How I Conquered Your Planet Read online

  How I Conquered Your Planet

  Frank Burly 2

  John Swartzwelder

  CHAPTER ONE

  First of all, it’s not true that I led the Martian attack on Earth. I was in Battle Cruiser Number Four. So let’s get that straight. I don’t know how these things get started. Secondly, I can explain.

  It all began innocently enough about a year and a half ago. I was chasing a criminal through the streets of Central City, honking at him to give himself up. I had spotted him breaking into the National Guard Armory and had taken off after him. He was on foot. I was driving a city bus.

  It’s pretty tough trying to run down a criminal at night, but it’s even tougher when all of your passengers are screaming so loud you can’t hear yourself think.

  “Hey, stop all that praying back there!” I told them. “Can’t you see I’m trying to drive? You! Sit down and quit trying to squirm through that window.”

  “I’ve got to get out!” He wailed frantically. “I’ve got to get out!”

  “Sit down when the bus is in motion,” I told him, pointing to the sign that said that. He reluctantly sat down. I frowned at him. “You better learn how to ride a bus, buddy.”

  I finally cornered the criminal, and about forty innocent bystanders, in the lobby of the Midtown Hotel. I was trying to decide whether to get out and handcuff him or just run over him with the bus, when he suddenly rolled up into a ball and disappeared in a puff of confetti. I hadn’t expected that. He had fooled me. I picked up the biggest piece of confetti, which had his mocking smile on it, and put it in my pocket. I figured if there was a reward for this guy, maybe I could get part of it. His smile had to be worth something.

  I turned the bus around in the lobby as best I could, gave the hotel people a false bus company name, told my passengers to quit throwing up or I would give them something to throw up about, and headed back out onto the street to continue my route.

  I probably shouldn’t have taken the time to go after that criminal. I had a schedule to keep. But I needed any extra money I could get. And I figured 9:40 pm is pretty much the same as 5:05 pm. It isn’t, I guess, but what the hell is everybody yelling about? That’s what I wanted to know.

  What you probably want to know is: why is Frank Burly, the famous detective you’ve heard so much about, driving a city bus? The reason is, I had to take a second job to bring in some extra money, because my detective business hadn’t been doing so well lately. After four years of serving the detective-hiring public, the detective-hiring public had caught on to me to a certain extent. Maybe Lincoln could fool everybody all the time, but I couldn’t.

  Unfortunately, my bus driving job hadn’t been going too well either. Hey, can’t I do anything right?

  Once I got the bus out of the lobby and back on the road, all my passengers started criticizing the way I had been driving. Everybody’s an expert. The kids in the back gave me the worst time. There’s something about being in the back that brings out the worst in people. They were really making fun of me, and getting some pretty good laughs at my expense.

  I hollered over my shoulder, with growing anger, that if they didn’t quit being so funny at my expense, if they didn’t start making their humor more generic, I was going to pull over to the side of the road, make everybody walk home, call everybody’s parents, blow the damn bus up, and set fire to the world.

  This chilly prospect didn’t bother the kids, who thought it was a lot more interesting evening than they had planned, but it greatly alarmed some of the older passengers, who started trying to get off the bus again, even though we were going over 50 mph. I had to tilt the bus up on its side wheels to get them to slide back more or less into their seats. Then I had to deal with all the fake injuries, and spend ten or fifteen minutes saying soothing things like “snap out of it” and “you’re not hurt” and “please, God, don’t let him die” until everybody on the bus had calmed down again. These are the kinds of things bus drivers have to deal with.

  Things quieted down after that, and nothing much more happened, except for a few wrecks, until I pulled into the last – and strangest - stop on my route; that new bus stop out by the crop circles. It hadn’t been there a couple of weeks before, and there was this weird green glow around it all the time. But it was a bus stop and I was a bus, so I stopped. No one ever got off at this stop but there was always a small group of passengers waiting to board there, all asking to be taken to “nearest Earth city”. “That would be Central City,” I would tell them.

  They all paid their fares with what looked like crops at first, but after they had handed them to me I could see they were dollar bills. After we got going again I would notice that the fare box was all gummed up with crops now, but by then I couldn’t remember whose fare was whose, so I had to just forget it and turn the crops in with the other money. Let the bookkeeping guys at the depot figure it out. They’re paid to do it. I’ve got a bus to drive.

  On this particular night, one of the passengers waiting at the Crop Circle Stop had forgotten to bring his fare and was taking a lot of ribbing from his friends about it. Mounting the steps into the bus he said “Hubbit hubbit hah!” and pulled a dollar out of my ass and paid his fare with that. For the rest of the trip I had to yell at the passengers to leave my rear end alone. There wasn’t any more money in there. And if there was, it was mine.

  Back at the depot, after my shift was over, I found that the guys had filled my locker with paste again and were behind a pile of boxes laughing as I tried to open the door, then quickly tried to close it again. They loved their little practical jokes, damn them. So I was in an extra bad mood when Mr. Thorson called me into his office.

  I entered Mr. Thorson’s office with my pants filled with paste and my hat smoking from another joke.

  “How’d the shift go tonight, Burly?”

