Earth vs. Everybody by John Swartzwelder

making what I
thought were outer space sounds (“Space! Space! Mweeeeeee!”), but nobody was
buying it.
    Every night I
came home from work with emptier pockets. Every day my business was farther in
the red. I started to think maybe I was too old to be a detective now. That’s
the way it works, you know. When you’re first starting out in life, everybody
says you’re too young. Then they start saying you’re too old. There’s only
about five minutes there in the middle where you’re just right. Just my luck, I
was in the can at the time.
    I wasn’t the only
one in Central City with troubles right then, thank heavens (misery loves
company). The Mayor and the City Council had suddenly discovered that just when
Central City was finally getting some publicity and had become the center of
intergalactic attention for a change, it wasn’t looking its best. The garbage
wasn’t being picked up. The trains weren’t running on time. No city services
were being carried out. And nobody seemed to know why.
    “Why isn’t
anybody picking up the garbage?” asked the Mayor. “We’ve got 92,000 people on
the city payroll. Whose job is it? Because it’s not mine. I’m the Mayor.”
    “And I’m the
police man,” said a policeman. “So it can’t be my job either.”
    “Maybe we should
ask the public who’s been picking up their garbage,” suggested a councilman.
    The Mayor shook
his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Fred. It might give them the idea
that we haven’t been doing it.”
    “Hey, yeah, it
might at that.”
    “The public isn’t
as stupid as it looks, Fred. I’ve told you that before.”
    “Yeah, I guess in
all the excitement I forgot.”
    Since garbage was
piling up everywhere, and nobody seemed to know whose job it was to clean it
up, the city decided, as a stopgap solution, to put up false walls along all
the roads throughout the city—they got the idea from a guy named Potemkin—so
visitors would only see what was best about Central City, like its beautiful
walls, and not what was bad about it, like what was behind those walls. Of
course you could still smell the garbage back there, even if you couldn’t see
it, but that was solved with another stopgap measure: the Great Perfume Flood
of 2009, which killed 2007 people.
    Another new
addition to the streets during this exciting time was me. I had given up trying
to get my business going and was out on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse
trying to pick up some extra money begging. There were so many tourists around
town now, with so much money burning holes in their pockets, I figured maybe I
could get some just by asking for it.
    I wasn’t a very
good bum at first. It takes time to learn any new trade. But I did the best I
could, like I always do. Always remember that, kids. In this world you’ve got
to work hard to be all that you can be, and then pretend to be the rest. Or,
you can just go straight to the pretending part. Either way. I don’t really
care what you do, to be honest. Don’t even know you. Do what you want.
    I picked out a
good spot in the gutter, mussed up my hair, and tried to look needy. Everyone
started making wider circles around me than they had been making before. I
checked myself out in a mirror. I looked too needy. I looked like I was so
needy I was about to kill somebody. I combed my hair back the way it had been
before. Then I sat down on the cement and held up a sign that said “Bum”. I
also had a sign that said “Bum Back In 5 Minutes”, which I used if I wanted to
get something to eat or go to the can or something, and a “Last Bum For 35
Miles” sign, which wasn’t quite accurate, but it had a compelling message.
    After awhile my
first customer showed up—an elderly gentleman with a suspicious face. He
stopped and looked down at me doubtfully. I rattled my tin cup and asked him
for ten cents for a cup of coffee.
    He frowned. “A
cup of coffee costs fifty cents.”
    I frowned. “Next
you’ll