Collected Stories

by Donald E. Westlake

  Pam said, “Kybee, this is just a scheme of yours; I can tell.”

  “Gosh, Kybee,” said Billy.

  “My dignity,” said the councilman.

  “Precisely!” Ensign Benson said. “Your dignity is what keeps the probabilities all lined up in a neat and civilized and predictable row. It’s the only way were ever going to get back onto the Hopeful. Think about it.”

  They thought about it. They hated it. But that, of course, was the point.

  “Hidy, Kybee. The captain feeling better?”

  “Oh, we’ll all adapt, Hank.”

  “What’s that you’re watching?”

  “Just a little video I made of the captain shooting birds. Never saw one of these machines?”

  “No, sir, can’t say I have.”

  “They’re easy to operate. Come here, Ill show you.”

  One nice thing about knowing the future, you never have to worry about a rain date for your parade. The sun shone bright, the bands and the marchers were respendent, and this year, thanks to the Earthpeople, there would be a permanent record of the whole affair! Hank Carpenter, armed with the video camera, stood atop a wagon right down by the Peace Memorial, ready to tape the whole show.

  And a real nice show it was. The South Side High School band led off, in uniforms of scarlet and white, and the North Side High School band, in blue and gold, brought up the rear. In between were contingents of the 4-H, the Grange, the police department, bowling leagues, volunteer firemen, a giggle of beauty-contest winners in a bedecked surrey; oh, all sorts of interesting things.

  Including the crew of the Hopeful. Naked.

  “Keep taping!” Ensign Benson yelled at Hank Carpenter. “Tape! Tape!” And he did, and they all looked at the tape later, and it was still impossible to believe.

  What an array of uncomfortable-looking people. What a variety of flesh was here on display. What an embarrassment all the way around.

  Captain Standforth and Hester appeared first, side by side but determinably separate. The captain sort of vaguely squinted and blinked, pretending to do difficult math problems in his head, while Hester marched along like an angry rhinoceros, daring anyone to tell her she was naked. The captain in the buff looked more mineral than animal: an angular, gawky armature, a scarecrow that wouldn’t scare a wren, an espalier framework for no known tree. Hester, on the other hand, merely became more Hester: chunky, blocky, squared-off.

  A rosy astrogator came next: Pam Stokes blushing from nipple to eyebrow, accompanied by an ashen legislator. Councilman Luthguster, shaped very much like the balloons being carried by some of the younger spectators, appeared to have been drained by a vampire before leaving the house that morning. Upon this pallid sausage casing, the hobnails of embarrassed perspiration stood out in bold relief. Would he faint, or would he make it to Main Street? He suffered from the loss of his pomposity much more severely than the simple loss of his clothes.

  Pam suffered from the loss of clothes. She was beautiful, but she didn’t want to be beautiful; she was graceful, but she didn’t want to be graceful; she was a treat, but the last thing on Earth-or Figulus-that Pam Stokes wanted to be was a treat. Her expression was like that sometimes seen in dentist’s offices.

  Finally there came Billy and the ensign, and here the mark of the ensign’s determination really showed itself. Although it would certainly be embarrassing for him or for Billy to appear naked in public, it wouldn’t, in truth, be quite the horror it clearly was for the others, so for himself and Billy the ensign had escalated the attach.

  They were dancing.

  Arm in arm, the ensign leading, Billy following pretty well, they turned and turned in great loops, waltzing to John Philips Sousa’s The Thunderer-not impossible but not easy.

  Nobody stopped them; nobody knew what to do but stand and gape. For two blocks past the astounded populace, down Broadway from Elm past Church to Main-that being the reach of the video camera-the captain paced, the chief engineer plodded, the councilman trudged, the astrogator inadvertently and unwillingly promenaded and the lieutenant and the ensign waltzed. At Main, surrounded by a populace still immobilized by disbelief, they broke and ran for it, around behind the crowd, through back yards and alleys and away. With many a hoarse cry and broken gasp, this unlikely herd thundered all the way home, up the stoop, across the porch, into the house and slammed the door.

  Knock, knock.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Hank Carpenter, Miss Hanshaw. You folks all right in there?”

