Once a Greech by Evelyn E. Smith (free e books to read txt) 📗
- Author: Evelyn E. Smith
Book online «Once a Greech by Evelyn E. Smith (free e books to read txt) 📗». Author Evelyn E. Smith
"I don't know what's the matter with you! I told you I handsomely forgave you for your mistake."
"But I can never forgive myself, sir—"
"Are you trying to go over my head?" Iversen thundered.
"No, sir. I—"
"If I am willing to forgive you, you will forgive yourself. That's an order!"
"Yes, sir," the young man said feebly.
Harkaway had changed back to his uniform, Iversen noted, but he looked unkempt, ill, harrowed. The boy had really been suffering for his precipitance. Perhaps the captain himself had been a little hard on him.
Iversen modulated his tone to active friendliness. "Thought you might like to know the chu-wugg turned into a hoop-snake this morning!"
But Harkaway did not seem cheered by this social note. "So soon!"
"You knew there would be a fourth metamorphosis!" Iversen was disappointed. But he realized that Harkaway was bound to have acquired such fundamental data, no matter how he interpreted them. It was possible, Iversen thought, that the book could actually have some value, if there were some way of weeding fact from fancy, and surely there must be scholars trained in such an art, for Earth had many wholly indigenous texts of like nature.
"He's a thor'glitch now," Harkaway told him dully.
"And what comes next?... No, don't tell me. It's more fun not knowing beforehand. You know," Iversen went on, almost rubbing his hands together, "I think this species is going to excite more interest on Earth than the Flimbotzik themselves. After all, people are people, even if they're green, but an animal that changes shape so many times and so radically is really going to set biologists by the ears. What did you say the name of the species as a whole was?"
"I—I couldn't say, sir."
"Ah," Iversen remarked waggishly, "so there are one or two things you don't know about Flimbot, eh?"
Harkaway opened his mouth, but only a faint bleating sound came out.
As the days went on, Iversen found himself growing fonder and fonder of the thor'glitch. Finally, in spite of the fact that it had now attained the dimensions of a well-developed boa constrictor, he took it to live in his quarters.
Many was the quiet evening they spent together, Iversen entering acid comments upon the crew in the ship's log, while the thor'glitch looked over viewtapes from the ship's library.
The captain was surprised to find how much he—well, enjoyed this domestic tranquility. I must be growing old, he thought—old and mellow. And he named the creature Bridey, after a twentieth-century figure who had, he believed, been connected with another metempsychotic furor.
When the thor'glitch grew listless and began to swell in the middle, Iversen got alarmed and sent for Dr. Smullyan.
"Aha!" the medical officer declaimed, with a casual glance at the suffering snake. "The day of reckoning is at hand! Reap the fruit of your transgression, scurvy humans! Calamity approaches with jets aflame!"
Iversen clutched the doctor's sleeve. "Is he—is he going to die?"
"Unhand me, presumptuous navigator!" Dr. Smullyan shook the captain's fingers off his arm. "I didn't say he was going to die," he offered in ordinary bedside tones. "Not being a specialist in this particular sector, I am not qualified to offer an opinion, but, strictly off the record, I would hazard the guess that he's about to metamorphose again."
"He never did it in public before," Iversen said worriedly.
"The old order changeth," Smullyan told him. "You'd better call Harkaway."
"What does he know!"
"Too little and, at the same time, too much," the doctor declaimed, dissociating himself professionally from the case. "Too much and too little. Eat, drink, be merry, iniquitous Earthmen, for you died yesterday!"
"Oh, shut up," Iversen said automatically, and dispatched a message to Harkaway with the information that the thor'glitch appeared to be metamorphosing again and that his presence was requested in the captain's cabin.
The rest of the officers accompanied Harkaway, all of them with the air of attending a funeral rather than a rebirth, Iversen noted nervously. They weren't armed, though, so Bridey couldn't be turning into anything dangerous.
