"Donald Westlake - SH2 - Interstellar Pigeon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westlake Donald E)

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-"