How the Earth Conquered the Universe

by A. C. Ellis

No one could have possibly known that the invaders would develop a passion for baseball surpassing even that of humankind, just as no one could have predicted that they would ultimately lose to Earth, and humankind would ascend to the most feared race in all the known universe. After all, the invaders were a mighty warrior race, taking great pride in the number of inferior races they had conquered in two millennia of space faring.

They hailed from Twilight, a planet orbiting a G-type star in the Altrob group. The system had not been discovered by humanity by the time of the invasion. Twilight possessed gravity nearly twice that of Earth's, supplying the invaders a distinct advantage in strength. Also, due to the extreme savageness of their home world environment, their reflexes were honed to several times quicker than those of humankind. And the fact that they could see both what was in front of them and what was behind simultaneously didn't hurt, either.

Considering their amazing physical attributes, one might have thought they would prefer football or hockey, but one would have been wrong. "Baseball is a gentlemanly sport," their fleet admiral said through his translator device when first he encountered the game, "loaded with strategy. We like strategy." It might have been the fact that he had been watching a game from the Baseball Commissioner's box just before the interview that lent him that particular terminology.

And it turned out they were quite good at baseball. Their previously mentioned physical prowess, and a savage do-or-die attitude went a long way to giving them a good many of the qualities necessary to play an excellent game of baseball.

The entire population of their home world, Twilight--so named because both the planet's spin and its orbit were synchronized so that one side of the planet always faced the system primary, while the other was in eternal dark, thus leaving a five-hundred-mile-wide band of habitable territory around the planet from pole to pole--quickly became wrapped up in the baseball phenomenon. Each major habitation center (more a military garrison than a city) had to build a stadium and field a team. Within ten years of its introduction on Twilight, the invaders were exporting baseball to every race with which they came in contact.

However, humankind still held an edge. Humans had been playing baseball for the better part of three hundred years by the time the invaders discovered Earth--time enough to invent and master the finer points of the game. And they also had steroids on their side, a chemical leg-up that did not work for the invaders. Add to those two advantages the ever-present threat of a players' strike--something the invaders' psychology would never permit them to conceive of--and humankind had an unbeatable triple play.

But where the humans really took it to the invaders was at the concession stand. As had been demonstrated by their inability to grasp the importance of the above mentioned players' strike, profit was a concept the invaders' minds were simply not wired to grasp. Nor was the mind of any race but humankind throughout the invaders' conquered universe. And so, concessions became the sole domain of humanity.

And with concessions firmly within human control, it was not long before humanity owned everything--lock, stock and barrel.

The invaders did, however, add something to both baseball lore and human language. They forever altered the meaning of the term Twilight double-header.