Дональд Уэстлейк - Collected Stories

“Sir,” said Luthguster, “you have misunderstood. We are an introductory mission representing the Galactic Council in this reabsorption of—”

“You mean, you aren’t our transportation?”

“Certainly not,” Luthguster said. “I assure you, sir, I am neither a play actor nor a tour director. I am—”

“In terrible trouble,” the agent finished. To his secretary — who had stopped note taking, the better to look shocked and horrified — he said, “Erase that bit, Emily, and don’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”

“Oh, sir,” breathed Emily, with all the despairing fervor of any showbiz secretary ordered not to gossip.

The captain said, “Really, uh, your Honor, I’m sure we can arrange all the transportation you need.”

“I’m delighted and relieved to hear it,” the agent said. “When?”

“In two or three years,” Luthguster told him. “Five at the very most.”

The captain said, “All we need is to get to the ship and—”

“Impossible,” the agent said.

“I knew there had to be a kicker,” Ensign Benson said. “What is it?”

The agent pressed all his fingers to his chest in the time-honored agent’s gesture of innocence. “ Bubee,” he said, “do I know where your ship is? No. Certain members of the rep company do. If you go to the rep company and tell them you’re here in a spaceship after five hundred years but you’re not their transportation, do you know what they’ll do?”

The Earth party shook its heads.

“Lynch you,” said Emily bitterly. She was shredding her pencil.

“Very probably,” said the agent.

Ensign Benson said, “Do you mean we can’t get our spaceship back because, if people know it’s real but not your damn tour bus, they’ll blame us?”

“I couldn’t have phrased it better myself,” the agent said. “Remember, five hundred years is a long rehearsal.”

Emily, sniffling solemnly over her note pad, murmured, “But what else could we have done? We never knew when… ”

“Yes, Emily,” the agent said sympathetically.

Councilman Luthguster said, “But this is terrible; I can’t arrange for transportation or trade agreements or development aid or anything until I’m back in the ship.”

“But how to get there,” Pam said. “That’s the problem.”

All nodded dolefully. But then Billy leaped to his feet, his fresh face eager and alight. “Say, gang!” he cried. “Why don’t we — I dunno — put on a show?”

And what a show! Dorothy and the Wizard of J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Company, and Selected Shorts. The agent helped arrange for cooperation from the craft guilds, and the sounds of cheerful hammering and more cheerful whistling rose up from the stage carpenters building the sets. Backdrops were flown, specialty acts were auditioned and Ensign Benson took to wearing jodhpurs and an ascot. Councilman Luthguster sang the bass notes, Billy gave pep talks from the tops of ladders and the captain flew squadrons of stuffed birds. The crew spent hours in the wardrobe shed, sequences from other shows were freely borrowed and even Emily chipped in, writing lyrics.

Curtain up!

“Somewhere over the welkin, skies are green…”

“Of thee I sing , hyperspace! Summer, autumn, winter, spring , hyperspace!”

“Toto, I don’t think we’re on Alpha Centauri anymore.”

“Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho! It’s off to J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Company we go!”

“Whatever Toto wants, Toto gets.”

“Hee, hee, hee! And I’ll get that little dog, too!”

“Toto! Toto!”

“Dingdong, the dingbat’s dead!”

“Ignore the man behind that curtain!”

The finale! A scrim parted and a gasp went up from the audience as Hopeful appeared, gleaming in the Hestia light. Dorothy (Pam), the Cowardly Lion (the captain), the Scarecrow (Ensign Benson), the Tin Person (Hester), the Wizard (Councilman Luthguster) and Toto (Billy) marched, singing, toward their ship.

Along the way, the agent shook Councilman Luthguster’s hand. “Hurry back,” he said. “We’ll take lunch.”

Klonk-klonk, up the yellow-metal ladder. Snuck went the air-lock door. Sssssssssummmmmmmmm went the spaceship, up, up and away.

“What stage effects!” marveled the cheering throng. “What magic! What realism! What a finish!”

What — no encore?

The astrologers of figulus knew the future, but they had yet to learn about naked truth.

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 1000 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.

Breakfast on the hopeful consisted of ocher juice, parabacon, toastettes, mock omelet, papjacks, sausage, (don’t ask) and Hester’s coffee. It was called Hester’s coffee because Hester made it and Hester drank it; the others had to draw the line somewhere .

This morning, all hands had gathered for the prelanding meal. At the head of the round table sat Captain Standforth himself, under the glassy eyes of nearly two score defunct birds mounted on the walls, the stuffing of which was his only true vocation. Descended from those Standforths, the ones who had so routinely over the past seven generations covered themselves with glory in the service of the Galactic Patrol, the captain had been compelled by both his family and destiny to enlist when his turn came, just as the patrol had been compelled by family and history to take him, inadvertently and unhappily proving that sometimes neither nature nor nurture may create character. Taxidermy? A Standforth? Regrettably, yes.

Gathered around, scoffing down the fabrifood, were the rest of the expendable captain’s expendable crew, plus his lone expendable passenger, Councilman Morton Luthguster, as plump and pompous as a pouter pigeon crossed with a blimp. The crew consisted of second-in-command Lieutenant Billy Shelby, young and idealistic but not to awfully bright; Astrogator Pam Stokes, very bright and very beautiful but a stranger to passion; Ensign Kybee Benson, whose encyclopedic knowledge of human societies did not keep him from being personally antisocial; and stockily blunt Chief Engineer Hester (of the coffee) Hanshaw, proud mistress of the engine room.

The captain wiped his lips on a toastette, then ate it. “Well,” he said to his murky band, “we’ll be landing soon.” His mild eyes gleamed with visions of this unknown planet and the unimaginable new birds he would soon disembowel.

Councilman Luthguster, swirling a forkful of papjack in pseudoleo, said, “What is this place we’re coming to, Ensign Benson? What are its characteristics?”

“No one knows for sure about this one, Councilman,” the ensign told him. “The old records simply say the colonies were a group of like-minded people whose goal was a simple life free of surprises.”