t have the imagination for it. The battle was completely
one-sided. A walkover. We had the saucers, they didn’t. We knew how to use the
Earth’s stockpile of weapons. They couldn’t even find the instruction manuals.

The battle was made even easier for us by the fact that many of
the Martians had become so decadent in the months they’d been here, being
waited on hand and foot, they had lost the use of their hands and feet, and in
a crisis could only wriggle around angrily.

The planet-wide Martian Defense System that I had personally
kicked slaves into finishing by my birthday had been put together so perfectly
that one well thrown brick could knock the whole thing out. And this brick had
been thrown.

Flying saucers in other cities were all either destroyed on the
ground or commandeered by Earthmen. Earth had control of the skies almost
immediately. After that it was mostly just cleanup. We strafed the Martians’
government buildings, leveled their movie star homes, and destroyed their
ludicrous “Escape Ladders”, which were too short to even reach the Moon, much
less Mars. In a surprisingly short amount of time, the Martians were ready to
surrender.

I took care of the last bit of armed resistance personally,
chasing the fleeing Martian cabinet halfway across Oklahoma, with the King Of
The Earth leaning out of the side window of his saucer, firing at me with his
ray gun, as he urged the Secretary of State to “step on it”. They eventually
lost me, but it didn’t really matter. The war was over.

I radioed “Mission Accomplished” and started heading back to
base. This is when I saw some new saucers of a strange design coming into our
atmosphere. I quickly got on the radio. “Nine hundred thousand bogies at twelve
o’clock,” I said.

There was no doubt of where these new saucers came from. They
were all marked “Neptune Royal Air Force” on the sides. While I was radioing
this information to base I didn’t watch where I was going and when I hung up
the radio set and looked out the window I saw that I was attacking the bogies.
I was right in the middle of all nine hundred thousand of them.

Panicking in a crisis is one of the things I’m famous for, and
that’s what I did here. I frantically started pushing every button on the
control panel, hoping one of them would make it so none of this had ever
happened. But if there was a button like that, I must have missed it. My chair
was adjusting itself all over the place and lights were going on and off all
over the ship, and I made more coffee than I could ever drink, but I was still
surrounded by enemy saucers. It was all still happening. I did, however, manage
to hit the rarely pushed “Destroy Own Saucer” button.

Fortunately, I had also pushed the “Eject And Ignite Occupants”
button. So I was already floating and burning down to Earth when the saucer
blew up, taking two thirds of the Neptunian fleet with it.

The rest of the invaders turned tail and ran. A few of our
fighter jets followed them a little ways into space, taunting them, then wished
they hadn’t done so.

The surviving bogies headed back to Neptune. Our people tapped
in on their radio communications and heard that they were radioing “Mission
Accomplished” as they flew off. So I guess everybody does that.

As the hero of the day, I was given the honor of accepting the
Martians’ surrender. Or most of the Martians, anyway. One enterprising Martian
negotiated a separate peace and came out of it with eighteen thousand dollars
and a piece of New Jersey, but he was the exception. I dictated the terms of
the surrender document, but I did such a bad job of it that the Earthmen ended
up being even bigger slaves than they were before. This whole agreement was
scrapped, I was told to stand slightly off to one side, away from the
microphone, and a new surrender deal was worked out. So I guess I’ll never make
a name for myself as a negotiator.

After the surrender was complete, I contacted The Council back
on Mars and told them it was all over. The Martians had been defeated.

“
Well, that’s good,” Frederick said. “because… what!? Wait a
minute, who is this?”

“
Triple Double General Frank Burly, Resigned.”

So that’s how it happened that I managed to conquer your planet
– not once, but twice. Once as a Martian and once as an Earthman. So I guess
I’m a pretty formidable guy no matter what planet I’m from.

Despite my success, I didn’t get a whole heck of a lot out of
it. The people of Earth presented me with a small citation that said simply
“Thanks”, with no mention of what I’d done or who I was. It fell off my wall
and got dinged up after a couple months so I went down to the dime store and bought
another one. It’s the thought that counts, cheap people say, and it was plain
they thought very little of me.

I was honored in a small way locally. Some of the neighborhood
kids wrote “Thank you” on a bag of shit and set fire to it on my doorstep. You’re
welcome, kids.

After their initial disappointment, the Martians ended up being
glad they lost the Earth as a slave labor planet. The six months worth of cheap
crap we manufactured for them set their planet back nearly ten years. Standards
fell. Quality became a thing of the past. A whole generation of Martians became
stupid. “We got out just in time,” was their viewpoint on the whole thing. So I
guess they won’t be trying to conquer us again anytime soon. Just as well, I
suppose.

Harvey got his job back, but I guess I didn’t tell you about
Harvey. Should have mentioned him earlier. Anyway, he’s all right now
financially. And that leg of his is healing up nice. So we can stop worrying
there.

A couple of weeks after the war ended, I found Arthur Gremlin sitting
alone in a coffee shop eating a cheese sandwich and a pickle and looking
pissed. Now that all the flying saucers were gone, he didn’t have a ride back
home. Not that a ride back home would have done him much good. There were
wanted posters out for him on both Neptune and Mars. Nobody on either planet
was very happy with how the war had turned out, and everybody blamed him.

I rehired him as my secretary. Despite his numerous faults,
he’s still the best secretary I ever had. Nobody answers the phone like he does
and he scares my creditors to death. So my secretary problem is solved.

The only problem I have now is that my Martian wife, Blanche,
blew into town last week, dragging our yowling kids behind her, and has been
looking all over for me saying “Where is that Earth bum?” I’ve managed to avoid
her so far, so maybe she’ll give up after awhile and go back home. Let’s hope
so, anyway. Except for that, things are pretty much the same around here. Which
is the story of my life, I guess.

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 © 2006

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, 2006

ISBN 13 (paperback edition) 978-0-9755799-4-7

ISBN 13 (hardback edition) 978-0-9755799-5-4

ISBN 10 (paperback edition) 0-9755799-4-0

ISBN 10 (hardback edition) 0-9755799-5-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006901140

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

HOW I CONQUERED YOUR PLANET

John Swartzwelder