  “Go away.”

  “It’s been five days; you can’t just----”

  Hank waited. He went over and sat on the porch railing and looked out at the sunny day. The rubbernecks who had filled this street at first had given up by now, and everything was back to normal. But what had it all been about, anyway?

  This was one of those rare moments when the charts didn’t help. If it were simple madness, of course, that would explain a lot, since insanity can play merry hob with your probabilities, but somehow Hank didn't believe lunacy was the answer.

  The front door opened and Ensign Benson came out, carrying a thin folder. He shut the door behind himself, gave Hank a quick, nervous smile, then frowned out at the street.

  “They’ve all gone,” Hank assured him.

  “I didn’t know it would be quite that I bad,” the ensign said. “It does something to your nervous system to be naked in front of that many people.” He had a twitchy look to him and didn’t quite meet Hank’s eye.

  “What we can't figure out is why you did it.”

  “So you could let us go, of course.”

  Hank smiled in confusion. “You mean, we’d take pity on you because you lost your minds?”

  “We didn’t lose our minds, just our clothes. You’ve got it all on tape, right?”

  “I don’t know why you’d want such a thing,” Hank said, “but yes, we do.”

  “Look at this,” Ensign Benson said, extending the folder.

  Hank took it, opened, found himself reading a report to the Galactic Council about the lost colony known as Figulus.

  “Says here, the settlement was abandoned. Colonists long dead. Some unanticipated poison in the atmosphere.”

  “Not suited for human life,” the ensign said. “As soon as we're aboard ship, that’s the report we’ll send.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re keeping us here because you’re afraid well spread the news about you and a lot of people will show up to learn all about the future.”

  Hank nodded. “Destroying our future in the process.”

  “If anybody did arrive, the ensign said, “you’d blame us. You’d probably be mad enough to show that tape.”

  “I’m beginning to see the light,” Hank said. “You were looking for a way to bust loose from the probabilities.”

  “That’s right. What could we do that we wouldn’t do?”

  “Walk down Broadway at high noon, naked, with a brass band.”

  “As long as you have that tape,” Ensign Benson said, “we’ll do anything-anything-to keep the rest of the human race away from here.” Wanly he smiled. “And if this doesn’t work,” he said, “if you still won’t let us go, we’ll just have to get more improbable.”

  “How?” Hank asked, a bit wide-eyed.

  “I don’t know yet,” the ensign told him. “I hope I never know. How about you?”

  Out, out, out across the illimitable void soared the Hopeful. Its crew, garbed in every piece of clothing they owned and not looking one another in the eye, had left Figulus without even having their charts done. They knew nothing of the future.

  Just as well.

  HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU

  ________________________

  When the sky filled with the roar of the descending ship, they all slithered into their holes to wait.

  “You know,” Captain Standforth said, unclenching his fingers from the controls as the ship shuddered its last and sagged onto the ground, �
��I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this landing business.”

  Groans answered him. Chipper young Lieutenant Billy Shelby, the person who normally dealt with landings – Captain Standforth was apt to take the term planetfall literally – managed a cheerful smile and even injected a little perkiness into his voice as he said, “Much better, sir. Why, this was quite smooth!”

  Chief Engineer Hester Hanshaw, blunt in body, mind and mouth, gave Billy a look. “Not as smooth as you, you little toady.”

  Billy’s handsome if not brilliant face clouded. He said, “What’s a toady?”

  Astrogator Pam Stokes, who had been lost in study of her ancestral slide rule, wondering if it had been damaged in the landing, looked up and said, “Thursday, I think. Back on Earth, that is.”

  In the baffled silence this created, Captain Standforth mused, “It’s that tricky business of not turning the engines off until you actually touch down; that’s the part I have the trouble with.”

  “If we’ve landed on the damn planet,” Ensign Kybee Benson said, struggling out of the pod that had absorbed the brunt – though not all – of the impact, “let’s take a look at it.” A social engineer, an expert in comparative societies, Ensign Benson was responsible for studying each lost colony when it was found and describing its 500 years of unsung history. Being the only one aboard the Hopeful likelier to be interested in the planet than in the landing, he was the first to cross the command deck to the viewscreens, switch them on and look out at a rolling and nearly treeless savanna that looked much like the Rift Valley in Kenya in August, before the rains. Each screen showed the landscape from a different direction, all the views very similar, each with low tan hills far in the background. “Hmmmm,” said Ensign Benson.

