Earth vs. Everybody by John Swartzwelder

suit.”
    “What!”
    “He said somebody
farted into a three piece suit and that’s how you were born.”
    “Why, you…”
    “Oh, boy,” said
Larry, ruefully, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
    That’s when the
big fight started.
    Sid was off to
the side while all this was going on, still talking on his cell phone, telling
somebody that something was totally out of the question. It was illegal,
immoral, and would never happen unless somebody came up with another dump truck
full of money. He suddenly noticed Larry and Buzzy going at it like Popeye and
Bluto. He hurried over to try to stop the fight, while still trying to
negotiate his deal over the phone. The main sticking point now, as I understood
it, was character payments.
    Hurling a few
final insults over my shoulder to keep them fighting, I dove into the nearest
ship, which turned out to be Larry Laffman’s Intergalactic Police cruiser, and
fired it up.
    “He said you
throw punches like a girl!” I shouted to both of them as I lifted off.
    “Oh, yeah?” they
both growled, throwing their next punches even harder, and even more like girls,
in my opinion.
    And that was the
last I saw of either of them, as I rocketed up into space, never to return. It
was the last I saw of either of them for almost an hour.
     

CHAPTER TEN
     
    It didn’t take
Buzzy and Larry long to realize they had been slickered. The rocket blast that
made their hair wave back and forth told them that. And the fact that nobody
was insulting them anymore now that I was gone. They traded a few final
punches, assured each other that this wasn’t over, then broke off their fight
and took off after me.
    It took me awhile
to get used to the controls on the police cruiser—I ground the gears a couple
of times, and put my head through the windshield in half a dozen places—but
once I got the feel of it I realized I had picked the right ship to make a
getaway in. The cruiser was the latest in space ship technology. An R-43, with
a Crimebuster engine. That’s one thing about the police everywhere. They’ve got
to have the horsepower to run you down, so their vehicles are built for speed.
Which makes them fun to drive. I guess that explains why policemen look so
happy all the time. This one had an engine that was capable of pushing the
cruiser to near the speed of light, and it also had an overdrive button which
promised even more.
    I needed all the
speed I could get because within an hour, thanks to police radio, I was being
chased by just about every police ship in the quadrant. This shouldn’t have
happened because the police radio was in the ship I was driving—Larry and Buzzy
didn’t have one in their ships—and there was no reason in the world for me to
turn it on. They wouldn’t be able to hear me. But I had been taunting them for
fifteen or twenty minutes before I realized my mistake. At that point the
damage was done, I felt, so I just kept taunting them. I still had a few
zingers left that I hadn’t used yet. A little while after that is when the
other police ships tapped into my signal and joined the chase. So I guess I
played that one wrong. I wish I had that one to do over again.
    The good thing about
being pursued by thousands of space ships, instead of just one or two, is that
they tend to get in each other’s way, resulting in all kinds of comical
pileups. In my rear viewing screen I saw ships running into each other, forcing
each other off the road into the path of oncoming comets, comically crashing
through space malls, sending customers flying, and, in one particularly
memorable scene, landing on top of each other in one big silly pile. If there
had been anyone watching all of this—if there were a studio audience in
space—they probably would have laughed their asses off at this point. I know I
did.
    Throughout the
chase, I kept getting urgent messages from the police over my police radio
advising me to give up, reminding me that I couldn’t keep running