Ole Doc Methuselah (11 page)

Four
hours later, at the main spaceport, Ole Doc finished giving his orders to the
departing crews. They were men of space and they knew their galaxies. They
listened reverently to the commands of a Soldier of Light, painted their
clothing and helmets as he told them, fixed their compartments at his orders
and then began the loading of the suddenly docile slaves.

In
the semidarkness of the subsurface hangars, a few moments before the first ship
would burst out into the freedom of space, on course for Sirius Sixty-eight,
Ole Doc nodded to the
cithw.

The
ancient one would have shaken Ole Doc's hand but Ole Doc adroitly avoided it,
smiling through his visor.

“We
are grateful,” said the ancient one. “You have delivered us, Soldier of Light,
and to you we shall build a shrine so that all our people may know. To you we
shall send prayers as to any other god. You have delivered us.”

Ole
Doc smiled. And from his kit he took a certificate, brilliant yellow, of
eternium satin. It stated:

Quarantine!

Know all wanderers of space, all captains of
ships, generals of armies, ministers of governments, princes, kings and rulers
whatsoever that this Planet Sirius Sixty-eight has been declared in perpetual
quarantine forever and that no inhabitant of this planet is to depart from it
for any cause or reason whatsoever until the end of time.

By my hand and seal, under the watchfulness of
God, by the power invested in me, so witness my command:

ODM
Soldier of Light

“Enshrine
this,” said Ole Doc when he had explained it. “Enshrine this and forget the
rest. And show it to all who would come for you and be deluded by your manlike
appearance into thinking you could be slaves. None will violate it, for the men
who conquer space are not the men who rule its petty planets and they know.
Goodbye, then. God bless you.”

The
ancient one clutched at the hem of his cloak and kissed it and then,
certificate securely clutched, boarded the first ship.

Six
minutes later the port was empty and the slaves were gone.

But
the work of Ole Doc was not yet done and through sixteen wearisome hours he
labored over the inhabitants of the city who had contacted the slaves even
indirectly. Fortunately it took but a short time to correct, with proper rays,
all the effects that might have been made.

Those
who were almost dead, even those, returned to health and strode away and Ole
Doc, with a tired smile, watched the last of them go. And then he signaled
Hippocrates to gather up the immense weight of equipment and take it to the
Morgue
.

George
Jasper Arlington, there on the steps where the station had been set up, looked
with awe at Ole Doc.

“I
never met one of you guys before,” said Arlington. “I guess I must have been
mistaken. I thought you were just some kid even if I'd always heard about
Soldiers of Light. They sure take you in young.”

“They
do at that,” said Ole Doc, seven hundred and ninety-two Earth years young.

“Can't
you tell me more about what was wrong? So maybe I could avoid it next time?”

“I
don't mind telling you,” said Ole Doc, “now that they've gone. Slavery is a
nasty thing. It is an expensive thing. The cheapest slave costs far too much in
dignity and decency. For men are created to do better things than enslave
others. You'll work out your industries some better way, I know.”

“Oh,
sure. You got a swell idea. But can't you tell me what was wrong?”

“Why,
I don't mind,” said Ole Doc. “It was a matter of metabolism. All creatures,
you know, haven't the same metabolism. They run on various fuels. In the galaxies
we've found half a hundred different ones in use by plants, animals and
sentient beings. My man there runs, weirdly enough, on gypsum. Others run on silicon. You and I
happen to run on carbon, which is, after all, a rather specialized element.
Earth just got started that way. Your slaves had a new one. I knew it as soon
as I saw that healed cancer.”

“Healed?”

“Yes.
Only the woman was healed too well.”

“I
don't get it.”

“Well,”
said Ole Doc, “you will. There was a fine reason not to shoot the Kufra people
or to keep them.”

“Well?”

“Why,
they had a very efficient metabolism which accounted for their great weight and
physical composition, also for their endurance and their apparent small need of
food. They,” said Ole Doc quietly, “had a plutonium metabolism.”

“A
plu . . . oh my God!”

“On
their planet, so close to the Sirius twin, everything is upper scale and
plutonium is the carbon of higher range. So you couldn't have shot them or
buried them in mass graves, you see. They were, I think, rather expensive
slaves.”

