How I Conquered Your Planet (7 page)

I took a look around the house. It seemed like a perfectly
normal modest suburban home. The perfect thing for a perfectly normal modest
suburban Martian like myself. The only thing ostentatious about it was the
presence of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of surveillance equipment
and bugging devices all around the house, all pointed at me.

I repositioned a couple of them so whoever was watching me
could see me better. No point in spending good money on machines like that if
you don’t use them.

Now that I knew that I was a Martian, I felt I should dress the
part. No one had laughed at my clothes yet, at least not to my face, but when I
looked in the mirror, something in the back of my mind told me I didn’t look
like a Martian. That had to be remedied before I did anything else. I couldn’t
find any Martian clothes in any of the regular Martian clothing shops for some
reason, so I finally had to get the bulk of my wardrobe from a costume shop.
Bubble helmet, ray gun, spacesuit, etc. Everyone looked at me when I walked
down the street in them so I knew I was dressed right. But my wife and kids
were horrified, and insisted I go back to my regular clothes. Women! Kids!

The next morning I went back to work at my old job. I’d been
away so long I had kind of forgotten what I was supposed to do. They reminded me
that my position was “Earth Monitor”. It sounded like an important job. And an
easy one too. Because the Earth wasn’t likely to move around much. I went to
work with great enthusiasm. I like easy jobs. I’m good at those.

After I’d been monitoring for awhile, my supervisor came in and
reminded me to concentrate my monitoring on military installations, rocket
bases and nuclear testing sites. He said I could watch ball games anytime, and
shouldn’t be using expensive equipment for things like that. I was glad to be
corrected.

Over the next few months I did my best to get used to living
150 million miles away. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that hard.

Living on Mars isn’t that much different from living on Earth.
Their cars have bigger fins than ours do. And their music is a little weird. No
matter what song is on, it always sounds like something is about to happen. And
most places on Mars it’s kind of hard to breath the air. (Something about
“oxygen”. There’s no “oxygen” or something.) But the main difference, I guess,
is the people you meet. They’re Martians.

Martians look a lot like us, though they are slightly smaller
and have somewhat insectoid features. They’re sensitive about this, so you
should be careful not to point it out, like I did when I snapped my fingers and
said to my wife: “Now I know where I’ve seen your face before! On a
grasshopper!” I was in the dog house for a week for that one.

The most noticeable difference between Martians and Earthmen is
in the brain department. It isn’t that Martians are smarter than Earthmen,
(they’re smarter than me, of course. Being 150 million miles farther away
didn’t make me any smarter than I was before. I mean, how could it?) but they
do have mental abilities Earthmen don’t possess. They can create illusions –
make you think you are a barnyard animal for instance. And they can control
your mind with theirs and make you do all kinds of crazy things. Like pick a
card.

Practically everyone I met could easily take over my mind. Then
they would use my great strength for their own purposes, like carrying sacks of
things for them or giving their enemies a good sock in the “nose”.

Sometimes two Martians would grab hold of my mind at the same
time and jerk me backwards and forwards, towards one or the other, with my
fists balled up in fury, with the stronger mind eventually winning, and the
weaker mind getting a deserved pounding. If the Martians were pretty equally
matched I often ended up spinning around in the center of the battleground,
beating myself to pieces.

I asked them how they did their tricks. Was it Mars’ yellow
sun? They said no, it was mostly just getting people to look somewhere else.

Maybe it was because of the differences in our mental
abilities, or maybe it was because I hadn’t taken a shower all year, but I didn’t
make many friends on Mars. I tried to hang around with my old brainwashing
buddies, but they had new friends now and didn’t have time for me. I understood
that. Life moves on. It was nothing to cry about. So after awhile I stopped
crying.

My family life wasn’t going too well either. I tried to be a
good father, but I guess I wasn’t too successful at it. I tried to teach my
kids, Skrank and Scrudge, baseball and they bit me. I tried to teach them to
respect their flag and country and they bit me again. I tried to hide behind a
building under some tarps, and they found me and bit me. Where do kids pick up
this stuff? In school? Maybe it’s the schooling. I’m going to blame that.

My job as Earth monitor hadn’t turned out to be as exciting as
I thought it would be. Nothing much ever happened down there except ball games,
and I wasn’t allowed to watch those. I never saw any unusual troop movements or
bomb tests or anything. There was the odd rocket launch, but it usually was
just a global positioning satellite or something. Occasionally probes from
Earth landed in one of our parks and roamed around until they flipped over and
burned. Nobody paid much attention to them because there was no way to get them
to look at you. Something about their programming I guess. Then one day I saw
something through my monitoring equipment that was very unusual. And very
important, I felt. I called my supervisor over.

“
They’re dismantling all their nuclear weapons! They’re turning
them into… it looks like… Love Beads!”

“
Turning their nuclear weapons into Love Beads! Are you sure
about this?”

“
As sure as I’ve ever been about anything,” I replied
truthfully. “And John Astin is involved somehow.”

“
Good work, Burly.”

“
Thank you very much, Mr. Xplycx.”

He rushed off to contact his superiors. I adjusted the eyepiece
on my telescope and went back to my monitoring of what I later realized must
have been a very bad drive-in movie. So I guess I’m at least partially
responsible for what happened next.

Later that day, as I was driving home, I heard over the radio
that April 30
^th
– that was just a few months from now – would be “Earth Day”.

Everyone in my neighborhood was very excited that Earth Day was
coming at last. I’d never heard of it myself, but I was sure it would be
DoublePlusGreat.

