Earth vs. Everybody by John Swartzwelder Page B

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.
     

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    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