Ole Doc Methuselah (18 page)

This
had soured the military on disease warfare and not even the most enthusiastic
jingoist
would ever propose loosing that member of the
Apocalypse
, PLAGUE, against anybody, no matter the heinous
character of the trumped-up offenses.

Now
and then some would-be revolutionist would clatter his test tubes and whip up a
virus which no one could cure, and so disease warfare came to have a dark
character and now smelled to the military nose like an anarchy bomb.

Hence
sterilization. When you had a new disease you probably had a revolt brewing.
There was only one thing the military mind could evolve. This solution
consisted of shooting every human being or otherwise who was sick with
nonstandard symptoms; and should a community become stricken with a mysterious malady,
it was better the community die than a planet.

The
Universal Medical Society, operating without charter from anyone, safeguarding
the secrets of medicine against destruction or abuse, had been instrumental in
solving the original military propensity for disease warfare. Indeed, this type
of fighting was one of the original reasons why the UMS was originated, and
while there were countless other types of medicines which could be politically
used or abused, the germ and the virus still ranked high with the out-of-bounds
offenses.

Center
had contacted Ole Doc some days since, offering to throw a blanket ticket on
the Earth Galaxy and stop Garth. But in that this would mean that some millions
of isolated humans would probably starve, that business would be ruined and so
create a panic, and that the rumor, traveling far and fast, would probably
demoralize a dozen galaxies or overthrow ten thousand governments, Ole Doc
dot-dashed back that he would play out the hand. That was brash. Hippocrates
said so. It meant Ole Doc couldn't lose now without losing face with his own
fellows, the only beings in the entire Universe with whom he could relax.

And
so he let the
Morgue
idle and kept all her speakers tuned to the
jingle-jangle of space police and naval bands. That they were all in code did
not bother him. A junior officer, back at Skinner's Folly, had gained a healed
stomach and had lost, unbeknownst to him, the search code via truth drug. The
junior officer would not be able to lie for two or three months, but Ole Doc
had the search code memorized.

 

“Styphon
Six . . . to . . . over . . .
yawk, scwowl scree
. . . Hydrocan . . .
roger . . . under over . . . out—” mimicked Hippocrates in disgust at the
clamor which filled this usually peaceful old hospital ship. “To Command Nine .
. .
scree
. . . Command Nine . . .
swowwwww
—
Foolish
people. Why they do all that, master?”

Ole
Doc looked up from a manual of disease diagnosis. “It's bad enough to listen to
those things without you parroting them.”

Hippocrates
stood in the door self-righteously kneading bread dough with three hands and
drinking some spiced ink with the fourth. “Foolish. They should say what they
mean. Then maybe somebody get something done. Go here, go there. Squadron,
Flight, Fleet attention and boarders adrift! Navy get so confused no wonder we
got to do their work.”

“Now,
now,” said Ole Doc.

“Well,
it may not confuse enemy,” said Hippocrates, “but it sure ruin operation of
own fleet.” He finished the ink, popped the bread under a baking light and
came back wiping his hands on an apron. “Good thing no girl you know on
Star
of Space
. Then we really get in trouble.”

“You
leave my private business alone.”

“You
so full of adrenaline you maybe catch chivalry.”

“That's
not a disease.”

“It
disease with you,” said Hippocrates, out of long suffering. “You stop reading
now. Bad for eyes. You tell me page number and book and I quote.”

He
got the book all right, but he had to duck it, it came so hard. Ole Doc went
back to the chart room, which lay beyond the main operating room and its myriad
bottles, tubes, instruments and bins. He pinpointed out the courses of the main
units of the search fleets and wiped off a large section of the Galaxy. He
threw a couple of switches on the course
comptometer
, and several
thousand cogs, arms and gears made a small whir as the ship shifted direction
and dip.

Somewhere
in this sphere of thinly mattered space was the
Star of Space,
or else,
like a drop of water under Vega's blast, she had utterly
evaporated away.

