Дональд Уэстлейк - Collected Stories

“Of course you do.” Irritation seeped through the Presidential manner. “How else do we discover the killer virus that’s taken over the crew’s bodies?”

“Wait a minute,” Ensign Benson said. “You aren’t the President: you’re pretending to be the President. This is a play!”

“Well, of course it is!” the President cried. “And this is the worst rehearsal I have ever participated in!”

Luthguster harrumphed. “Do you mean to say,” he demanded, “that you are not empowered to deal on a primary level with a plenipotentiary from Earth?”

Frowning, the President said, “Have you come unglued, fella?”

Ensign Benson muttered, “Director — no. Producer — no.” Snapping his fingers, he said to the President, “Take me to your stage manager.”

The man sat atop a six-foot wooden ladder. Behind him were three rows of kitchen chairs, several occupied by solemn-faced people wearing their Sunday best. The man on the ladder said, “I’m the stage manager here. I guess I know just about everything there is to know about our town…”

The captain and the crew sat by the side of the dusty road. Billy took his boot off and looked in it. Councilman Luthguster, marching back and forth, announced, “This is absurd! These people can’t spend all their time play acting. They must have a government, an infrastructure. How do they get their food?”

“Of Mice and Men for an extended run,” suggested Ensign Benson.

Across the way, out in the middle of an empty field, a group of men in togas strolled out from behind an invisible curtain of air and began declaiming at one another. They all stood with one foot in front of the other. “That’s the part that bugs me the worst,” Ensign Benson said. “How do they appear and disappear like that?”

“Scrim,” said Hester.

Ensign Benson gave her an unfriendly look. “What?”

“I know what a scrim is,” Billy said. “We had one in the theater in college. It’s a big mesh screen. You paint a backdrop on it and hang it across the front of the stage. If you shine a light in front, you see the painting but you can’t see the stage. If you shine the light in back, the painting disappears and you see the stage.”

“Close but no pseugar,” said Hester. “That’s the original, old-fashioned kind of scrim, but then a way was found to alter air molecules so light would bend around them. Now a scrim is a curtain of bent molecules. You put it around a set and it shows you what’s beyond it. They used to use one in field questions for the S.E. degree, but of course it’s old-fashioned now.”

“Science is wonderful,” Ensign Benson said bitterly as he watched the men in togas disappear again behind their curtain of bent molecules.

“None of which solves,” Councilman Luthguster reminded them, “the problem of how to get in touch with whoever runs this blasted colony I’ll do no more play acting !”

Standing, the captain said, “Well, Hestia’s going down; there’s no more to do today. We’ll get an early start tomorrow.”

“Wasn’t it right here?” the captain asked.

“I thought,” said Pam vaguely, “it was more over that way, by those little trees.”

“There weren’t trees there before,” Ensign Benson said. “Those are cardboard, part of a set.”

“I am uninterested in sets,” the councilman said. “Totally uninterested. What I want is my room on the ship.”

“What I want,” said Hester, “is the bathroom on the ship.”

“Well, yes,” said Luthguster.

The little group stood on the plain, looking around. The captain said, “It was just— It was right around— I know it was over here somewhere.”

A man dressed in the front half of a horse costume came striding purposefully by, carrying the horse’s head under his arm. Billy said, “Excuse me. Have you seen our spaceship?”

“What?” The horseman looked around, then said, “Oh, right. They struck that set.” And he walked on.

“Struck?” echoed the captain. “Struck?”

“Theatrical term,” Pam told him. “It means to dismantle a set and take it oil the stage.”

“You can’t dismantle a spaceships, ” the captain said. “Not in half an hour.”

“No,” Ensign Benson said, through clenched jaws. Smoke seemed to be coming out of his ears. “But you can put a curtain around it.” Glaring at Hester as though it were her fault, he said, “Our ship is surrounded by your goddamn bent molecules!”

Darkness fell, a bit at a time. “I think,” said the captain inaccurately, “I think we’ll just have to sleep on the ground.”

“Like camping out!” said the irrepressible Billy.

“Without the camp,” added the repressive councilman.

The captain said, “We’ll each have to find a declivity to sleep in.”

“I’ll need two declivities,” said Hester.

“Amen,” said the councilman.

“Kybee,” Pam said, “this is my declivity.”

“It’s important to retain our body heat,” Ensign Benson explained, trying to hunker down beside her.

“Thank you, Kybee,” Pam said, “but I’m really quite warm enough sleeping by myself.”

“You would be,” Ensign Benson muttered, thumping off across the darkling plain and all at once running into a spider web. “Ptchah!” he cried, flailing at the web, then realized it wasn’t a web at all. It was a, it was some sort of, it felt like a thin sheet or a—

Curtain.

“ Oh, boy,” Ensign Benson said. Feeling the material with both hands, maintaining a lot of body contact with this drapery, he sidled along to the right, noticing how clothlike it was, giving when he pressed but resisting when he pressed too hard. Somewhere there would be, there had to be, an opening.

There. His right hand slipped off the curtain’s edge and fell forward against unresisting air, and all at once, instead of Hestia’s dull but protracted set, he was looking at somebody’s drawing room.

Comedy-of-manners time. A sofa centered, telephone on stand to its left. Several upstage doors for slamming. Occasional furniture along the walls. Steady, not-too-bright light, source uncertain.

Ensign Benson stepped through the break and inspected more closely. Windows fakes with painted views. Bookcase a painted facade. Telephone nonoperative. Water in ashtray, soap on mirror. Some sort of mottled obscurity high above blocking the sky. Sofa real and soft.

Turning about, he looked through the curtain of bent molecules at his shipmates settling down for the night on the dusty ground, like a small herd from some endangered species. Tell Pam about the sofa? Surely she wouldn’t mind sharing it. On the other hand, there was the rest of the crew.

Ensign Benson sighed. Pushing open the flap, he called, “Everybody! I found us a room.”

Hestia rose like thunder out of the horizon across the way. “I hear thunder,” Pam said, sitting up on the sofa, squinting in the rosy light, looking tousled and adorable and unavailable.

The other Earthlings, less adorable, rose from their beds of chair cushions and window draperies. “Rain,” grumbled Ensign Benson, stretching his stiff, sore back. “Just to make things perfect.”

But there was no rain, and when the thunder stopped, it became obvious that the sound had actually been some sort of approaching motor. For a few seconds the Earthers waited in silence, contemplating their morning mouths, and then an upstage door opened and a heedless young couple in evening dress-black tie for him, green flapper outfit for her — entered and slammed the door. “Tennis, anyone?” cried the boy, with a big toothy grin; then, as he reacted to the scene onstage, his grin became a toothless O of shock. “Lor!” he breathed.