Councilman Luthguster shook his jowly head. “Damn-fool name for a place,” he insisted “Detroit, now, that’s a name. Khartoum. Reykjavik. But J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Company?”
A tap at the frame of the open office door was followed by the cheerful, optimistic, shiny young face of Lieutenant Billy Shelby, Hopeful’s second in command, who said, “We’ve landed, sir. We’re on the ground.”
“I know what landed means,” Ensign Benson snapped. “I felt the bump. And when I’ve finished explaining the situation to the councilman, we’ll be along.”
“OK,” Billy said happily. “We’ll be waiting at the air lock. At the door.”
“I know what an air lock is.”
Billy cantered off, and Ensign Benson returned to his task. As social engineer, an expert in comparative societies, he had the job of giving Councilman Luthguster the necessary background on each colony they visited. “When this sector of the universe was colonized,” he explained, “a special cultural fund was set up to bring the arts to the far-flung outposts of Man. A theatrical troupe from Earth was offered its own settlement and a subsidy and was meant to tour the other colonies with a repertory of ancient and modern drama. Of course, contact was lost almost immediately, so the troupe never got its transportation and therefore never toured. There’s no guessing what it’s become by now.”
Luthguster pursed fat lips. “So who is this fellow J. Railsford Farnsworth?”
“Founder of the repertory company. The actor-manager-director of the troupe.”
“Do you mean,” Luthguster demanded, puffing out like an adder, “that I shall be expected to discuss affairs of state with an actor?”
“I don’t think so,” Ensign Benson said. His face was expressionless, but his tense hand had crushed the plastoak arm of his chair. “J. Railsford Farnsworth would be about five hundred and forty-three by now, and that’s old even for an actor.”
Gathered around the air lock were two thirds of the Hopeful’s complement: Captain Standforth, Astrogator Stokes, Lieutenant Shelby and Chief Engineer Hester Hanshaw, a stocky, blunt woman with a stocky, blunt manner, who was saying, “I didn’t like that thump. Bad for the engines.”
“I didn’t like it, either,” Captain Standforth told her. “Made me cut myself.” He showed her the scratched finger.
Hester, the closest thing they had to a ship’s doctor, frowned at the scratch a millisecond, then said, “Paint a little anti-rust compound on it Be good as new.”
Bemused, the captain gazed at his finger. “Are you sure?”
Ensign Benson and Councilman Luthguster joined the group, and Billy armed the councilman with his microphone. “It’s all set,” he said. “Just talk straight into it.”
“Fine.”
“Not yet,” Ensign Benson said.
The councilman stepped out onto the small platform suspended halfway up the side of the ship, and his amplified voice rolled out over a dusty landscape reminiscent of certain sections of eastern Oklahoma in early June: “Citizens of J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Com— Aak!”
Inside the ship, Ensign Benson frowned. “Aak?”
Councilman Luthguster bundled hastily back into the ship like a stockbroker into the bar car. “Those aren’t peopled They’re, they’re things!”
“Stop talking into the microphone,” Ensign Benson said.
Billy looked out the air lock. “Oh, wow! Cute bug-eyed monsters!”
“What?” Stepping impatiently out onto the platform, Ensign Benson found himself gazing down on as motley a collection of creatures as ever was lit by the same sun. Nonhuman to a fault but, as Billy had said, cute. There were tiny round puffballs with human legs and wings and yellow wigs over fairy faces. Fall, androgynous sprites in tights. Hoppers with humps. And in front of them stood a beautiful womanoid with gauzy wings and a gauzy gown and long, pointed cars, and a big, hairy manoid with a great purple cloak and long feet that curled up into spirals at the end.
Loudly enough for Ensign Benson to hear, the manoid addressed the womanoid: “I’ll met by moonlight, proud Titania.”
In the doorway, the captain said, “That one over there looks like a bird, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Captain,” said Billy.
“What, jealous Oberon!” the woman was bellowing. “Fairies, skip hence: I have forsworn his bed and company.”
“I will not talk to things!”
“Tell that nitwit,” Ensign Benson said over his shoulder, “to stop talking into the microphone.”
Below, half the thingummys and jigmarigs were skipping away, while the womanoid frowned up at Ensign Benson. “Fairies, skip hence,” she repeated, even more loudly. “That’s you, buster!”
Ensign Benson called, “Where are the human beings around here?”
“Nowhere in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” jealous Oberon told him, apparently exasperated.
“I will not talk to things!”
“All right,” disgusted Oberon said, “let’s go, troupe.” As his whatsits and flumadiddles obediently sloped off, he turned back to call, “And I suppose that spaceship of yours is an example of kitchen-sink realism!”
The entire crowd shuffled away. They appeared to be removing wings and heads and appendages as they went, almost as though they were costumes; and 40 feet from the ship, they stepped around a curtain of air, one after the other, and disappeared.
Ensign Benson blinked. “Oh, boy,” he said.
The captain and Billy came out onto the platform, the captain saying, “Where did everybody go?”
“Um,” said Ensign Benson.
“Those were really keen creatures,” Billy said.
“And what a beautiful day,” the captain said, gazing skyward, stepping back from the ship the better to view the empyrean. “Is it morning here or after— Aak!”
“Another aak,” Ensign Benson moodily said, watching the captain tumble down the stairs to land in a dusty heap at the bottom.
“Kybee, look!” said Billy.
Ensign Benson followed Billy’s pointing finger. There in the middle of the field, an invisible curtain of air was lifting to reveal what seemed to be a house with its side wall torn away. In the kitchen, a woman wearing a slip stood wearily at her ironing board. In the living room, a man in a tom T-shirt sprawled on a sofa and drank beer.
Captain Standforth had picked himself up and was brushing himself off. Ensign Benson started down the ladder, intent on finding out what was going on here, and Billy came after. Above, Pam Stokes and Hester Hanshaw came tentatively out to the platform, Pam looking at the oddly sliced house and saying, “Did they miss a mortgage payment?”
Hester said, “Maybe all their weather comes from the other side.”
“Are the things still out there?”
“They’re gone, Councilman Luthguster,” Pam said. “You can come out.”
“Tell him to leave the microphone inside,” Ensign Benson called up the ladder, then said to the captain, “Let’s go find out the story here.”
“I suppose we have to.”
The captain and the ensign and Billy crossed the dusty field, meeting part way a frazzled woman wearing many frilly-but-worn garments and carrying a carpetbag. Smiling rather maniacally at Billy and speaking with an almost impenetrable Southern accent complicated by many odd little pauses, she said, “Ah have… all-wuz depended… on the… kahnd-ness of stranjuhs.”