Ole
Doc was nervous lest he miss. Who knew how many millions of human beings might
be infected by this before he was done. If only he had an exact description of
symptoms!

And
he sat in the “office” of the
Morgue,
endlessly speculating until:

“Scout
Force Eighty-six to Command. Scout Force Eighty-six to Command. Clear Channel.
Operational Priority. Clear Channel. Scout Force Eighty-six to Command. Banzo!
Over.”

Ole
Doc whipped upright and grabbed his direction finders. He could get the
distance in to that beam and know which way the command answer would travel.
The nearest ion beam which was actively maintained was only fifteen seconds
away. He had been traveling along it, parallel, after his last course change.

The
speakers were dead except for faint crackling. The moment was tense with
nothingness.

And
then: “Command to Eighty-six. Command to Eighty-six. Revolve and Able. Over.”

“Eighty-six
to Command. Eighty-six to Command. Arcton P Lateral. Over.”

“Command
to Eighty-six. Command to Eighty-six. Operating Zyco X23 Y47 Z189076. Obit
Banzo if Jet. Order Box Arcton P Lateral. AHDZA. ZED DOG FOX ABLE. WILLIAM
GEORGE QUEEN BAKER. QUEEN QUEEN CAST FOX. Over.”

There
was a pause. Then: “Eighty-six to Command. Eighty-six to Command. Wilco and
out.”

The
series of orders which began to blaze and sputter through the speakers were
assembly and destination commands with the High Fleet manifesto for suspension
of civil liberties on every one of the five planets of Sirius.
With this the forward surge of a third of a million naval craft could be felt.
Banzo was run to cover. The hunters were coming up to the hounds.

Ole
Doc made a rapid scan of his charts.

Banzo,
code for the
Star of Space,
had been located on the ground at Green
Rivers, third habitable planet of Sirius, Arcton P Lateral being the one column
removal in the
Star Pilot
lists for Sirius. Eighty-six had orders from
Garth to blow the
Star of Space
out of the heavens if it attempted to
take off and to knock apart any merchantman that tried to go to or from Green
Rivers. The civil authority of the Sirius System, that being a satellite of the
Earth government, had been suspended and Marines were probably right now
swarming down upon Manford, the capital on the planet Wales, to pick up the
reins of state.

The
comptometer told Ole Doc he could be at the rendezvous mentioned within two
hours either way of Garth's arrival, for they were now at two points of a
triangle, not near but equidistant from Sirius. It all depended on the
Morgue
and she shortly began to put light-leagues behind her in a way which made the
galley a shambles and did nothing to improve the temper of Hippocrates.

He
staggered up to control and said, peevishly, “Even if you find, you ruined the
bread.”

“Get
out of here,” said Ole Doc. “I've got several thousand fast cruisers to beat
and by all that's holy, they're going to be beaten!”

 

From
the way they skimmed the edges of clusters and plowed through systems and
dodged comets for the next eight days, even Hippocrates gathered that this was
important enough to put on some effort. He took to going back to the fuel
chambers and helping the autofeeders. That would have been a short and unmerry
death to any human but the deadly rays seemed to like him. Hippocrates liked
them. They were part and parcel of machinery and machinery, to him, was
lovable. After all, wasn't it only human?

So
Ole Doc rode the controls with fire in his sleepless eyes, one ear glued to the
channels which would tell him if anything serious would happen before he got
there and one ear to the ticking meters which said that if he kept stretching
the
Morgue
out like this, she wouldn't have a sound seam in her whole
ancient hull.

It
worried him because he was outrunning the bulk of the signals he would receive
in case something went wrong. After you go just so fast in space, incoming
stuff sounds like a Japanese record of a woman in hysterics played treble time,
even when you are looping it off an ion beam.

On
the seventh day they went through a space maelstrom which almost chipped
Hippocrates to pieces. This phenomenon was no more than an unleashed hurricane
of magnetic energies, unplotted and unpredicted. Ole Doc kept the throttle all
the way down and they came through.

