How I Conquered Your Planet Read Online Free PDF Page B

void. I told her I seemed to have
gotten on to a flying saucer somehow. No harm done, but when could I get off?
She informed me this was a nonstop flight. We’d be landing on Mars in a week.
    That was not acceptable to me, I told her. I wanted this vessel
turned around, and I wanted it turned around now. If it wasn’t turned around
now, there would be big trouble.
    Unfortunately, we were beyond the Earth’s gravity by this
point, and it’s hard to threaten people when you’re bobbing around in front of
them, sometimes upside down, sometimes sideways, and nearby passengers are kind
of playing with you, batting you back and forth across the aisle to each other,
and keeping a running score of who’s ahead.
    “ You’re laughing now,” I told the stewardess, sternly, “Laughing
so hard you can hardly see straight, but you won’t be laughing for long.”
    The passengers played with me for a little while longer, then
grew tired of me and batted me back towards my seat.
    I sat there for awhile, fuming, then raised my hand with a
question for the stewardess. “Does the pilot of this vessel carry a weapon of
any kind?”
    “ Yes,” said the stewardess.
    I put down my hand. There went my kill-everybody-and-run idea.
    Since threats weren’t getting me anywhere, I tried bribery. But
neither the stewardess nor any other member of the flight crew would accept
money for not doing their jobs. Finally I accepted the stewardess’ $20 bill to
sit down and shut up for the rest of the voyage. Am I the only one who takes
bribes anymore?
    For the next seven days I killed time as best as I could,
trying to read their magazines, watching the in-flight movies – some of which
featured has-been American actors along with the mostly Martian cast – and
trying to get more money from the stewardess for all the sitting down and
shutting up I was doing for her. I said the $20 she had given me wasn’t enough.
I needed more now. She said she didn’t have any more.
    On the seventh day, I could see a red planet out of my window.
It was Mars, all right. Okay, that does it, I thought. I’ve got to get out of
here.
    I got out of my seat, crossed to the hatch and started yanking
on it. It took several members of the flight crew, and several more $20 bills,
to get me back to my seat.
    “ I’ve got to get out of here,” I explained, reasonably, to
anyone who would listen.
    They said everybody would be getting out of here in a few
minutes. Just be patient.
    Sure enough, the saucer’s speed began to slow dramatically, and
we began our descent into the Martian atmosphere. Fortunately for me, I was
pretty ignorant about science. Otherwise I would have been worried about the
lack of oxygen, the freezing temperatures, the harmful cosmic rays, the low
atmospheric pressure, the wildly elliptical orbit, and all that other stuff. I
didn’t know planets could be different like that. A scientist would have been scared.
Me, I didn’t give a shit.
    And I was right not to worry, as it turned out. Once we had
landed and I had gotten off the saucer, I noticed things didn’t seem all that
different here. The elliptical orbit bothered me a little bit at first, but
that’s all.
    I tried to breeze through security at the terminal, like all
the other passengers were doing, but there was a problem with my identification
papers – the problem being that I didn’t have any. They asked me for my
passport. I didn’t have a passport. Then they asked me for my official Martian
ID card. I told them I didn’t eat that kind of cereal. More security people
gathered around me.
    “ Do you have an Interplanetary Travel Permit?” one of them
asked.
    “ I might. What does it look like?”
    “ If you had one you would know what it looked like.”
    “ I think you might be overestimating my intelligence,” I said
stiffly.
    I said they were welcome to look through my wallet, but then I
noticed they were already doing that.
    They asked me to turn myself inside out, so they