Free How I Conquered Your Planet by John Swartzwelder Page A

leaders, hiding like that.
    Earth defenses sprang into action. Supersonic jets shot up into
the sky from nearly every nation on Earth. Missiles were launched from land,
sea and air. The Martian fleet suddenly found itself flying through a sky
filled with bad-tempered jets, deadly missiles and massive explosions.
    The first skirmish was a revelation to the leaders on both
sides. The Martian saucers were not only armed to the teeth, with energy beams
that never seemed to run down, their pilots could employ their mental powers to
make the devastation seem even worse than it was. Many enemy pilots bailed out
of planes that hadn’t been hit at all.
    On the other hand, the Earth forces were setting off explosions
that made the Martians’ death rays seem like parlor tricks by comparison.
    On board my flagship, the Chiefs of Staff started giving me
worried looks – worried looks I’ve grown to recognize as Worried Look #4 and
Worried Looks #s 7-25. I was the source of a lot of their information about
Earth weaponry, and we were all starting to worry I might have been seriously
full of shit.
    After the battle had been raging for nearly an hour, it became
obvious to everyone that the Martians were overmatched. Their stylish but
underpowered weapons and mind control methods and magic tricks, which were
dazzling at first, and still good at short range or on the stage, were nothing
compared to the titanic explosions Earth science had developed.
    Our saucers broke out of what was increasingly looking like a
losing battle in the air and came in low to start strafing things on the
ground. People were running from us in terror, with me pointing out the best
targets. “There’s an Earthman there!” I would yell. “His name is Jerry! Get
him!”
    I had briefed the other saucer pilots about targets of
importance they would find on Earth besides the usual military bases, missile
silos and so on. So there was a lot of fighting around the Alamo and Iwo Jima.
    Some of the ships in my wing spent too much time chasing after
and strafing one gangster who kept dodging them and firing back as he ran,
downing three saucers before he was nailed by a hail of death rays. As he died
he started saying something that sounded like “Crime does not pay” or “You were
right all along, Father O’Malley”, some important speech like that, but our
saucers were long gone by then. So I don’t know for sure which one of those two
things he said.
    I wasted my share of valuable time too. I tried to use my death
ray to replace George Washington’s face on Mount Rushmore with my own face, but
you know, that’s harder than it sounds. It’s not enough to be a brutal
trigger-happy maniac with no sense of history, you’ve got to be an artist as
well. There haven’t been many guys like that. Hitler and Rembrandt are the only
ones I can think of. I finally got the face to look something like me, but by
then the mountain was only two feet high. The tourists didn’t like that. They
kept tripping over it.
    Our saucers were circling the Earth at tree-top level, blasting
everything that moved and a lot of things that didn’t. Even if we weren’t
exactly winning, we were sure scaring the hell out of everybody, and doing a
lot of damage.
    Teams of government experts, who must not have had much to do
up until now, were called in to figure out how to deal with us. This was their
moment. Now they would start earning all that pay they had been getting all
these years.
    They captured one of our men, pulling him out of a downed
saucer, and examined him to find our weaknesses biologically. Fortunately for
us, the man they captured was a professional boxer known as “Rufus, The Martian
Strongboy”. After a lengthy examination, in the course of which they received
several bloody noses and had all of their eyes blackened, they determined that
the Earth should fight somebody else. Martians were dynamite.
    After having taken considerably more losses in the air than