Donald Westlake - SH4 - The World's A Stage

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2024-11-24 0 0 30.25KB 15 页 5.9玖币

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THE WORLD’S A STAGE, the fourth of the Starship Hopeful stories, was written in October of 1982,

and published in Playboy in July, 1984. By this point, I knew I had a series, and I pretty much knew how

it worked. The misfit crew of the Starship Hopeful would visit a new planet in every story , where the

‘civilization’ they’d find would be a distillation of one aspect of human life. Gambling in the first story, war

in the second, religion the third, and now - tara tara! - the thee-ay-tah!

Enjoy.

THE WORLD'S A STAGE

by Donald Westlake

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, and measled with the colonies of Man.

Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundreds 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 millenium, those colonies, young and struggling when last heard from,

had had no contact with the rest of humanity.

The Galaxy 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.

THE TWO TRAMPS, picturesquely filthy, sat by the side of the road in the dusty sunshine. They were

dressed in more rags than seemed absolutely necessary given the mildness of the weather; and while one

of them mused upon life more or less audibly, the other removed a battered, scruffy boot and frowned

mistrustfully into it, as though expecting to find something alive in there. He sighed. He blew into the boot.

He sighed. He put the boot on. He took it off again. He turned to his musing, muttering companion and

said, “Didi?”

“Yes?”

“What do we do now?”

“We wait.”

A kind of inner earthquake of frustration vibrated through the tramp holding the boot. With a repressed

scream, he cried, “For what?”

“For him,” Didi said. “He promised he’d meet us here, and we’re supposed to wait until---” He broke

off, gazing upward past his friends filthy forehead.

“Well?” asked the other. “Go on, go on.”

“Oh, my gosh,” said Didi. His voice, his manner, even his facial appearance, all changed.

“What is it?” asked his friend, turning to look.

The two tramps stared upward at the slowly descending spaceship, a great silver corncob lowering

through the empty air. “It’s Godot,” Didi whispered in awe. He finally got here.

Inside the spaceship, 27 birds watched Pam Stokes, astrogator, beautiful and brainy but blind to passion,

play with her ancestral slide rule. The birds were all stuffed and wired to their perches around the

Hopeful’s command deck, and from the expression in their fifty four glass eyes, they didn’t like it a bit.

Or perhaps what they didn’t like was the sight of captain Gregory Standforth disemboweling yet another

bird on the control panel. Indigo ichor oozed through the dials and switches into the panels innards,

where it would make a mysterious bad smell for the next several weeks.

A tall, skinny, vague-eyed, loose wired sort of fellow, Captain Standforth was the seventh consecutive

generation of Standforths to spend his life in the service of the Galactic Patrol and the first to be terrible at

it. Much was expected of a Standforth, but in this case it was expected in vain. The Captain had had no

choice other than to follow the family footsteps into the patrol, and the patrol had to take him, but neither

had profited. All the captain wanted was to pursue his one passion, taxidermy-the stuffing of birds from

everywhere in the universe-while all the patrol wanted was to never see or hear from him again.

Thump. “Ouch!”, said the captain. As vermilion blood mixed with the indigo ichor, he put his cut

varicolored finger into his mouth, said, “oog,” took it out again and made a bad-taste grimace. “Nn”.

Turning to Pam, he said, “What was that thump? Made me cut myself.”

“Subsidance,” she said, rapidly whizzing the slide rule’s parts back and forth. “By my calculations,

ground level must have eroded seven millimeters in the last half-chiliad. Therefore, the ships computer

switched off engines before we actually---”

“Half-chiliad?” asked the captain.

“What’s a half-chiliad?”

“Five hundred years. So that’s why we thumped when we landed.”

“Landed? You mean we’ve arrived somewhere?”

“Yes, sir.”

Captain Standforth looked around at his birds. They looked back. “I wonder where we are,” he said. “I

wonder what kind of birds they have here.”

“Wardrobe! Wardrobe!”

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Donald Westlake - SH4 - The World's A Stage

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