All
during the eighth day they wore out spare tubes trying to brake. About three-thirteen
sgt
, all the port tubes went out at once and they had a wild,
tumbling hour in which they passed Sirius as if it had been stabbed with a
spur, and then another two hours of limping while Hippocrates and Ole Doc clung
to the outside plates and unjammed the fried rinds of metal which prevented
reinstallation of the new linings.

It
was after the succeeding two hours, before they were at the rendezvous point,
and it was a very spent crew of two which came up to find fully half of the
navies of the Galaxy assembled in an array which would not be seen for many
another day.

A
hundred thousand ships, more or less, were grip to grip in squadrons, suspended
majestically in scattered but orderly formations all about the space of Green
Rivers.

An
eye at a spaceport could not grasp their infinity. The light of the huge
dumbbell planet blazed from their sides and made them so many jewels, for this
was peace and metal was shined. Blinkers were flashing and lifeboat and gig
lights were moving about until it looked, in the far distance, like a whole new
galaxy had been born.

Orders
were being rushed on a dozen admiralty bands. Barges cruised to conferences.
Fleet train vessels moved amongst the horde with supplies and new air.

It
was an imposing sight. Here lay, side by side, navies which had within the last
century been searing one another out of the darkness. Here were reunions of
peoples who had long since forgotten any connection with Mother Earth.

It
was a blinding, majestic array.

Ole
Doc was indifferent to its majesty. He wanted the flagship of Garth.

Patrol
craft, as the
Morgue
cruised by the drifting lines, came out to blare a
surly warning and then sheered off from the gold color of the hull without even
trying to see the ray rods. Ole Doc, by naval etiquette, was entitled to
priority in any anchorage. More than one spaceman of the Navy heaved a gusty
and hopeful sigh of relief at the sight of that hull.

But
the
Morgue
had proved a better vessel than the
Tangier-Mairlicon
which
had Garth's flag. In that the
Tangier-Mairlicon
was about one tenth the
age of the
Morgue,
this was amazing. But the mighty thousand-man vessel
was not there. The radar did not catch her identification signal and Old Doc's
flaring eye saw no blazing blue star of authority present.

He
gave the controls to Hippocrates who, though this was nervous going, Navy people
knowing or caring no more about the rules of the road than they did, was well
qualified to take them in to a safe position.

Ole
Doc was satisfied that the
Star of Space
had not left Green Rivers, just
as he was certain that he would be boarded and stopped if he tried to land on
that planet.

He
gave the sphere near them a pitying glance before he lay down in his cabin. It
looked like a very pleasant planet. There would be no help for it whatever if
the
Star of Space
had spread its death across its face.

Tuning
up a speaker on the command channel reserved for Garth in all this babble, Ole
Doc stretched out for a good sleep. The last he heard was a junior officer,
officer of the deck on some cruiser, trying to make headway over the control
visiograph with a very snide Hippocrates.

 

Garth
arrived full of purpose and blowing cigar smoke like a steam turbine. The voice
which awoke Ole Doc was so thick with authority that it must have carried
through a vacuum by itself without benefit of radio waves.

“Admirals
of all Fleets, attend on the flag at sixteen-thirty hours.” There was a click
and that was all. Galactic Admiral Garth had spoken.

Ole
Doc dressed with leisure, having bathed in hot water—a practice on which
Hippocrates frowned, since it would have dissolved the little slave in a splash
had he neglected to grease himself up first. Ole Doc pulled out a new cape, a
presentation cape from Omphides on the event of his having solved a small
problem for them in that system. It had a great display of jagged flashes done
across it which, besides furnishing the symbol of ray rods rampant in solid
gold, had actual ray reservoirs in the design which purified the air around and
about. His old helmet had numerous scratches across it but that couldn't be
helped. His boots were a bit scuffed despite all Hippocrates could do for them.
When he thought of what those admirals would be wearing—suddenly he put the
presentation cape back and got out his old one. In a very few minutes he
entered his lifeboat and went across to the
Tangier-Mairlicon,
leaving
the
Morgue
tethered to vacuum.