George
Jasper Arlington came out of his daze. In a voice of hushed respect he said,
“Is there anything I can give you?”

“Nothing,”
said Ole Doc. And then, “Oh, yes! You have Mizar musk here. I'll take a bottle
of it for a friend.”

Which
was how Miss Rogers received a full hogshead of Mizar musk and why the Soldiers
of Light, wandering through a thousand galaxies, bear to this day the right to
forbid the transportation of slaves from anywhere to anywhere on the pain of
any one of those peculiar little ways they have of enforcing even their most
capricious laws.

The Great Air Monopoly

Ole
Doc sat in the cool sunlight of Arphon and pulled at a fragrant pipe.
The
Morgue,
his ship-laboratory, sat in lush grass up to its belly
beside the sparkling lake and from its side came out an awning to make a
stately pavilion for the master.

Sun
¹²
was thirty
degrees high and Arphon's autumn sucked hungrily at the warmth, even as Ole Doc
sucked at the pipe. He was getting away with something with that pipe. His
little super-gravitic slave Hippocrates was bustling around, all four hands
busy, now and then coming to a full stop to lower his antennae at Ole Doc in
disapproval. It was not of his master that he disapproved, it was the pipe.

“What
if it is his birthday?” growled Hippocrates. “He shouldn't. He said he
wouldn't. He promised me. Nicotine,
ugh!
And three whole days until he
takes his treatment. Nicotine on his fingers, poisoning him; nicotine in his
lungs. Poison, that's what it is. In the pharmacopoeia . . . !!” And he
rattled off a long, gruesome list of poisons, for, once going, his
phonograph-recordwise mind went on into Nilophine, Novocain and Nymphodryl.
Suddenly he realized where all this was heading and, in anger with himself now
as well as Ole Doc, got back to work with his birthday party preparations. They
were very intricate preparations. After all, there had to be nine hundred and
five candles on that cake.

Ole
Doc paid his little slave no heed. He sat in the sunlight and puffed his pipe
and occasionally made intricate calculations on his gold cuff—his filing case
was full of torn cuffs containing solutions which would have rocked even his
brothers of the Universal Medical Society, much less the thousand and five
humanoid systems in this one galaxy.

He
didn't hear the clanking chains or the bark of the guards on the march, even
though they came closer with every second and would pass hard by the ship. It
was nothing to Ole Doc that Arphon was a boiling turmoil of revolt and murder.
In the eight hundred and eighty years since he had graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Maryland, First
Continental District, Earth, Orbit Three, Sun
¹
,
Rim Zone, Galaxy
¹
,
Universe—or 1, 316
⁰
,
1 m. ly hub
¹
,
264–89, sub-3
²⁸
,
which will find it for you on the space charts if you are going there—he had
seen everything, done everything, felt everything, tasted everything, been
everything including a messiah, a dictator, a humanoid animal in a glass dome,
and a god, and there were few things left to amaze or interest him.

He
supposed someday he would crack up or get shot or forget his regular youth
treatments for a month and wind up in the quiet crypt where sat the nine
hundred coffins of black ebony and gold containing all the mortal remains of
Soldiers of Light who had departed the service in the only way possible and whose
brothers had carefully brought them home.

He
calculated from time to time and filled his pipe. After a while, when dinner
was over, he'd go to the lake, make an artificial dusk and try out his battery
of flies on the trout. Just now he was calculating.

It
had come to him that morning that negative could be weighed and if this were
so, then it could be canned and, if that were true, he could undoubtedly
surprise his colleagues at the Center some two hundred million light-years away
by making painless amputations so that new limbs could be grown.

He
had just come up to his ninety-sixth variable when Hippocrates heard the chain
gang. The little slave was ashamed of himself for being too busy or too
provoked to heed sounds audible to him these past sixteen and two-tenths
minutes.

Hippocrates
jumped to the panel, making the
Morgue
rock with his great weight, and
four-handedly threw on a combination of switches which utterly camouflaged the
Morgue,
screened Ole Doc without making him invisible, trained outward a brace of 600-mm
blasters rated at a thousand rounds a second, and turned down the oven so that
his cake wouldn't burn. These four importances attended to, Hippocrates hung
invisible in the door and eyed the column with disfavor as it came in sight.

Ole
Doc saw it at last. It would have been very difficult to have avoided it,
seeing that the vanguard—a huge Persephon renegade—would momentarily stumble
against the screen, the limit of which he was paralleling.

It
was a weird sight, that column. The lush grass bent under white human feet and
became stained with red. Clothing ripped to nothing, eyes sunken and haunted,
bent with iron fetters and despair, the hundred and sixteen people captive
there appeared like shades just issued forth from hell for a bout with Judgment
Day.

The
guards were brutish humanoids,
eugenicized
for slave tending.
And this was odd because Ole Doc himself, a hundred—or was it fifty—years
before, had thought the practice stopped by his own policing. These ape-armed,
jaguar-toothed devils were like humans mad with a poisonous stimulant or like
Persephons dragged from their pits and injected with satanic human
intelligence. Their pointed heads were as thick as helmets, their necks were
collared with an owner's mark, their shoulders and shaggy loins girded about
with blasters and brass cases, and their elephant-pad feet were shoed in
something resembling spittoons. Whoever owned and controlled that crew, who in
turn controlled these human slaves, must be a very rough lad himself.

Ole
Doc raised a microglass to his eye and read the collar brand. It wasn't a man's
name, it was a commercial company stamp: “Air, Limited.”

Maybe
they would have gone on by and nothing whatever would have been written in the
Morgue
's
log. But then Ole Doc saw her.

She
was slight, but strong enough to bear this iron. She was curved just so and
thus. And her eyes and nose and mouth made a triangle, just . . . well, and her
hair flowed away from her face and down her back.

Ole
Doc sat up and the pipe dropped unheeded to the ground. He looked harder. The
lines before and behind her vanished. The guards vanished. The grass, the
sunlight, all Arphon, vanished. And there was this girl. Ole Doc stood up and
his knees wobbled a little, which was odd because Ole Doc was in a physical
recondition far superior to most men of twenty-five.

She
saw him and for an instant, as she looked and he looked, broke her stride. The
slave behind her was old and stumbled. The slave ahead was jerked back by his
collar. The Persephon humanoid whirled off the screen he had just bumped and
came around to see the tangle. And down came his brass rod.

It
never touched the young lady. Ole Doc had not practiced drawing and hip
shooting for about four hundred years but his hand had not forgotten. That Persephon
humanoid sort of exploded into a mist. His arm flew up sixty yards, turned at
the top and came down with a thump on the
Morgue
's screen where it lay,
dripping, suspended in air. The guard's blaster belt went off after an instant
like a chain of small cannons and blew tufts of grass in the air. The hole
smoked and the other guards came up sharply, gaped and as one, faced about with
guns drawn looking for their quarry.

It
was not quite fair. Ole Doc was out of the screen where he could shoot without
deflection and he was shooting. And even if he was a fine target it was still
not sporting. He had five Persephons only to shoot at him and then there were
four, three, two, none. And patches of grass smoked and there was silence. A
final belt cartridge exploded in a hole and there was silence again.

The
Persephons never knew they had had the honor of being shot by a Galactic
Medalist in short arms.

The
slaves stood still and shivered. A wild one had
pinked
an
old woman at the end of the column and she was sitting down staring at her own
blood. The rest were gazing miserably at this new menace who had risen up from
the tall grass. Ole Doc found he was shaking with the excitement and he
disliked finding it so, for he had often told himself that one should never get
a thrill out of killing, that being a barbarous sort of joy, and besides, at
the end there, it had been but five to one. He picked up his fallen pipe,
jammed it into his mouth and took a drag. The slaves screamed and fell back
from this smoking monster, the tobacco habit having been extinct most
everywhere for hundreds of years.

Hippocrates
grunted with disgust. He had not been able to more than slew the 600-mm into
position and had not had the satisfaction of shooting even one round.