My first thought was that Earth Day must be some kind of
festival where everyone dresses up in costumes and pretends to be an Earthman.
But I soon realized that I was wrong, unless everyone was planning on going to
the party as a soldier. Just about everyone in town was out in the streets
doing military style drilling, and practicing shooting strange looking guns at
people who resembled me more than it did them. This made me a little nervous.
Even though I was born right here in good old Mars City, I knew I wasn’t built
like a standard Martian. I was aware of my Earthy good looks. I hoped no one
with poor eyesight and a gun would mistake me for an Earthman.

But I still didn’t make the connection between shooting people
who looked like Earthmen and “Earth Day”. Then I found out that Earth Day was
the day the attack on the Earth was to begin.

I was stunned. Attack the Earth? Of course I’d never been
there, but it seemed like a decent enough place. What had they ever done to us?
The Martian propaganda machine was ready with an answer to that question.

Posters immediately started appearing all over town that showed
Earthmen thumbing their big noses at our beliefs, crapping noisily on our
culture, and laughing when our women tripped over things. Radio programs dramatized
these outrages and made them seem even worse now that we could actually hear
all the crapping and laughing.

As I listened to all the Martian propaganda I got madder and
madder. Those lousy Earthmen, I thought. Where do they get off treating us good
old Martians like that? I went downtown and enlisted.

When I entered the induction center it was packed. It seemed
like everybody wanted to personally teach those paper-hanging sons of bitches
on Earth a lesson.

As I stood in line I saw some of the young Martians I had grown
up with and waved to them, calling them by their boyhood nicknames.

“
Hey Snapper! Remember all that time we spent together as kids?
All the crazy things we did?”

“
No.”

“
Neither do I. And yet those events happened. Remember our many
mutual acquaintances?”

“
No.”

“
Nope, me neither. Great times. Well, goodbye.”

When I got to the front of the line, they had me fill out a lot
of papers. It was easy to remember all my personal information and family
history, because I’d just had all of that beaten into me by experts.

I passed the physical, but it took awhile. A lot of time was
spent with the doctors yelling “Hey! Look at this!” They kept lowering big
cameras down my throat to take pictures of what they found down there.
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so interesting.

Before I was sworn in I had to swear obedience to the
All-Powerful, Pretty-Much-All-Knowing, He’s-Practically-Everywhere Martian God
Zog.

“
Uh… this is the first I’ve heard of this god,” I said.

“
Swear allegiance to him.”

“
Well… all right.” I did so, hoping this wouldn’t get me in
trouble in any additional life I might be entitled to later. (It hasn’t so
far.)

I was issued a stylish grasshopper-green uniform and entered
the army officially as Private F. Burly 0775321. Which is ironic in a way
because that’s the same number I was assigned in the Death House later on. But
I’ve got to remember not to get ahead of my story. That’s bad storytelling. It
tips off the reader about what is coming. So just forget what I just said about
the Death House, and my lucky escape in the garbage truck.

Along with the other new recruits, I was loaded onto a green
troop bus and transported to nearby Ray Walston Army Training Base for boot
camp.

The war spirit on the bus was high. Everyone was bragging about
all the heroic things they were planning on doing in the war (no one was
planning on being a coward or screwing up, I noticed), telling each other which
Earth celebrities they were going to blow away (they all had Orson Welles on
their list), and having light-hearted gun battles with soldiers on other troop
busses. There was a definite lack of discipline on that bus. I frowned a little
at that. No one dislikes going to war, but soldiers shouldn’t be too happy.
It’s bad for morale.

When we reached the camp we were assigned to our barracks. To
my dismay, my platoon seemed to have gotten the real oddball recruits – the
stupid, the lazy, the untrainable, the party boys, the clumsy. I complained to
the senior officers about being thrown in with a bunch of 8-balls. Obviously a
mistake had been made on the army’s part. Let’s get this situation sorted out
and try to be more on the ball next time, I told them. They said no mistake had
been made. I was placed in the right platoon. Boy that made me stop and think.
That took the starch out of me. Apparently I was an 8-ball too.

I certainly seemed like an 8-ball once we had started our basic
training. All the other recruits could run for miles and hop over obstacles
like grasshoppers. I couldn’t even get over the first obstacle. I still haven’t
gotten over it. It worried me that I wasn’t making a better showing. I knew I
wasn’t built like most Martians, but I was a Martian, gosh darnit, so I should
be able to do these things.

My frustration was compounded by the lackadaisical way the
other men in the platoon went about their training. They didn’t seem to be
taking army life seriously at all. They wore their own custom-made outfits,
spurning the “uniform look” preferred by the army. Some were dressed better
than the Generals. And they used their mental powers to get out of a lot of
their training. They’d make the drill sergeant think they were out on the drill
field doing pushups, when actually they were still back in the barracks, doing
pushups in their bunks. This sort of unmilitary behavior drove the officers
crazy, but there were too many goof-offs to deal with. So they basically did
nothing.

The goofing off offended me even more than it did the officers.
Partly because I was programmed to be very patriotic now, but mostly because I
didn’t have the kind of imagination required to goof off like the others were
doing. I had the sort of standard issue imagination; the kind that allows you
to tie your shoes or eat meat. It was my feeling that if I had to do it, they had
to do it.

When I realized that the officers weren’t going to do anything
to stop the goofing off, I did something myself. I started cuffing the recruits
around when they slacked off and told them to get going and make me and Mars
proud of them or else. Frightened by my bulk, my bad grammar and my psychotic
attitude, they obeyed. The ones who didn’t, got it good. I kicked one guy in
the ass so hard part of his face fell off. That scared everybody. Me too (the
guy’s face fell off!), but I didn’t show it.