  “Fine, Mr. Thorson.”

  “How many accidents this time?”

  “Four.”

  “Better. But not good enough.”

  “Huh?”

  He started chewing me out, reminding me of all the things I had done wrong since I joined the firm. The fiery crashes, the speeding tickets, those missing busses I couldn’t account for. All the usual stuff.

  I nodded off during part of this recitation, which didn’t improve his humor.

  “Are you asleep, Burly?”

  He had to ask this several times before I answered.

  “No, of course not,” I said sleepily, rubbing my eyes and yawning. “What kind of an employee do you think I am?”

  “That is precisely what we are discussing.”

  “Good. It’s about time.”

  “And now there’s this ‘money’ you’ve been collecting for fares. Money that is nothing more than garbage.” He held up a money bag with a dollar sign on it and ears of corn sticking out of it. “Explain this, Burly.”

  “Well sir, I have a theory about that.”

  “I’d like to hear it.”

  “Yes sir. First of all, I think we’re going about this in the wrong way blaming me for it. I think we can rule me out right from the start. It’s those guys out at that new bus stop by the crop circles. The passengers who get on there. They’re to blame.”

  At this, Mr. Thorson’s chief accountant, a small gremlin-like man, whose name, appropriately enough, was Arthur Gremlin, looked up from his work and stared at me. Gremlin had been the driving force behind putting in the new bus stop out by the crop circles. At first the company had felt it was a waste of good bus stop sign material, but Gremlin had been proven right by the constant flow of passengers who boarded busses there. He was immediately given a raise, and, to show that bus companies can be as progressive and f
orward thinking as the next form of transportation, stops were put in in all the cornfields in the state. The Crop Circle Stop was Arthur Gremlin’s baby, so when he went back to his work he kept one eye and both ears on the conversation that was going on.

  “How are our passengers to blame?” asked Mr. Thorson.

  “The people who get on the bus at that stop are magicians or wizards or something, Mr. Thorson,” I said. “They can turn corn into money. At least for awhile. And that’s not all that’s weird about them. They also have feelers.”

  “Feelers!”

  “Yes sir. Mr. Thorson. Alien feelers. Under their hats. Which brings me to my theory. I think the Earth is being invaded by Magicians From The Moon. They’re invading us and riding our busses.”

  “The Moon!”

  “Or maybe the Van Allen Radiation Belts. I’m not completely sure what part of space they’re from at this point. Check back with me later on that.”

  He looked at me like I was nuts. “I’m looking at you like you’re nuts”, he said.

  Arthur Gremlin was looking at me funny too. I looked back at him even funnier, and that stopped that. I guess we know who can look the funniest now. He looked away.

  Now that I’d come out with my theory, actually put it into so many words, I was starting to wonder if there was anything to it. It made sense to me, I was willing to stake my reputation, if any, on it, but I was well aware that throughout the course of my life I’d almost never been right about anything. You’ve got to take stats like that into account. You can’t ignore inside information like that. So suddenly I wasn’t so sure of myself.

  Mr. Thorson was looking at me with that mixture of contempt and pity I know so well. “I understand making mistakes on the job and trying to cover them up, Burly. I’m not always perfect at my job either…”

  “You can say that again!” I agreed enthusiastically. It always pays to butter up the boss. “Of all the bumbling, half-witted…”

  “But there’s one part of my job I am good at. And that’s firing people. You’re fired!” he said powerfully.

  For a moment I was too stunned to speak. Then I started going to sleep again. Then I got mad. “Hey, if I’d known you were going to fire me I wouldn’t have stood here and let you chew me out like this. I would have shown more backbone.”

  “Yes, well, you didn’t. So get out!”

  “Yes, Mr. Thorson. Wait a minute, I mean, screw you, Mr. Thorson.”

  I went down to payroll to collect my final paycheck. They gave me a plastic bag full of garbage. They said it was my share of what I’d been bringing in for the company. Was it all there? I looked at the ears of corn and thumbed through some of them.

  “Yeah, I guess it’s all here.”

  I cleaned out my locker, at least as much as I was going to clean it – screw ‘em, screw everybody around here – then I said goodbye to my bus company friends.

  “What’s your name again? Eugene? Goodbye forever, Eugene. I will miss you horribly. The time we had together… hey, come back when I’m talking to you.”

  I waved to the others as I walked through the depot for the last time. “See ya Stretch, Curly, Pimple Face, Cross-Eye, Dribble-Mouth.”

  I went out, pausing at the door to take one last look at the old place. Not to fix it in my memory, just to see if I could erase it completely from my mind. As I was looking at it, I saw my giggling “friends” peeking out from behind a half-closed door and realized I was about to be the victim of one last practical joke. Sure enough, when I got to the parking lot, I saw that they had blown up my car.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Frank Burly Investigations. No, Mr. Burly isn’t here right now. Probably sleeping it off somewhere... uh huh… but you don’t want him anyway. He’s a lousy detective… no, worse than them… I know it doesn’t seem possible, but…. Hey, listen mister, I used to work for the Three Stooges, and I’m telling you this guy is worse… You want my advice? Hire a good detective. The good ones don’t cost any more.” She hung up the phone and looked at me.

