"Donald Westlake - SH4 - The World's A Stage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westlake Donald E)

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.”