Earth vs. Everybody (11 page)

The constant
demands to pull over and give myself up got tiresome after awhile. Finally I
turned the radio to a different station. Let’s get some music in here. That
wasn’t much better. It was police music. (Though I did quite like the “You’re
Breaking Your Mother’s Heart March”.)

The police were
right about one thing though—there didn’t seem to be any way this chase could
end up in my favor. There was apparently no limit to the number of police ships
in the galaxy. And none of them seemed to have anything better to do than to
chase me. They just kept coming—suddenly appearing from behind asteroids,
lifting off of planets as I passed them, and just popping in from hyperspace as
if by magic. It seemed like they had to get me in the end. Which is what they
had been telling me all along. I guess I should have listened. The police don’t
talk to you just to be exercising their gums. If they exercise their gums at
all, they do it at a gym. When they talk to you they’re talking to you for a
reason.

Then I had an
inspiration. I realized there was one place I could go where no one would dare follow
me. The Earth. The good old Earth, my good old polluted birthplace, and friend.
No one would be able to follow me there because the whole planet was poison. It
meant instant death to anyone stupid enough to set foot on it. Once I got
inside the Earth’s protective doomsday shroud, they would just have to turn
around and go back the way they came. Ha! If I had taken the time to think
about the downside to my idea, I would have realized that the poisonous
atmosphere would kill me just as quickly as it would kill them. Quicker,
probably, because that’s the way things had been going for me this week. But I
didn’t have time to think. I only had time to act.

As I started
looking over the star charts to see where the Earth was from here—I was pretty
sure it was “down”, but “down” where?—several hundred more police cruisers
appeared out of hyperspace slightly ahead of me and to my right. Their sirens
were cranked up so loud I could hear them in the vacuum of space. Now those are
loud sirens, I thought. At our present speed, they were in a perfect position
to intercept me. Of course, that was easy to fix. All I had to do was change my
present speed to one no one in their right mind could match.

I disconnected
all the engine’s safety devices, pointed the ship towards the Earth and hit the
overdrive button as hard as I could, quickly accelerating the ship to beyond
the speed of light, a speed at which no one is supposed to go. I hated to break
the rules of physics, but this was an emergency.

I glanced down at
my speed indicator. The needle had already gone beyond all the numbers and was
now passing “Are you kidding?” and heading for “Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
Ridiculous is right! As soon as I passed the speed of light, all sorts of
screwy things started appearing outside of my window. I started seeing
kaleidoscopic colors, and strange wavy lines, geometric shapes, big babies in
bubbles, a woman on a bicycle turning into a witch on a broomstick, more kaleidoscopic
colors, two men in a rowboat tipping their hats to me, then a final wavy line,
the waviest of them all. Now I understood why you weren’t supposed to go past
the speed of light. A guy could go nuts seeing all that crap going on outside
his window. Maybe go nuts and crash. I guess I was supposed to understand all
the symbolism of what I was seeing, but I didn’t. I think the big babies might
have been symbolic of youth in some way, but that was as far as I got.

And strange
things weren’t just happening around me. They were happening to me too. My arms
were getting longer and shorter, my eyes were opening and closing, my antlers
were turning different colors, and my nose was running backwards. I guess I was
quite a sight. I probably could have gotten quite a few laughs with a screwy
face like I had right then. I was a regular Larry Laffman. But laughs wouldn’t
do me any good out here. I was a long way from Hollywood.

I looked in my
rear view mirror, which was melting and burning and yelling: “What’s…happening…to…me?”
The ships behind me were falling back a little. They didn’t have super-light
speed like I did. Plus, I think they were a little afraid of all the colors and
babies.

As I passed the
Earth’s moon, the pursuing ships began to slow down and fall back even more. I
listened in on their chatter over the police radio. The way they had it
figured, I was as good as dead the moment I entered the Earth’s atmosphere. So
once I passed into that doomsday shroud, they could all go home. Their work
would be done. I smiled in triumph. That’s what I wanted them to think. Then my
smile faded. Hey, they were right!

