Donald Westlake - SH2 - Interstellar Pigeon

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 30.41KB 14 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

INTERSTELLAR PIGEON

by Donald Westlake

The natives didn't name their planet Casino for nothing - the crew members

of Galactic Spaceship Hopeful were losing their shirts.

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.

Why me?

Watching Captain Gregory Standforth sit at his desk and -- stuff yet another bird -- this one a

blue-beaked yellow-backed Latter Sneezer from Degeb IV -- Why me? wondered Ensign Kybee

Benson, not for the first time. What flaw is there in me that I don't suspect? Why did they choose ME?

There was no question why the Galactic Council had chosen Captain Standforth to lead this one-way trip

into obscurity. Just look at him now: a tall, skinny, mild-eyed fellow with his nose and fingers jammed up

that dead bird's ass, tamping the excelsior in real tight. "Got to get it in real tight," the captain said, "or the

wings'll sag." Why me? thought Ensign Benson. I'm no misfit.

Captain Standforth was, and would be the first to admit it. Were it not for the seven generations of

glorious Standforth's preceding him in the Galactic Patrol, he never would have joined up, nor would they

have taken him. Taxidermy was the only thing he really cared about, which was why strange stuffed birds

from all over the known Universe pervaded the Hopeful like an eighth plague. Everywhere you looked,

plastic eyes looked back, surrounded by feathers.

"Captain," Ensign Benson said, "we really should talk about Casino."

"In a moment."

Ensign Benson, a social engineer, an expert in comparative societies, the man whose job it was to define

each of the lost colonies once it was found, to study it and describe what it had become in its 500 years

of solitude, brimmed to overflowing with facts about Casino, the first colony they were to visit. The name

itself, Casino, had been a brave, irony; the colonists had been a group of compulsive gamblers, who had

joined to flee the temptations of society. What had they become in the past 500 years? "Captain-"

"This is the most delicate moment, Ensign Benson." The captain inserted a glittering green eye; balefully,

one-eyed, the Latter Sneezer glared at Ensign Benson.

Why me?

"There's a spaceship coming!"

"Six to five it crashes."

Astrogator Pam Stokes, beautiful, brainy and blind to passion, entered the captain's office to find the

captain stuffing yet another bird and Ensign Benson 'hopping tip and down on a nearby chair, rather

birdlike himself. "Captain," Pam said, "we're about to land, sir."

The captain looked up, startled, the one-eyed bird impaled on his right hand. "Land! Why?"

"Because we're here, sir."

"Here?" The captain looked at the bird, which looked back.

"Casino, Captain," Ensign Benson said. "I've been trying to tell you."

Pam nodded. "That's right, sir. Fourth planet of the star Niobe." Whipping out her ever-present slide rule,

she said, "Fifteen sixteenths Earth's size, one point oh oh seven six Earth's density, fifteen point one six--"

Rising, the captain said, "Yes, yes, yes, Astrogator, thank you very much."

"Just trying to keep you informed, sir. I may say, as astrogator, I had quite some time finding this spot.

Celestial drift, you know."

The captain, removing the bird from his fingers and edging toward the door, said, "Is that right?"

Absorbed in her slide rule, Pam said, "Given a mean deviation of point oh seven five--"

"I'll just go supervise the landing," the captain said and left with the bird.

"Alter for nebular attraction," Pam mumbled, working the math, "on a scale of--"

Ensign Benson was beside her now. Stroking her smooth, tanned forearm with the tiny golden hairs all

along its rounded length, he said, "I know a couple of mean deviations myself."

"Oh, hello, Kybee," she said, gave him a distracted smile and went away to think about the math.

On a grassy field not far from town, the spaceship landed, light as a feather (automatic pilot). A dozen

citizens of Casino approached the great gleaming sausage and watched in admiration as an oval door in

its side slid away to permit a ladder slowly to descend. Down that ladder, smiling heroically in the

sunlight, resplendent in his Galactic Patrol uniform, came Lieutenant Billy Shelby, Hopeful's handsome,

idealistic second in command. Pausing two steps from the bottom, he raised his hand like a Roman

centurion and cried, "Hail, Casinomen! We come in peace!"

A citizen approached. "Seven to two," he said, "you don't know what day it is."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Donald Westlake - SH2 - Interstellar Pigeon.pdf

共14页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Donald Westlake - SH2 - Interstellar Pigeon

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: