How I Conquered Your Planet by John Swartzwelder Page B

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.
     

CHAPTER NINE
     
    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