He
came out. Shrilly shrewish, he said: “You ought to know better. I have told you
and told you and told you and you ought to know better. You'll get hurt. I've
said you'll get hurt and you will. You leave that to the bravos and
buckos
. It
says right in your code that ‘whosoever shall kill large numbers of people
solely for satisfaction shall be given a hearing and shall be fined a week's
pay, it being the mission of this Society to preserve mankind in the Galaxy—”'
He brought up short. His terror for Ole Doc had brought him into an error of
quoting the Parody Code. It actually said “ . . . kill large numbers for
experimentation shall . . .” This fussed him so that he shut off the force
screens and came down and would have carried Ole Doc straight back into the
ship for a takeoff had not his revered master been staring so hard, pipe again
forgotten.

Hippocrates
took the pipe. He looked for the objection. He knocked out the bowl. He looked
again, more wonder in his antennae waves, and slyly broke the pipe to bits.
Still no objection. Hippocrates poured out the contents of the pouch and heaved
bits and leather as far as his very powerful arms could throw. Still no
objection. Hippocrates walked all the way around Ole Doc and stared at him. His
master was staring at the line of slaves.

No,
at the center of the line. And someone there was staring as though hypnotized.

“Oh,”
moaned Hippocrates, seeing plenty of trouble. “A girl!”

Now
it was no plan of Ole Doc's to inspect Arphon of Sun
¹²
.
He was on his leisurely way to hand a deposition warrant to a System Chief over
in Sub-Rim 18, 526
^o
,
that worthy having failed to respect Section 8, Paragraph 918, of Code 94 of
the Universal Medical Society. And if Arphon had slaves like this, it was
theoretically none of his medical business.

But
she was staring at him.

He
flushed a little and looked down. But he was caped in gold and belted in
scarlet with metal wings on his yellow boots and was decent.

Hippocrates
sighed with the depth of resignation. He went over and chopped the girl out of
the line with a simple twist of the iron links, barehanded. Then he set her
bodily to one side and to the rest made pushing motions with his hands.

“Shoo!
Shoo!” said Hippocrates. “You are free. Go!”

“Nonsense,”
said the girl in a voice which made tingles go up and down Ole Doc's spine.
“How can they go anywhere? They have no money to pay the air tax.”

“The
air—” Hippocrates gaped at her. She was just a human being to him. Personally
he liked machines. “Nonsense yourself. The air's here and the air's free. Shoo!
SHOO! You stay,” he added over one of his shoulders to the girl. “Shoo!”

And
the slaves sank down and began to inch forward on their knees to the little
slave. “No, no,” they cried. “We cannot pay the tax. We have sickened already
in our homes when the air was shut off. We cannot pay. We are repossessed and
on our way to remarketing. Don't send us away! Help us! Money, money! You pay
our tax and we will work—!”

“Master!”
cried Hippocrates, scuttling back. For there were definite limits on his skills
and when these were reached he had but one god. “Master!”

But
the slaves just came on, inching forward on their knees, hands pitifully
upraised, begging and whining, and Hippocrates fell hastily back again.

“Air,
air. Buy us air! You pay our tax. Don't send us away!”

“MASTER!”

Ole
Doc paid no heed to his slave now behind him, to the pathetic cries, to the
creeping throng or to anything else on Arphon for that matter. He was still
staring at the girl and now she blushed and pulled the rags of a robe around
her.

That
did it. “Put her in the ship!” said Ole Doc. “The rest of you get out of here.
Go back to your homes! Beat it!” But this relapse into the vernacular of his
youth had no effect on the crowd. They had crept forward, leaving flattened grass
behind them.

Suddenly
an old man with a ragged gray stubble and thin chest caught at his throat, rose
up and with a wild scream cried, “Air! Air! Oh—” And down he went, full length
into the grass. Two others shortly did the same thing.

Ole
Doc sniffed alertly. He looked at his third cloak button but it was still gold
and so the atmosphere was all right. He sniffed again. “Test for air,” he said
to Hippocrates.

The
little fellow leaped gladly into the
Morgue
and in his testing brought
visibility back to the ship. He saw through the port that this startled half a
dozen of the slaves out there into fits and the fact made him feel very
superior. He, master of machinery, tested for the air. And it was good.