Дональд Уэстлейк: Collected Stories

It was light. Kybee drank nearcoffee and brooded at the viewscreens. More of them were out there today. A couple of thousand by now. Food would become a problem soon. And as for finding the right Pam, the right Billy…

No. It was still impossible.

Nevertheless, the comfort of despair had been wrested from him. He had no choice. The task might be impossible, but he was going to have to try it, anyway. “The tape,” he told himself. “I’ll watch it again. I’ll watch it a hundred times if I have to. Maybe there’s a clue in it, maybe there’s something…”

He sighed and finished his nearcoffee and went off to watch again the final testament of Hafter Kass.

Kybee was slapping Hesters. His hand had begun to sting as he left reddened cheek after reddened cheek in his wake, but he persisted. “Kybee!” the Hesters cried, blinking, putting their hands up to their slapped faces. “What are you doing?” they cried, or, “What was that for?” or, “What’s the big idea?”

He didn’t answer, not a one of the stinking worms. He’d left the ship, sealing the entrance behind him, carrying the only electronic key that would work with the combination he’d just created, and now he was moving among the crowd, slapping and slapping.

What a mob there was, more than ever, and how they liked to mill around. Kybee shoved Billys and Ensign Bensons out of his way, seeking out the Hesters, slapping them, slapping them, and at last , one of the Hesters yelled, “What the hell was that for?” and slugged him back.

Seated at the viewscreens, Hester watched Kybee rove through the crowd, tweaking councilmen’s noses. “The bastard’s enjoying himself,” she told the air, watching Luthguster after Luthguster recoil, fat hands flailing the air, piggy eyes filling with tears, noses reddening.

Her own cheek still stung from that hefty wallop the bastard had given her . Having now watched that poor doomed fellow, Hafter Kass, on the tape, and having had Kybee point out to her that Kass described the worms as nonviolent, she could understand that violence was the only way to find the real wolf when surrounded by sheep in wolf’s clothing, but that still didn’t excuse him for hitting so hard . It’s because he was enjoying it, that’s all.

Still, being rescued from the legion of look-alikes was worth it, no matter what the cost. It had been really frightening down there for a while, not knowing who anybody was, surrounded by piss-poor imitations of herself — why couldn’t Kybee simply have noticed that the fake Hesters were dumpier and uglier than the original? — and never knowing if the ship would up and leave, abandoning her to an entire population of Captain Standforths and Councilman Luthgusters and second-rate Hesters for the rest of her life.

(The true long-range horror hadn’t occurred to her while she was out there and probably hadn’t yet occurred to the rest of the Earthlings still trapped out there, but now that she’d seen Hafter Kass’s description of life on Matrix, she knew just how horrible it would have been and how lucky she was not to be nonviolent.)

Outside, Kybee moved off the edge of one viewscreen’s range and was picked up by another, tweaking Luthgusters left and right. All reacted in the same roly-poly fashion, pained and astonished, waving arms and legs, and Kybee kept moving. And then one Luthguster, after Kybee turned his back, yanked off a shoe, ran up behind him and whammed him over the head with the heel.

“Now,” said Hester, smiling, “why didn’t I think of that?”

Out there, Luthguster kept swinging the shoe, shouting in rage, letting out all the mad emotions created by their mad situation, while the surrounding throng backed away, like cattle slightly disturbed at their feeding. Kybee went down under the rain of blows, huddling to the ground, and the councilman started kicking the fallen social engineer with his shod foot. Kybee rolled away, tumbling a nearby Billy and a Hester like ninepins, and Councilman Luthguster pursued him, hopping on one foot, that massive belly, like Falstaff’s flacon of sack, blooping over the ground. Kybee managed to scramble to his feet and come running toward the ship, Luthguster and his furious paunch bounding along in his wake.

“There you go, Kybee,” Hester said, nodding. “That’s the way to bring him home.”

The ship’s entryway controls were at her fingertips. Across the viewscreens came Kybee at a dead run, bowling a path through the shoals of Pams and pseudo ensigns, the councilman following, bobbing like an escaped grapefruit. Up the ramp came Kybee, heelmarks on his forehead and cheeks, eyes wild, voice echoing from the intercom, “Hester! Open up! Open up!”

Her fingers hovered on the controls. Luthguster came panting up the ramp, looking now more like a lobster than a grapefruit, and gave Kybee just one more whop. Then Hester opened up.

It was breasts he tweaked on Pam. In the first place, he simply couldn’t bring himself to behave harshly toward that beautiful face or harm that beautiful nose. And in the second place, when would he ever again get the opportunity to cop a feel in a noble cause?

“Kybee! Stop that!” Pam after Pam threw up protective arms, and when he reached for the second breast, back-pedaled in horror and shame. Exactly like Pam, of course, but not good enough. On he went.

If this doesn’t work, he told himself, clutching breast after breast, I’ll just have to escalate. The thought was not untinged with a kind of anticipation.

“Kybee! Stop that! What’s got into you?”

“It’s what’s getting into you , baby,” Kybee leered, and lunged for the other breast, and this Pam slapped feebly at his lupine fingers.

Slapped? Was that meaningful? To be certain, Kybee aimed for target number three.

“I’m sorry I gave you a bloody nose, Kybee,” Pam said.

“Dad’s all wry,” Kybee told her, tilting his head back, holding many blobs of absorbent cottonique to his nose while Hester held an ice pack to the back of his neck. Councilman Luthguster stood off to one side, looking, Kybee knew, pleased with this turn of events.

“Now that I know there was nothing personal in it,” Pam went on, “I’m not upset anymore.”

Kybee rolled his eyes. Some problems remain insoluble, no matter what.

“I think it’s stopped bleeding,” Hester said, stepping back, giving him a critical look.

Kybee lowered the bloody rags from his nose, straightened, breathed experimentally and said, “OK. Back into the fray.”

“Gee whiz!” said all the Billys.

“Kybee? Did I have a fly on my nose?” asked all the captains.

“The problem is,” Kybee said, back in the ship, in serious conclave with Hester, Pam and the councilman on the control deck, “the real Billy and the real captain are also nonviolent.”

Pam said, “Kybee, we can’t just leave them there.”

Hester said, “There has to be a way.”

“Glad to hear that,” Kybee told her. “What’s the way?”

“Beats me,” Hester said.

The councilman brooded at the viewscreens, where the walking, milling simulacra still included hundreds of himself. “Ghastly out there,” he said. “To see myself in the mirror in the morning and, of course, on election posters, that’s good enough for me.”

Kybee also looked at the viewscreens. “I used to think sometimes,” he said, “I’d be really content in a world where everybody was exactly like me. Well, half like me and half like Pam. Well, like Pam, but with modifications.”

Blinking without comprehension, Pam said, “Kybee? What can you mean?”

“But now,” Kybee went on, ignoring her for one of the few times since they’d shipped out together, “I’m going to have to find a new dream. When I’m shaving in—”