"Donald Westlake - SH5 - Hitch Your Spaceship To A Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westlake Donald E)

keep him from being personally antisocial; and stockily blunt Chief Engineer Hester (of the coffee)
Hanshaw, proud mistress of the engine room.

The captain wiped his lips on a toastette, then ate it. “Well,” he said to his murky band, “we’ll be landing
soon.” His mild eyes gleamed with visions of this unknown planet and the unimaginable new birds he
would soon disembowel.

Councilman Luthguster, swirling a forkful of papjack in pseudoleo, said, “What is this place we’re
coming to, Ensign Benson? What are its characteristics?”

“No one knows for sure about this one, Councilman,” the ensign told him. “The old records simply say
the colonies were a group of like-minded people whose goal was a simple life free of surprises.”

“Well, we’ll be a surprise,” the councilman said.




Councilman Luthguster said, “What’s the name of the place, Ensign Benson? I’ve noticed that the name
the colonists give their settlements frequently offers a clue to their social structure.”

“It’s called Figulus,” Ensign Benson said.

“Figulus?”

Blank looks around the table. Billy Shelby said, “Wasn’t he one of the founders of ancient Rome? Figulus
and Venus.”

“No, Billy,” said Ensign Benson.



Jim frowned skyward. “You don’t suppose they got the coordinates wrong? Landed someplace else on
Figgy?” Behind them, on the knoll where they stood, the pleasant town dreamily awaited.

“They’re dawdling over their breakfast, like as not,” Hank replied. “In fact, there they come yonder.”




“Publius Nigidius Figulus,” Ensign Benson said. “He was the most learned Roman of his age, a writer and
a statesman, died circa forty-five BC”

Billy looked sad. “Died at the circus? That’s awful.”

“Terrible,” the ensign agreed. “Figulus was most noted for his books on religion and-----”

“We’re,” Pam Stokes said, her ancestral slide rule moving like a live thing in her slender-fingered hands,
a subtle alteration simultaneously taking place in the faint aura of engine hum all about them, “here.”