Дональд Уэстлейк - Collected Stories

“Walk down Broadway at high noon, naked, with a brass band.”

“As long as you have that tape,” Ensign Benson said, “we’ll do anything — anything — to keep the rest of the human race away from here.” Wanly he smiled. “And if this doesn’t work,” he said, “if you still won’t let us go, we’ll just have to get more improbable.”

“How?” Hank asked, a bit wide-eyed.

“I don’t know yet,” the ensign told him. “I hope I never know. How about you?”

Out, out, out across the illimitable void soared the Hopeful. Its crew, garbed in every piece of clothing they owned and not looking one another in the eye, had left Figulus without even having their charts done. They knew nothing of the future.

Just as well.

Imitation is not always a form of flattery.

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.

When the sky filled with the roar of the descending ship, they all slithered into their holes to wait.

“You know,” Captain Standforth said, unclenching his fingers from the controls as the ship shuddered its last and sagged onto the ground, “I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this landing business.”

Groans answered him. Chipper young Lieutenant Billy Shelby, the person who normally dealt with landings — Captain Standforth was apt to take the term planetfall literally — managed a cheerful smile and even injected a little perkiness into his voice as he said, “ Much better, sir. Why, this was quite smooth!”

Chief Engineer Hester Hanshaw, blunt in body, mind and mouth, gave Billy a look. “Not as smooth as you , you little toady.”

Billy’s handsome if not brilliant face clouded. He said, “What’s a toady?”

Astrogator Pam Stokes, who had been lost in study of her ancestral slide rule, wondering if it had been damaged in the landing, looked up and said, “Thursday, I think. Back on Earth, that is.”

In the baffled silence this created, Captain Standforth mused, “It’s that tricky business of not turning the engines off until you actually touch down; that’s the part I have the trouble with.”

“If we’ve landed on the damn planet,” Ensign Kybee Benson said, struggling out of the pod that had absorbed the brunt — though not all — of the impact, “let’s take a look at it.” A social engineer, an expert in comparative societies, Ensign Benson was responsible for studying each lost colony when it was found and describing its 500 years of unsung history. Being the only one aboard the Hopeful likelier to be interested in the planet than in the landing , he was the first to cross the command deck to the view-screens, switch them on and look out at a rolling and nearly treeless savanna that looked much like the Rift Valley in Kenya in August, before the rains. Each screen showed the landscape from a different direction, all the views very similar, each with low tan hills far in the background. “Hmmmm,” said Ensign Benson.

The five other travelers in the Hopeful crowded around: Captain Standforth, tall and craggy; Pam, beautiful, brainy and blind to passion; Hester, the human fireplug; Billy, the idealist; and Councilman Morton Luthguster, portly as a plum pudding, representative of the Galactic Council, who harrumphed and said, “Fine farmland, I should think.”

“Oh, should you?” Ensign Benson snarled. He despised his shipmates, each and every. They were here because they were misfits, home base delighted to be rid of them on this endless journey; but why was he here? Furious by nature, he said savagely, “We aren’t here for real estate, Councilman. Where’s the colony ? Pam? You steered us here.”

“This is definitely the nexus,” Pam told him, the slide rule flashing in her slender fingers. “We are on the planet Matrix, fourth from the star Mohonk, gravity and air compatible with Earth—”

“It’s a big planet,” commented Ensign Benson.

“One point one nine three times the size of Earth,” Pam agreed. “Earth density to one point—”

“It’s a small colony,” the ensign interrupted.

“Oh, it’s here ,” Pam assured him, getting the idea. “This is the place. The coefficients are—”

Billy, peering at one of the view-screens, said, “I see something out there. Little boxes or something.”

Everyone peered at the same screen. Thirty yards away on the tundra were low, slender structures of some kind.

“Then let’s take a look,” Ensign Benson said.

They watched the new creatures emerge from the giant silver ship. One, two, three, four, five, six. They watched, and absorbed, and studied.

Then, for the moment, they slid deeper into their holes, drawing the earth closed above them.

The slender structures were gravestones, made of metal. “Oh, dear,” said Pam.

Ensign Benson looked around at the bare land. A slight breeze blew. “There were forty colonists,” he said. “There are thirty-seven graves.”

Captain Standforth, who had been scanning the sky — bird taxidermy was his one passion — said, “What’s that? You mean the colony never survived at all?”

“Look at the dates,” Ensign Benson told him, gesturing at the letters and numbers etched into the metal. “Not one person was born here, and none of the original colonists lasted more than four years after arrival.”

Hester said, “But they didn’t all die at once, so it wasn’t poisoned water or an attack from hostile creatures.”

Billy said, “Forty colonists and only thirty-seven graves? How come, do you suppose?”

“Well,” Ensign Benson said, being uncharacteristically patient with Billy, his natural animosity softened by the presence of all those headstones, “I suppose there wasn’t anybody around to bury the last one, and the other two could have died away from the colony. After five hundred years, you know, Billy, they’d all be gone by now, anyway.”

“I guess so,” Billy said, nodding but glancing surreptitiously toward the horizon.

Councilman Luthguster pointed at something beyond the cemetery, farther from the ship. “Is that some sort of ruin?”

It was. They approached it and found that it was at the crest of a low fold in the land, with more ruins on the slope down from them. Crumbled remnants of poured quasi-parquet flooring, stubby bits of pseudostone wall, the entire area scattered with artifacts of domesticity: pots, coat hangers, plastic picture frames. During 500 years of neglect, accumulated rust, wind and dirt had gnawed at the husk of the fledgling colony, working tirelessly to make it unexist, coming closer to that goal with every passing year.

At the bottom of the fold in the terrain, among coatless buttons and doorless handles, the crew found a sturdy metal footlocker half-buried in the earth; buried deeper on one side, indicating the direction of the prevailing wind. The locker’s catches were closed, but it wasn’t padlocked. Inside were sheets of paper that had all but rotted away, photos faded to a nearly uniform beige and what looked like a video tape, but not of a sort Ensign Benson had ever seen. Picking it up, removing the cassette from its metal box, he showed it to Hester, saying, “Any idea what this is?”