Moments
later my ship dove screaming into the Earth’s atmosphere. Actually, it just
sounded like it was screaming. That was actually me doing the screaming.

I didn’t know
what to expect when I entered the Earth’s poisonous atmosphere. Death, of
course, but what else? As I got closer to the ground I was surprised to see
that the Earth’s surface didn’t look like the Moon at all. It wasn’t dead.
There was greenery everywhere. I was even more surprised when I landed and
found that my ship’s sensors didn’t indicate any toxic substances in the
atmosphere at all.

I hesitated
before I opened the airlock. The ship’s sensors didn’t indicate any life
threatening conditions outside, but I was taking no chances. If I was going to
die, I wanted to die slowly, like my parents, not all at once, like a sewer
explosion. I suited up in a police survival suit I found in one of the storage
compartments, cautiously opened the airlock, and climbed down the ladder to the
surface.

The planet looked
great. Flowers and trees everywhere. Blue sky. Blue water. And no signs of the
contamination I had heard about at all. My tricorder—a futuristic gadget that I
had picked up at Roddenberry’s in the Pleiades, the same place that I got my
Spock Neck—indicated that the atmosphere was safe to breath, so I took off my
helmet and took a deep breath. The air was fine. My tricorder said it was okay
for me to give it some oil, too, if I had time, but I didn’t bother. What am
I—Uncle Fixit?

I wandered around
looking at all the greenery and wondering what all those gloom and doomers had
been talking about. Earth was as nice as it had ever been. Maybe even a little
nicer, since I hadn’t been there for awhile. I didn’t see any reason for it to
be condemned. Some bureaucrat had really dropped the ball on this one. And that
newspaper article I had read was baloney. Pure unadulterated baloney. There was
nothing wrong with this place.

Then I noticed
something wrong. There were plants everywhere, but no people. I hadn’t seen
anybody since I arrived. No buildings either. No roads. No signs of
civilization at all. At first I thought maybe I was in some kind of park, but
there were no signs telling me all the things I couldn’t do, so I knew it
couldn’t be a park.

The more I looked
around, the more alarmed I became. I seemed to be all alone on an empty planet.
Then I remembered my tricorder. I took it out of my pocket and switched it to
dating mode. It said I was currently crapping my pants in the year 300,612,209.
Three hundred million years in the future! Yikes.

I’m not known for
my cursing. I only curse to make a point. Or to let off steam. Or to kill time
before church starts. But I cursed now. I cursed a blue streak. Of all the
blankety blanks this was the blankiest, I said. Blank blank blank blank blank
shit blank.

When I had calmed
down a little bit, I took another look around the blankety blank area, this
time with an eye for changes the passage of centuries might have brought about.
Sure enough, now that I was looking for them, I could see the changes. There
were changes all right. Blackberries were bigger now, for one thing. Much
bigger. The size of apples. And they weren’t black anymore. They were
apple-colored. And the apples were as big as watermelons. And they didn’t grow
on trees anymore. They grew in patches. But the biggest change was in the
people. There just weren’t any.

Then I found
them. They weren’t exactly people as you and I know them. They were just huge
brains in jars. I had walked past these jars a number of times. In fact, I had
tossed an empty Coke can into one of them, but I hadn’t noticed there were
brains in there.

I went over to
talk to them.

“Hiya,” I said.

“Greetings, Frank
Burly,” said the oldest looking, most wrinkled brain, who I took to be their
leader.

“Who are you, and
how do you know my name?” I demanded.

“We know all. And
your name is embroidered on your shirt.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s
right. Well who are you then?”

“Our names are on
our jars.”

I looked closer
at their jars. Someone had stuck labels on the jars to identify their contents.
“Oh, I see the names there now. Hello, Mr. Rosenbloom.”

“Hello, Frank
Burly.”

“How do you know
my… oh, yeah, we covered that.”

