en assured it. "We'll just--" he shrugged, his
dreams of escape forever blighted--"just have to buy the ship from the
IEE(E), that's all."

"Right you are, sir," the first officer agreed. "We must club together,
every man Jack of us, and buy her. Him. It. That's the only decent thing
to do."

"Perhaps they won't sell," Harkaway worried. "Maybe--"

"Oh, they'll sell, all right," Iversen said wearily. "They'd sell the
chairman of the board, if you made them an offer, and throw in all the
directors if the price was right."

"And then what will we do?" the first officer asked. "Once the ship has
been purchased, what will our course be? What, in other words, are we to
do?"

It was Bridey who answered. "We will speed through space seeking,
learning, searching, until you--all of you--pass on to higher planes
and, leaving the frail shells you now inhabit, occupy proud, splendid
vessels like the one I wear now. Then, a vast transcendent flotilla, we
will seek other universes...."

"But we don't become spaceships," Iversen said unhappily. "We don't
become anything."

"How do you know we don't?" Smullyan demanded, appearing on the
threshold. "How do you know what we become? Build thee more stately
spaceships, O my soul!"

Above all else, Iversen was a space officer and dereliction of duty
could not be condoned even in exceptional circumstances. "Put him in
irons, somebody!"

"Ask Bridey why there were only forty-five spaceships on his planet!"
the doctor yelled over his shoulder as he was dragged off. "Ask where
the others went--where they are now."

But Bridey wouldn't answer that question.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Once a Greech, by Evelyn E. Smith

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