Earth vs. Everybody Read Online Free PDF

the Big
Boss is made of electricity.”
    “Yeah. 200,000
volts. More, if he’s mad.”
    “He’s not from
around here, is he?”
    “Him? Naw. He’s
from outer space.”
    I wasn’t too
surprised to hear that. Most people from this planet aren’t made of
electricity. We’re made of meat or something. Pork, I think. And most of the
electricity we have around here can’t—or won’t—talk.
    “He’s doing
pretty good for somebody who wasn’t born here,” I observed. “For a foreigner, I
mean.”
    “I’ll say.
Self-made man, too, or so they say. I heard he came to this planet with
nothing. No money. No clothes. Didn’t even have a shape. Got his start as a
burglar, getting into people’s homes through power lines. He used the money he
got from that to start CrimeCo. Now he’s one of the richest formless alien
entities in the state. He still burgles occasionally, to keep his hand in, but
he mostly just does executive stuff now, like yelling at me.”
    I was stunned. I
suddenly realized I had just solved the case of “The Amazing Electric Thief”!
My batting average had just rocketed up to .017! I briefly considered quitting
the crime game and going back to being a detective. Maybe I was on a roll.
Maybe I’d solve them all from now on. But after catching a glimpse of my dull
witless face in the mirror, I decided this was probably just a fluke. Something
that wouldn’t be repeated.
    “The only other
thing I know about him,” Larry continued, “is that he doesn’t like being called
‘Buzzy’. So when you call him Buzzy, make sure he’s not around. When he’s
around he’s ‘Mr. Theremin’ or ‘Boss’. Not ‘Buzzy’ or ‘The Buzzmeister’.”
    “Gotcha.”
    I’d like to say
that that was the end of that, and that I thought no more about what I had seen
in the Big Boss’s office, and lived happily ever after as a crook, with this
being the happy ending of the book, or maybe the start of some great crime
adventure of mine—“The Unfired Crook Strikes Again” or something like that—but
it didn’t turn out that way. Much as I tried to fight it, my detective training
eventually kicked in. I found myself getting curious about this space alien who
lived among us and controlled all of our crime for us. Just because I wasn’t a
detective anymore didn’t mean I had stopped being nosy.
    So, despite the
fact that it was none of my business, and no one was paying me to do it, and it
could bring me nothing but grief, I started to investigate. Discretely, of
course.
    “May I help you?”
Buzzy asked, when I snuck into his office and began creeping along the floor on
my belly towards him.
    “Is the elevator
broken?” he asked, when he saw me scaling the side of the building and looking
in his office window with five pairs of binoculars.
    “Did you lose
something?” he asked, when he found me with my head in his car.
    I always had a
glib answer to these questions, of course. You know me. But none of them were
very convincing. Just glib. After awhile I got the feeling Buzzy was beginning
to suspect me a little. But I didn’t have time to worry about that. I was too
busy snooping.
    During the course
of this snooping, I noticed a secret inner office Buzzy had behind his regular
office. It had all sorts of odd looking furniture in it—furniture with no fixed
shape and plenty of extra plugs—and there were some paintings of electricity on
the wall (relatives, probably), and a poster I couldn’t quite read from the
window sill I was clinging to. I tried to gain access to this office, first by
telling Buzzy’s secretary that I was a Secret Inner Office Repairman, then, when
that didn’t work, by claiming to be part of the office. That didn’t work
either. I finally decided the inner office wasn’t important.
    I began making
discrete inquiries about Buzzy among the other employees. “Have you noticed
anything odd about the Big Boss?” I would ask them. “Anything worth snooping
into?” Most