Now it came to pass that the thor'glitch's mid-section, having swelled to unbearable proportions, began to quiver. Suddenly, the skin split lengthwise and dropped cleanly to either side, like a banana peel.
Iversen pressed forward to see what fresh life-form the bulging cavity had held. The other officers all stood in a somber row without moving, for all along, Iversen realized, they had known what to expect, what was to come. And they had not told him. But then, he knew, it was his own fault; he had refused to be told.
Now, looking down at the new life-form, he saw for himself what it was. Lying languidly in the thor'glitch skin was a slender youth of a pallor which seemed excessive even for a member of a green-skinned race. He had large limpid eyes and a smile of ineffable sweetness.
"By Nopus Secundus," Iversen groaned. "I'm sunk."
"Naturally the ultimate incarnation for a life-form would be humanoid," Harkaway said with deep reproach. "What else?"
"I'm surprised you didn't figure that out for yourself, sir," the first officer added. "Even if you did refuse to read Harkaway's book, it seems obvious."
"Does it?" Smullyan challenged. "Does it, indeed? Is Man the highest form of life in an irrational cosmos? Then all causes are lost ones!... So many worlds," he muttered in more subdued tones, "so much to do, so little done, such things to be!"
"The Flimbotzik were telling Harkaway about their own life cycle," Iversen whispered as revelation bathed him in its murky light. "The human embryo undergoes a series of changes inside the womb. It's just that the Flimbotzik fetus develops outside the womb."
"Handily bypassing the earliest and most unpleasant stages of humanity," Smullyan sighed. "Oh, idyllic planet, where one need never be a child—where one need never see a child!"
"Then they were trying to explain their biology to you quite clearly and coherently, you lunkhead," Iversen roared at Harkaway, "and you took it for a religious doctrine!"
"Yes, sir," Harkaway said weakly. "I—I kind of figured that out myself in these last few weeks of intensive soul-searching. I—I'm sorry, sir. All I can say is that it was an honest mistake."
"Why, they weren't necessarily pet-lovers at all. Those animals they had with them were.... By Nair al Zaurak!" The captain's voice rose to a shriek as the whole enormity of the situation finally dawned upon him. "You went and kidnaped one of the children!"
"That's a serious charge, kidnaping," the first officer said with melancholy pleasure. "And you, as head of this expedition, Captain, are responsible. Ironic, isn't it?"
"Told you all this spelled doom and disaster," the doctor observed cheerfully.
Just then, the young humanoid sat up—with considerable effort, Iversen was disturbed to notice. But perhaps that was one of the consequences of being born. A new-born infant was weak; why not a new-born adult, then?
"Why doom?" the humanoid asked in a high, clear voice. "Why disaster?"
"You—you speak Terran?" the captain stammered.
Bridey gave his sad, sweet smile. "I was reared amongst you. You are my people. Why should I not speak your tongue?"
"But we're not your people," Iversen blurted, thinking perhaps the youth did not remember back to his greechi days. "We're an entirely different species—"
"Our souls vibrate in unison and that is the vital essence. But do not be afraid, shipmates; the Flimbotzik do not regard the abduction of a transitory corporeal shelter as a matter of any great moment. Moreover, what took place could not rightly be termed abduction, for I came with you of my own volition—and the Flimbotzik recognize individual responsibility from the very first moment of the psyche's drawing breath in any material casing."
Bridey talked so much like Harkaway's book that Iversen was almost relieved when, a few hours later, the alien died. Of course the captain was worried about possible repercussions from the governments of both Terra and Flimbot, in spite of Bridey's assurances.
And he could not help but feel a pang when the young humanoid expired in his arms, murmuring, "Do not grieve for me, soul-mates. In the midst of life, there is life...."
"Funny," Smullyan said, with one of his disconcerting returns to a professional manner, "all the other forms seemed perfectly healthy. Why did this one go like that? Almost as if he wanted to die."