  The five other travelers in the Hopeful crowded around: Captain Standforth, tall and craggy; Pam, beautiful, brainy and blind to passion; Hester, the human fireplug; Billy, the idealist; and Councilman Morton Luthguster, portly as a plum pudding, representative of the Galactic Council, who harrumphed and said, “Fine farmland, I should think.”

  “Oh, should you?” Ensign Benson snarled. He despised his shipmates, each and every. They were here because they were misfits, home base delighted to be rid of them on this endless journey; but why was he here? Furious by nature, he said savagely, “We aren’t here for real estate, Councilman. Where’s the colony? Pam? You steered us here.”

  “This is definitely the nexus,” Pam told him, the slide rule flashing in her slender fingers. “We are on the planet Matrix, fourth from the star Mohonk, gravity and air compatible with Earth---“

  “It’s a big planet,” commented Ensign Benson.

  “One point one nine three times the size of Earth,” Pam agreed. “Earth density to one point---“

  “It’s a small colony,” the ensign interrupted.

  “Oh, it’s here,” Pam assured him, getting the idea. “This is the place. The coefficients are---“

  Billy, peering at one of the viewscreens, said, “I see something out there. Little boxes or something.”

  Everyone peered at the same screen. Thirty yards away on the tundra were low, slender structures of some kind.

  “Then let’s take a look,” Ensign Benson said.

  They watched the new creatures emerge from the giant silver ship. One, two, three, four, five, six. They watched, and absorbed, and studied.

  Then, for the moment, they slid deeper into their holes, drawing the earth closed above them.

  The slender structures were gravestones, made of metal.

  “Oh, dear,” said Pam.

  Ensign Benson looked around at the bare land.

  A slight breeze blew.

  “There were forty colonists,” he said.

  “There are thirty-seven graves.”

  Captain Standforth, who had been scanning the sky – bird taxidermy was his one passion – said, “What’s that? You mean the colony never survived at all?”

  “Look at the dates,” Ensign Benson told him, gesturing at the letters and numbers etched into the metal. “Not one person was born here, and none of the original colonists lasted more than four years after arrival.”

  Hester said, “But they didn’t all die at once, so it wasn’t poisoned water or an attack from hostile creatures.”

  Billy said, “Forty colonists and only thirty-seven graves? How come, do you suppose?”

  “Well,” Ensign Benson said, being uncharacteristically patient with Billy, his natural animosity softened by the presence of all those headstones, “I suppose there wasn’t anybody around to bury the last one, and the other two could have died away from the colony. After five hundred years, you know, Billy, they’d all be gone by now, anyway.”

  “I guess so,” Billy said, nodding but glancing surreptitiously toward the horizon.

  Councilman Luthguster pointed at something beyond the cemetery, farther from the ship. “Is that some sort of ruin?”

  It was.

  They approached it and found that it was at the crest of a low fold in the land, with more ruins on the slope down from them. Crumbled remnants of poured quasi-parquet flooring, stubby bits of pseudostone wall, the entire area scattered with artifacts of domesticity: pots, coat hangers, plastic picture frames. During 500 years of neglect, accumulated rust, wind and dirt had gnawed at the husk of the fledgling colony, working tirelessly to make it unexist, coming closer to that goal with every passing year.

  At the bottom of the fold in the terrain, among coatless buttons and doorless handles, the crew found a sturdy metal footlocker half-buried in the earth; buried deeper on one side, indicating the direction of the prevailing wind. The locker’s catches were closed, but it wasn’t padlocked. Inside were sheets of paper that had all but rotted away, photos faded to a nearly uniform beige and what looked like a video tape, but not of a sort Ensign Benson had ever seen. Picking it up, removing the cassette from its metal box, he showed it to Hester, saying, “Any idea what this is?”

  “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.

  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 prolong
ed, 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.”