Дональд Уэстлейк - Collected Stories

“We’d better be getting our act together and taking it on the road,” said ensign Benson, “or we’ll be stuck on this planet forever.”

From the beginning of Time, Man has been on the move, ever outward. First he spread over his own planet, then across the Solar System, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted, speckled, measled with the colonies of Man.

Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundred and six (11,406), an incredible discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth. Nearly 500 years before, a clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than WOO colonies, all in sector F.U.B.A.R.3. For half a millennium, those colonies, young and struggling when last heard from, had had no contact with the rest of Humanity.

The Galactic Patrol Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Captain Gregory Standforth commanding, was at once dispatched to re-establish contact with the Thousand Lost Colonies and return them to the bosom of Mankind.

The two tramps, picturesquely filthy, sat by the side of the road in the dusty sunshine. They were dressed in more rags than seemed absolutely necessary given the mildness of the weather, and while one of them mused upon life more or less audibly, the other removed a battered, scruffy boot and frowned mistrustfully into it, as though expecting to find something alive in there. He sighed. He blew into the boot. He sighed. He put the boot on. He took it off again. He turned to his musing, muttering companion and said, “Didi?”

“Yes?”

“What do we do now?”

“We wait.”

A kind of inner earthquake of frustration vibrated through the tramp holding the boot. With a repressed scream, he cried, “For what?”

“For him,” Didi said. “He promised he’d meet us here, and we’re supposed to wait until—” He broke off, gazing upward past his friend’s filthy forehead.

“Well?” asked the other. “Go on, go on.”

“Oh, my gosh,” said Didi His voice, his manner, even his facial appearance, all had changed.

“What is it?” asked his friend, turning to look.

The two tramps stared upward at the slowly descending spaceship, a great silver corncob lowering through the empty air. “It’s Godot,” Didi whispered in awe. “He finally got here.”

Inside the spaceship, 27 birds watched Pam Stokes, astrogator, beautiful and brainy but blind to passion, play with her ancestral slide rule. The birds were all stuffed and wired to their perches around the Hopeful’s command deck, and from the expression in their glass eyes, they didn’t like it a bit. Or perhaps what they didn’t like was the sight of Captain Gregory Standforth disemboweling yet another bird on the control panel. Indigo ichor oozed through the dials and switches into the panel’s innards, where it would make a mysterious bad smell for the next several weeks.

A tall, skinny, vague-eyed, loose-wired sort of fellow, Captain Standforth was the seventh consecutive generation of Standforths to spend his life in the service of the Galactic Patrol and the first to be terrible at it. Much was expected of a Standforth, but in this case it was expected in vain. The captain had had no choice other than to follow the family footsteps into the patrol, and the patrol had had to take him, but neither had profited. All the captain wanted was to pursue his one passion, taxidermy — the stuffing of birds from everywhere in the universe — while all the patrol wanted was to never see or hear from him again

Thump. “Ouch!” said the captain. As vermilion blood mixed with the indigo ichor, he put his cut varicolored finger into his mouth, said, “Oog,” took it out again and made a bad-taste grimace. “Nn.” Turning to Pam, he said, “What was that thump? Made me cut myself.”

“Subsidence,” she said, rapidly whizzing the slide rule’s parts back and forth. “By my calculations, ground level must have eroded seven millimeters in the last half-chiliad. Therefore, the ship’s computer switched off engines before we actually—”

“Half-chiliad?” asked the captain. “What’s a half-chiliad?”

“Five hundred years. So that’s why we thumped when we landed.”

“Landed? You mean we’ve arrived somewhere?”

“Yes, sir.”

Captain Standforth looked around at his birds. They looked back. “I wonder where we are,” he said. “I wonder what kind of birds they have here.”

“Wardrobe! Wardrobe!”

“Now what?”

“My wings keep falling off.”

“All right, I’ll get my needle and thread.”

He’s an airhead, Ensign Kybee Benson thought, raging murderously within while he struggled to appear calm and composed without. A clot head, a bonehead, a meal-head. Chowderhead, fathead. Muttonhead. No, he’s worse than all of those — he’s a Luthguster.

The Luthguster in question, Councilman Morton Luthguster of the Supreme Galactic Council, sealed on the other side of Ensign Benson’s desk, went obliviously on with his question. “Why name an entire planet after an actor ? A planet called J. Railsford Farnsworth is ridiculous.”

“In the first place,” Ensign Benson said, swallowing brimstone, “the planet is named Hestia IV, since it is the fourth planet from its sun, Hestia. The colony’s full name is the J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Company.”

Councilman Luthguster shook his jowly head. “Damn-fool name for a place,” he insisted “Detroit, now, that’s a name. Khartoum. Reykjavik. But J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Company?”

A tap at the frame of the open office door was followed by the cheerful, optimistic, shiny young face of Lieutenant Billy Shelby, Hopeful’s second in command, who said, “We’ve landed, sir. We’re on the ground.”

“I know what landed means,” Ensign Benson snapped. “I felt the bump. And when I’ve finished explaining the situation to the councilman, we’ll be along.”

“OK,” Billy said happily. “We’ll be waiting at the air lock. At the door.”

“I know what an air lock is.”

Billy cantered off, and Ensign Benson returned to his task. As social engineer, an expert in comparative societies, he had the job of giving Councilman Luthguster the necessary background on each colony they visited. “When this sector of the universe was colonized,” he explained, “a special cultural fund was set up to bring the arts to the far-flung outposts of Man. A theatrical troupe from Earth was offered its own settlement and a subsidy and was meant to tour the other colonies with a repertory of ancient and modern drama. Of course, contact was lost almost immediately, so the troupe never got its transportation and therefore never toured. There’s no guessing what it’s become by now.”

Luthguster pursed fat lips. “So who is this fellow J. Railsford Farnsworth?”

“Founder of the repertory company. The actor-manager-director of the troupe.”

“Do you mean,” Luthguster demanded, puffing out like an adder, “that I shall be expected to discuss affairs of state with an actor?”

“I don’t think so,” Ensign Benson said. His face was expressionless, but his tense hand had crushed the plastoak arm of his chair. “J. Railsford Farnsworth would be about five hundred and forty-three by now, and that’s old even for an actor.”

Gathered around the air lock were two thirds of the Hopeful’s complement: Captain Standforth, Astrogator Stokes, Lieutenant Shelby and Chief Engineer Hester Hanshaw, a stocky, blunt woman with a stocky, blunt manner, who was saying, “I didn’t like that thump. Bad for the engines.”