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid you won’t do.”

  I had been auditioning new secretaries. This one, I felt, was too honest. She disagreed.

  “My mother taught me that honesty was the best policy.”

  “Your mother’s fired too.”

  I really couldn’t afford a secretary anyway. As I mentioned before, my money situation wasn’t all that great. And now that I’d lost my second income, things were even worse. I’d originally thought this was going to be a real bang-up year, so I had spent a lot of money upgrading the office and installing a Disneyland style line to slowly wind clients up to my desk. That cost me over eight thousand dollars because I had the guys from Disney put it in for me. If you’re going to do something, I figured at the time, you should do it right. I’ve since realized if you’re going to do something, you should do it as half-assed as you can. It’s cheaper, faster, easier, and nobody in this world or the next can tell the difference. Nobody can. Check it out.

  All my normal day to day expenses were going up too. The price of a private investigator’s license had suddenly jumped up by 50% to help pay for some stupid school children’s lunches. The government thought a bunch of little kids’ lunches were more important than my lunch. That’s bureaucratic thinking for you. I could write a book about bureaucratic thinking. Or maybe a play would be better. It might make a better play.

  Even my rent had gone up during the year. My landlord couldn’t justify the increase by pointing to the inflation rate, which was quite low at the time, so he just said that my office had gotten $50 better, it was $50 closer to the ocean or something. I told him that $50 was a lot of money. I pointed out that, for example, I could have him killed for $50. He said he could have me killed for $50 too. By the same guy. We stared at each other for awhile, fingering our wallets, then I decided to pay the additional rent.

  The only thing that wasn’t going up was the daily rate I charged my clients. I couldn’t raise that because it was felt by everybody that I was already charging more than I was worth. Can’t argue with everybody, I guess. Everybody can’t be wrong.

  The problem was I wasn’t very good at things. Everybody knows somebody like that. And I was the guy I knew. I wasn’t very dependable either. And I guess I didn’t smell too good most of the time. I didn’t have much going for me, to be honest.

  Sometimes I wished there were an easier planet to live on because this one was so hard for me. I realized there was no place like home. I mean, there couldn’t be two places this bad. But that didn’t make me like it any better.

  During the year I had tried all kinds of creative ways to increase my business. I offered volume discounts to victims of more than one crime, and began accepting Crime Stamps.

  My radio campaign didn’t generate much business, though I never saw what was wrong with it. The commercial went like this:

  ME: (HIGH VOICE) “What’s the matter, Edna?”

  ME: (MIDDLE VOICE) “My detective isn’t solving my cases lately.”

  ME: (HIGH VOICE) “Sounds like you need to hire Frank Burly.”

  ME (MIDDLE VOICE) “That’s what I was thinking.”

  It had the right message. Maybe the “boinnnngggg!” sounds I put in after each couple of words hurt the tone.

  I tried holding a “One Second Sale”. If you had your first crime solved* in the regular amount of time, you got your second crime solved* in one second.

  The Frank Burly Double Your Money Back Detective School didn’t work out. Most of the people who signed up for it weren’t serious about learning about detecting. They were just in it for the Double Your Money Back. They got their money, all right. If that’s all they cared about, fine. But I gave each of them a failing grade.

  When I couldn’t bring any more cash in, I tried to lower the amount going out. I switched to smaller caliber bullets, started making my own clothes, and finding my own gas. And I tried to find a secretary who would answer the phone f
or tips.

  The applicants who showed up weren’t acceptable. Either they were too honest, too clumsy (I’ve still got a telephone receiver in my back somewhere), or they didn’t understand how a phone worked and would just sit there and listen to it ring until we both started to die.

  On this particular day, there were about a dozen applicants for the job waiting in my waiting room, but I didn’t hold out much hope for them. Still, I had to find somebody. I was thinking it might be a good time to lower my standards. I spent a few minutes with a pencil and a piece of paper figuring out how low my standards could go. I decided I would now accept minorities, cripples and the criminally insane. One-eyed men were back in the running, as well as people without voice boxes. I reduced the minimum number of arms, legs and teeth I would accept. And I decided they no longer had to speak English. They could communicate with me in the language of their choice. I figured with low standards like that, just about everybody would be able to work for me.

  I flipped the switch on my solid gold intercom (another expense!) and called in the next applicant. But that person turned out to be gone. So were the next three applicants. In fact, everyone in my waiting room was gone except for one small gremliny-looking man, who I instantly recognized as Arthur Gremlin, the bookkeeper for Mr. Thorson, down at the bus company. I said it was a small world and he said he thought so too.

  “Small. And weak.”

  I asked what he was doing here and he said he had quit the bus company when he heard about the great job I was offering. I admitted the job wasn’t that great – my full page ads in the newspaper had exaggerated the benefits a little bit. For example there would be no chance for advancement. My company only had two jobs. He could never work his way up from his job to my job. He said that was all right. He would be satisfied to remain a secretary.

  I asked where the other applicants had gone, the ones who had been here ahead of him, and would have probably gotten the job before he did, and he said the answer to that was simple. There were no other applicants, and never had been. They simply never existed.