Дональд Уэстлейк - Collected Stories

“If that’s a tape,” Hester commented, “it’s goddam old.”

“Hester,” the ensign said, “if it’s anything in this forsaken place, it’s goddam old.”

“Well, that’s true,” Hester admitted. She took the cassette from the ensign’s hands and studied it. “Tape seems all right,” she said, “but we don’t have anything to play this on.”

“Then it doesn’t matter if it’s all right or not,” the ensign pointed out.

“Well, I’m wondering,” she said, turning the cassette in her hands, “if I could adapt it. If you read this tape the same way our machine does, with a laser, with the same kind of laser, maybe I could rewind it or something, fix the machine to take it.” She turned. “Captain?”

Captain Standforth guiltily looked down from the skies. “Yes, Hester?”

“Want me to see if I can play this tape?”

“Excellent idea,” the captain told her.

Down in the holes, they wove, they spun, they altered, they waited.

For two days, while the rest of the crew roamed and searched the surrounding area, collecting basketfuls of detritus and trash, examining remnants and ruins, learning nothing, Hester struggled with the ancient tape.

“It’s impossible,” she would announce at every meal, smudges of machine oil on cheeks and knuckles, the banked fires of frustration in her eyes. Sometimes it was impossible because the tape was not scanned in the way the machine knew how to scan; sometimes it was because the speed of the tape was unknown and d unknowable; sometimes it was because of incompatibilities at the magnetic or the electronic or simply the physical level. And always, having announced the impossibility, Hester would grumble and sigh and shake her head and wade back in to try some more.

Everyone else rooted for her, of course, partly wanting Hester to succeed simply because she was their shipmate and they wanted their shipmate to succeed, but also because they wanted to know what had happened to the Matrix colony and assumed the tape would tell them. That is, everybody but Ensign Benson assumed that. As the struggle to read the tape grew more and more prolonged, he came to believe it would turn out — if they ever did crack it — to be no damn use at all. Instead of the Rosetta tape, instead of the answer to the mystery of the colony’s failure, it would prove to be, in Ensign Benson’s private, unstated opinion, nothing more than some silly piece of entertainment, songs and dances perhaps, some piece of forgettable 500-year-old fluff brought along by the colonists to distract themselves during the long nights of their settlement’s youth. In a brand-new colony, after all, there is no downtown.

On the third day, Hester didn’t appear for lunch, she was so engrossed in the complexities of her impossible task. It was midafternoon when she emerged from the ship, looking as disgruntled as ever but with some sort of firm line of satisfaction in her jaw. She marched out across the dusty tan landscape toward Ensign Benson, who had been studying the grave markers yet again, hoping to find some inscription he hadn’t noticed before, some clue that had eluded him up till then. Reaching him, she stopped and put her stubby hands on her broad hips. “It’s there if you want it,” she announced.

He straightened, one hand to his aching back. “Hester? The tape?”

“That’s what I’ve been working on, isn’t it?”

“You found a way to play it!”

“I invented a way to play it,” Hester corrected, “and it wasn’t easy.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t.” Then, unable to keep his doubts to himself any longer, he said, “What’s on it? A sports roundup? A wet-T-shirt contest?”

“Some gloomy-looking fellow sitting g at a table,” she told him. “That’s all I know. I’m sick of that damn thing, Kybee. You want to watch it, watch it.”

“I want to watch it,” he agreed.

“It’s in there, in my workroom next to the engine room,” she told him. “Just push the green button. It’s not the cleanest picture you’ve ever seen, but you can make it out.”

Doubtful, he said, “You don’t want to operate it yourself?”

“I don’t want to be anywhere near it,” Hester told him. “Not for a while. Go ahead, take a look.”

They were nearly ready. They slithered and groped toward the surface, moving unfamiliar parts, tiny clods of dirt dropping down past their shuuz. Shooz. Shoez. Shoes.

A terrible picture, with green horizontal lines of interference and a pink glow around every object. A raspy, furry buzz obscured the sound track. Ensign Benson leaned forward, squinted and listened.

“I am Hafter Kass,” said the frowning, bulky, steep-shouldered, despairing man seated at the black plastic table, elbows and forearms on the table before him, fingers nervously twining. Behind him was a blank wall with a closed door in it. “I am the real Hafter Kass,” the man said, leaning forward, staring intensely at the camera. Then rage broke through. “Do you hear me? The real Hafter Kass! Goddam it, the real one!”

“I believe you,” Ensign Benson murmured. “Honest, I do.”

As though reassured, Hafter Kass subsided into his chair. He was about 40, wearing a rough plaid old-fashioned tunic. He lifted a shaking hand to rub his mouth, then said, “Whoever you are, if anybody ever sees this, get off Matrix. Get off now ! Before—”

He stopped and looked quickly over his shoulder, then back at the camera. “Have to get hold of myself,” he said.

“Good idea,” agreed Ensign Benson.

“We arrived three years ago,” Kass went on, “and almost immediately lost contact with the mother ship. That’s the worst of it, knowing there won’t be any help, ever. Not ever. Stuck here, doomed here—”

Again, Kass visibly brought himself under control. “They didn’t come out right away,” he said. “The… the things . But then they— No, wait, I’m not making any sense.”

“True,” Ensign Benson said.

“About two weeks after we landed,” Kass said, voice trembling, “they appeared. Creatures that looked exactly like us. Like specific ones of us.” He gestured toward the door behind him. Out there, hundreds of Hafter Kasses. Hundreds of Magla Damerons. Hundreds of—” He ran both hands through thinning hair. “Their clothing is exactly like ours, they look exactly like us, they have some kind of low-level telepathy, so they have our memories, our gestures, our expressions. Stee Venking, our zoographer — well, amateur zoographer — anyway, he says these creatures developed this as a defense against predators. Become the predator and it can’t eat you without being a cannibal.”

Kass gestured helplessly, looking around, then back at the cameras. “At first, we didn’t realize the horror of it. But then we found out what it means. You never know if you’re talking to a human being like yourself or one of them . You’re alone. Every one of us is alone, surrounded by thousands of… whatever they are.” He shook his head. “Well, we know what they are. If you kill one, it reverts to its real shape, a kind of fat eight-foot-long worm.”

“Ugh,” said Ensign Benson.

“There will never be a child born in this colony,” Kass went on. “How could any of us, any of us human beings, go to bed with — Never knowing if— That’s a part of the creatures’ defense mechanism, too. They make the predators die out, cease to reproduce.”

A chill ran through Ensign Benson at that; a life without even the possibility of sex? Couldn’t you just go along with what you saw, if what you saw was built the way, uh…

But then he frowned, thinking it through. What you saw might be shaped any way at all, but if you knew the odds were hundreds to one that the person in bed with you was really an eight-foot-long worm, even the horniest human being would begin to lose enthusiasm. Bad news.