The brains were
glad to fill me in about what had happened to the Earth since I left. They
enjoyed showing off their knowledge. The doomsday shroud hadn’t destroyed all
life on Earth, they said. The most obnoxious managed to survive, as they always
do. But no one outside of the Earth knew that there were any survivors because
they couldn’t see through the poisonous shroud, which had gradually moved up
into the upper levels of the atmosphere. There it harmed no one, and kept out
dangerous ultra violet rays and maintained a constant year round temperature of
75 degrees all over the world. I always figured pollution had to be good for
the environment. People are wrong about everything else. Why not that?

I was glad the
Earth was okay, but I was horrified by what mankind had come to.

“This is
horrible,” I said, genuinely moved. “Is this the future of life on Earth? A
bunch of smelly brains in jars?”

Mr. Rosenbloom’s
brain got more wrinkly. “What do you mean smelly?”

“If you were a
giant nose instead of a giant brain you’d know what I meant.”

“Perhaps,” he
admitted.

I asked him how I
had ended up here in the future. I was in the past a minute ago. He said that’s
what happens when you exceed the speed of light. The years flow faster on your
planet of origin than they do for you in your ship. Read Einstein, Mr.
Rosenbloom said. You read it, I said. I didn’t want to read anything. I wasn’t
in the mood.

I asked the
brains what they did for fun around here. They said “squat and think”. That
didn’t sound like so much fun to me. They said that’s because I hadn’t tried
it. They had me there. I hadn’t tried it.

One of the
smaller brains—one that had lipstick on it—volunteered to help me have a good
time, if that’s what I was looking for. She was apparently a hooker of some
sort, because she kept calling me either “sailor” or “handsome” and kept
offering to give me a good time in exchange for four hundred quatloos. But, try
as I might, I just couldn’t get what she was offering to do for me.

“Look,” I said,
fingering the quatloos, “if you want the quatloos, you’re going to have to
better explain what it is you’re offering me.”

“A good time!”
she said, almost shouting. She was starting to get as frustrated as I was.

We never did get
it sorted out, and the money ended up staying in my pocket.

It didn’t take
very long for me to realize that this future Earth was no place for a guy like
me. There was nothing going on here at all. I was bored stiff already, and it
wasn’t even 2:30 yet. And if I thought I was over-matched in the brain department
in space, it was nothing compared to here. These guys were all brain. I
couldn’t understand half of the things they were saying. I kept telling them to
use smaller words, but they said there weren’t any smaller words.

I decided to head
back up into space—take my chances there. I didn’t know what was out there at
this late date in history, but whatever it was, it would have to be better than
this.

I said goodbye to
the brains, told them that I would write often, and made my way back to my
space ship. But when I got there I found that the engine wouldn’t turn over.
Driving it nonstop in overdrive for so long, and pressing the “Burn Out Motor”
button so many times, had burned out the motor. It was a good thing I had
gotten to Earth when I did. I must have had only a few seconds left before the
whole ship blew apart. I confirmed this when I manually overrode all the safety
systems, kick-started the engine, and blew the ship apart, with some pieces of
it landing up to half a mile away, and other pieces only traveling a few feet
before they lodged in my head.

I went back and
asked the brains if any of them knew how to repair an R-43 with a Crimebuster
engine. I needed it by Thursday. They said they knew all, of course, especially
how to fix an R-43, but the ship could not be repaired. It was in too many
different places now. They said it looked to them like I was stuck here. I said
it looked like that to me too.

After conferring
among themselves, the brains invited me to stay with them forever. They said I
could never really be one of them—never be their intellectual equal—but they
had always wanted a dog. I could be that. They would call me “Scruffy”, if that
was okay with me. I said it sounded all right. They told me to pick out a jar,
get in, screw the top tightly closed (remembering the air holes), and start
living it up—like them.

“Okay”, I said,
doubtfully. I climbed into the nearest empty jar. “Now what?”

“Think.”

I
sat there and thought. I must have thought for over an hour. But it wasn’t very
entertaining. All I could think of was that I was in a jar.