How I Conquered Your Planet by John Swartzwelder

of the head?”
    “ Oh, is that the back of your head?”
    “ Yes.”
    “ Sorry. Is this the front? Gosh you’re beautiful.”
    Our relationship was getting off to a rocky start this time
around, but I was confident we would be great pals again soon.
    The kids didn’t take to me right away either. I guess I’d been
away too long.
    “ You’re not my father!” said the shorter of my two boys, the one
who looked most like an alligator.
    “ Well I wouldn’t have thought so either,” I said, patting what I
hoped to God was his head. “I’m just going by what the cops said.”
    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