Earth vs. Everybody by John Swartzwelder Page A

forever—the
universe was finite. I’d be reaching the brick wall at the end of it pretty
soon—and giving me dozens of other good reasons why my continued flight was
pointless. They even put a priest on the radio who told me he was really
disappointed in me. So disappointed he was thinking of quitting the priesthood
and becoming a cop. So if I saw him wearing a police uniform in my rear view
mirror, that’s how that happened.
    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