"He was too good for this ship, that's what," the radio operator said, glaring at the captain. "Too fine and brave and—and noble."
"Yes," Harkaway agreed. "What truly sensitive soul could exist in a stultifying atmosphere like this?"
All the officers glared at the captain. He glared back with right good will. "How come you gentlemen are still with us?" he inquired. "One would have thought you would have perished of pure sensibility long since, then."
"It's not nice to talk that way," the chief petty officer burst out, "not with him lying there not yet cold.... Ah," he heaved a long sigh, "we'll never see his like again."
"Ay, that we won't," agreed the crew, huddled in the corridor outside the captain's cabin.
Iversen sincerely hoped not, but he forbore to speak.
Since Bridey had reached the ultimate point in his life cycle, it seemed certain that he was not going to change into anything else and so he was given a spaceman's burial. Feeling like a put-upon fool, Captain Iversen read a short prayer as Bridey's slight body was consigned to the vast emptiness of space.
Then the airlock clanged shut behind the last mortal remains of the ill-fated extraterrestrial and that was the end of it.
But the funereal atmosphere did not diminish as the ship forged on toward Earth. Gloomy days passed, one after the other, during which no one spoke, save to issue or dispute an order. Looking at himself one day in the mirror on his cabin wall, the captain realized that he was getting old. Perhaps he ought to retire instead of still dreaming of a new command and a new crew.
And then one day, as he sat in his cabin reading the Spaceman's Credo, the lights on the Herringbone went out, all at once, while the constant hum of the motors died down slowly, leaving a strange, uncomfortable silence. Iversen found himself suspended weightless in the dark, for the gravity, of course, had gone off with the power. What, he wondered, had come to pass? He often found himself thinking in such terms these days.
Hoarse cries issued from the passageway outside; then he heard a squeak as his cabin door opened and persons unknown floated inside, breathing heavily.
"The power has failed, sir!" gasped the first officer's voice.
"That has not escaped my notice," Iversen said icily. Were not even his last moments to be free from persecution?
"It's all that maniac Smullyan's fault. He stored his mk'oog in the fuel tanks. After emptying them out first, that is. We're out of fuel."
The captain put a finger in his book to mark his place, which was, he knew with a kind of supernal detachment, rather foolish, because there was no prospect of there ever being lights to read by again.
"Put him in irons, if you can find him," he ordered. "And tell the men to prepare themselves gracefully for a lingering death."
Iversen could hear a faint creak as the first officer drew himself to attention in the darkness. "The men of the Herringbone, sir," he said, stiffly, "are always prepared for calamity."
"Ay, that we are," agreed various voices.
So they were all there, were they? Well, it was too much to expect that they would leave him in death any more than they had in life.
"It is well," Iversen said. "It is well," he repeated, unable to think of anything more fitting.
Suddenly the lights went on again and the ship gave a leap. From his sprawling position on the floor, amid his recumbent officers, Iversen could hear the hum of motors galvanized into life.
"But if the fuel tanks are empty," he asked of no one in particular, "where did the power come from?"
"I am the power," said a vast, deep voice that filled the ship from hold to hold.
"And the glory," said the radio operator reverently. "Don't forget the glory."
"No," the voice replied and it was the voice of Bridey, resonant with all the amplitude of the immense chest cavity he had acquired. "Not the glory, merely the power. I have reached a higher plane of existence. I am a spaceship."
"Praise be to the Ultimate Nothingness!" Harkaway cried.
"Ultimate Nothingness, nothing!" Bridey said impatiently. "I achieved it all myself."
"Then that's how the Flimbotzi spaceships were powered!" Iversen exclaimed. "By themselves—the Flimbotzik themselves, I mean—"
"Even so," Bridey replied grandly. "And this lofty form of life happens to be one which we poor humans cannot reach unassisted. Someone has to build the shell for us to occupy, which is the reason humans dwell together in fellowship and harmony—"
"You purposely got Harkaway to
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