Дональд Уэстлейк: Collected Stories

He stopped. He frowned at the viewscreens. “Could they?”

The others all sensed the change in him. Hester said, “Kybee, do you have something?”

“I don’t know,” Kybee turned toward the others, his manner intent but distracted, as though he were already outside, doing whatever it was. He said, “When we came aboard, they put a lot of sports equipment on, didn’t they? Bats and balls and rackets and all that.”

“Cluttering up my storage space,” Hester grumped.

Kybee nodded at her. “Still there, eh? Hester, get me a ball. A tennis ball or something.”

“Hey, Billy! Catch! Hey, Billy! Toss it back!”

“Hey, Billy! Catch! Hey, Billy! Toss it back!”

“Hey, Billy! Catch! Hey, Billy! Toss it back!”

“Hey, Billy! Catch!”

And finally, out of a sea of lefties, one Billy caught it right-handed. Beaming, holding it up, this Billy called, “Want me to throw it back?”

“No, Billy, “ Kybee said. “ You come along with me.”

“Mirror image,” Kybee explained to the others. “There was just a chance, when they did their imitations, they wouldn’t match us, they’d mirror us. Do what they see us doing, which isn’t exactly like doing what we do.”

“Gee,” Billy said, smiling at everybody, delighted and relieved to be back in the ship, “I don’t know how you think of things all the time, Kybee.”

Kybee looked at him. “Variety is good,” he said. “I’d be unhappy if everybody was the same as me. I’ll have to keep reminding myself of that.” He tossed the yellow tennis ball into the air and caught it. “And now,” he said, “to bring in the captain.”

“Oops. Sorry, Kybee,” said all the captains.

“And now the problem is,” Kybee told the others back in the ship, “the captain can’t catch a ball thrown at him. And even if he could, he isn’t sure if he’s right- or left-handed.”

Sonorously, Councilman Luthguster said, “He’s ambidextrous, you mean.” (He loved to say long words he could wrap his tongue around.)

“That’s what I mean,” Kybee agreed. “He’s equally inept with either hand.” He looked at the viewscreens. Out there, in the lengthening shadows of afternoon, the false crew members milled and trailed along, all except the Captain Standforths. One by one, they were moving toward the ship, looking up at the monitor cameras, waving and gesturing. Their thin reedy voices began to be heard on the open intercom: “Kybee? Billy? How about me out here? Hester? Hi, don’t forget about me! Hello?”

Pam stood beside Kybee, looking at the viewscreens. “Kybee? How can we save him?”

“I wish I knew,” Kybee said.

They turned the intercom off that night, but in the morning the captains were still there, crowding around the ship, more of them than ever. The numbers of the other faux crewpersons in the background seemed not to have increased by much, as though it were harder to create imitations once the original was gone, but the Captain Standforths had doubled overnight.

“More and more of them,” Kybee said grimly. “How are we ever going to sift through that mob?”

“O Captain, my captain,” Pam said, and sighed.

“The captain of his soul,” Hester said, and sighed.

“A captain courageous,” the councilman said, but didn’t sigh.

“And a right good captain, too,” Billy said, and brushed away a tear.

“Gimme a break,” Kybee said and went away to his own room to think.

“Kybee? Pam? Anyone at all?”

It was late afternoon. Captain Standforth felt lonely, sad, tired, worried and confused as he stood with all these bumbling fellows outside the Hopeful. Who were all these awkward people, anyway? “Why don’t you be off about your business?” he told a few nearby louts. “Go find your own ships.”

“This is my ship!” one of them announced, poking himself in the eye in his agitation.

“My ship!” cried dozens of others.

“Oh, really!” snapped the captain and raised his plaintive face to the monitor camera high on the Hopeful’s side. If only he’d caught that ball yesterday, things would be so different now. But he’d never been any good at sports. Back at the Academy–

“Captain. Listen up.”

It was Kybee’s voice, amplified over the speakers. The captain — and all these oafs around him — alertly listened up. Many of them even said, “Yes, Kybee?”

“Bad news, captain,” Kybee’s voice said.

Oh, dear, the captain thought. If only I’d caught that ball.

“There’s no way to tell which of you is real,” Kybee’s voice went on. “We can’t stay here forever. We have to leave. But if some other ship stumbled onto this place and found you, we could be vaporized for mutiny.”

Ah, thought the captain, so they can’t leave. No one wants to be vaporized.

“Tomorrow morning,” Kybee’s voice continued, “before we leave, we’re coming out to shoot all the captains. We’re sorry, Captain, but you can understand. That’s the only way we’ll be safe.”

The captain gaped at the ship, astounded and appalled. Shoot him? He looked around, and all the other captains were also astounded and appalled. Shoot them all ?

And yet, of course, Kybee wouldn’t want to risk being vaporized by the authorities. It did make an awful kind of sense.

“Oh, dear,” Captain Standforth said. So did most of the others.

Morning. Kybee and Hester went out onto the ramp, armed with heavy laser guns, and looked around at a world crawling with thousands and thousands of Pams, councilmen, Billys, Hesters and Ensign Bensons, many, many more than ever before. But not one Captain Standforth.

“By golly, Kybee,” Hester said, “you were right.”

“Of course I was,” Kybee said, though he hadn’t, in fact, been at all certain it would work. “Tell them that everybody who looks like the captain is going to get shot, then everybody who can look like somebody else will .” He pointed his laser gun at a nearby councilman, the largest available target: “Where’s the captain?”

A hundred imitations pointed. “Betrayed!” wailed the voice of Captain Standforth from the shed in which he’d taken cover.

It took quite a while to convince the captain he wasn’t going to be shot, but even then, he was too nervous to handle the take-off, so Billy did, to everybody’s relief.

“That was fun,” said a Billy, watching the great silver ship soar upward.

“Oh, I don’t know,” a Hester said. “Let’s get out of these damn shoes.” Shoez. Shooz. Shuuz. Ssshhhuuuuuu…

The fact that the state of Florida would give the odious Boy Cartwright a driver’s license only shows that the state of Florida isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. The vile Boy, execrable expatriate Englishman, handed this document across the rental-car counter at Gulfport-Biloxi Regional Airport and the gullible clerk there responded by giving him the keys to something called a Taurus, a kind of space capsule sans relief tube, which turned out on examination in the ghastly sunlight to be the same whorehouse red as the rental clerk’s lipstick. Boy tossed his disreputable canvas ditty bag onto this machine’s backseat, the Valium and champagne bottles within chattering comfortably together, and drove north.

This was not the sort of assignment the despicable Boy was used to. As by far the most shameless and tasteless, and therefore by far the best, reporter on the staff of the Weekly Galaxy , a supermarket tabloid that gives new meaning to the term degenerate, the debased Boy Cartwright was used to commanding teams of reporters on assignments at the very peak of the tabloid Alp: celebrity adultery, UFO sightings, sports heroes awash in recreational drugs. The Return of Laurena Layla — or, more accurately, her nonreturn, as it would ultimately prove — was a distinct comedown for Boy. Not an event, but the mere anniversary of an event. And not in Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Miami or any of the other centers of debauchery of the American celebrity world, but in Marmelay, Mississippi, in the muggiest, mildewiest, kudzuest nasal bowel of the Deep South, barely north of Biloxi and the Gulf, a town surrounded mostly by De Soto National Forest, named for a reprobate the Weekly Galaxy would have loved if he’d only been born four hundred and fifty years later.