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“The Martians are
impossible,” said World President Hillary Clinton as she led her group
into the conference room. “They
won’t give an inch. I wish Bill
was still here”
“I wish I was younger,” said North American Governor Arnold
Schwartzenager. “I’d show them
who’d terminate who.”
“Whom,” said the French Premier. “The
galling thing is that they have no culture at all.
They remind me of the second George Bush.”
“They don’t even have a
first-rate technology,” put in the Japanese Prime Minister.
“No cell phones, no game boys, no CDs, no DVDs, none of the
things essential to a real civilization.”
“But they do have the weapons,” said Arnold.
“As they showed when they destroyed Los Angeles.”
“I tried to get them to destroy some city in a red state,” said
Hillary, “but they said it would be more fun to wipe out Los Angeles.
At least, they let us evacuate the city before they disintegrated
it.”
“So now we have a population explosion in San Francisco.
Real estate prices have gone sky high.”
“Milton” Hillary addressed her intern, “do you have everything in
place for the meeting?”
“God, another boring meeting,” muttered the intern, Milton Lewinsky.
“What was that?” said Hillary. “Remember,
I took you on as a favor to your aunt Monica so behave yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am. Everything is
ready. But one thing I still don’t
understand. All of our scientists
said Mars was a dead planet that couldn’t sustain life.
So where did the Martians come from?”
“The scientists were right; the planet is dead now.
But they didn’t realize that billions of years ago when the water
hadn’t frozen and there was an atmosphere with oxygen there was a
Martian civilization, much, much older than ours.
Then, after the planet began to freeze, the Martians fled in their
space ships to a distant galaxy and settled there.”
“Those canals that our 19th –century French astronomers saw
were really canals,” said the French Premier.
“The German astronomers
saw them first,” muttered Schwartzenager under his breath.
“So why did they come back?” asked Milton.
“Who knows?” said Hillary. “The
Martians love to fight. That’s why
they’re so far ahead of us in weapons. Maybe
they got tired of warring among themselves.
Or maybe they all of a sudden felt homesick.
Anyway, they’ve returned and seen what a nice planet Earth has
become so they want to make it their colony.”
“Can’t we do anything about it?”
“We can’t match their weapons, as Los Angeles showed.
We’re lucky they haven’t destroyed any other cities.
The only reason they’ve talked to us for so long is that we’ve
given them the old Star Trek
videos and they’re fascinated by them. They especially like the Klingons.”
“They look and act like Klingons,” said Arnold.
“Only they’re bigger and uglier.”
“I hear them coming,” said Hillary. “Let’s
get to our places.”
A loud clumping noise was heard outside and the contingent of Martians
strode in. Their leader, General
Snort, said, “I see you were waiting for us.
Good. We saw the last Star
Trek episode yesterday so let’s get this thing settled.
You still haven’t given us any good reasons why we shouldn’t
just take your planet over.”
“You’d do much better if we cooperated with you,” said Hillary.
“We’re prepared to offer you most favored planet status.”
“Not good enough”
“We’ll make other concessions. Here’s
the latest list our experts have drawn up.”
Here the meeting descended into the minutia that had occupied most of the
past month. Finally, Snort said,
“We’re wasting time” and banged his huge hand on the table,
upsetting his water pitcher
“Milton,” Hillary immediately said. “Another water pitcher for
General Snort.”
“Huh,” said Milton, looking up.
“What’s that you have in your hand?”
“This. It’s an old game called
Space Invaders. I found it in
President Reagan’s things.”
“So that’s where he got the idea for his Star Wars anti-missile
defense,” said Hillary.
“What’s that?” asked General Snort.
“Nothing. Just some ancient
history.”
“What’s Space Invaders?” said General Snort.
“Let me see it. How do you
play it?” The General snatched the game away from Milton.
“Barbarian,” the French Premier muttered under his breath.
“It’s simple,” Hillary quickly broke in.
“Press that button. See,
these space invaders are coming at you and you have to shoot them
down with those weapons. You push
these buttons.”
“Ah, I see. You’re right, this
is simple. Wait, they’re moving
faster. They’ve destroyed my
weapons. It says, ‘Game
Over’.”
“Let me see it,” said General Snort’s second-in-command, General
Gooch. “You’re probably
not playing it right.” General
Gooch considered General Snort old-fashioned and had ambitions to take
over.
“Hah. See if you can do
better.”
All discussion stopped while the two Martians handed the game back and
forth.
“I have a proposal,”
said Hillary.
“What?”
“We’ll make enough of these Space Invaders games for each and every
Martian. In return, the Earth
retains its sovereignty. As I said,
we’re prepared to cooperate fully with you.
We’ll help you make Mars the beautiful red planet it was once.”
“Hmmm,” said General Snort. He
looked at General Gooch. “What do
you think?”
“It would save us a lot of time and trouble,” said General Gooch.
“Remember what those Earth history books said happened in
Iraq.”
“All right,” said General Snort. “It’s
a deal.. Now let me have the game.
It’s my turn.”
“The meeting is adjourned,” said Hillary.
The Martians went out, the two generals still arguing over the
Space Invaders game. “Let’s get
the papers drawn up and get them to sign before
they change their minds. We’ll
call them back in an hour.”
“I guess this means I don’t get my game back,” said Milton.
Hillary gave him a withering look, the kind she used to give Bill when he
disagreed with her. “We have to
start making millions of Space Invaders. How
many Martians are there?”
They all left the room to go about their respective tasks, all except
Milton, who was ordered to stay and wipe up the spilled water from General
Snort’s pitcher. “Huh,”
muttered Milton, as he wiped, “I
save the Earth from the Martians and I have to clean up.
We Lewinskys always get the dirty end of the stick.”
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