How I Conquered Your Planet by John Swartzwelder Page A

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