Ole Doc Methuselah (2 page)

Preface

The Universal Medical Society—is
the supreme council of physicians organized in the late Twenty-third century
after the famous Revolt Caduceus which claimed the lives of two billion
humanoids of the Earth-Arcton Empire through the villainous use of new medical
discoveries to wage war and dominate entire countries. George Moulton, MD, Dr.
Hubert Sands the physio-chemist, James J. Lufberry, MD, and Stephen Thomas
Metridge, MD, who was later to become as well known as Ole Doc Methuselah, had
for nearly a hundred years kept to a laboratory studying far beyond
contemporary skills and incidentally extending their work by extending their
own lives, came out of retirement, issued a pronunciamento—backed with atomic
and du-ray hand weapons and a thousand counter-toxins—which denied to the
casual practitioner all specialized medical secrets. Thus peace came to the
Empire. Other systems anxiously clamored for similar aid and other great names
of medicine quietly joined them. For centuries, as the Universal Medical
Society, these men, hiding great names under nicknames, who eventually became a
fixed seven hundred number, maintained a Center and by casual patrol of the
Systems kept medicine as well as disease within rational bounds. Saluting no
government, collecting no fees, permitting no infringement, the UMS became
dreaded and revered as The Soldiers of Light and under the symbol of the
crossed ray rods impinged their will upon the governments of space under a code
of their own more rigorous than any code of laws. For the detailed records and
history of the UMS, for conditions governing the hundred-year apprenticeship
all future members must serve and for the special codes of call and appeal to
the UMS in case of plague or disaster, consult L. Ron Hubbard's “Conquest of
Space,” 29th Volume, Chapter XCLII. 

Rene LaFayette

Ole Doc Methuselah

Chapter One

Ole
Doc Methuselah wasn't thinking what he was doing or he never would have landed
on Spico that tempestuous afternoon. He had been working out some new formulas
for cellular radiation—in his head as usual, he never could find his
log table
s—and the act of also navigating his rocket ship must
have been an unconcious too much for him. He saw the asteroid planet,
de-translated his speed and landed.

He
sat there for some time at the controls, gazing out into the pleasant meadow
and at the brook which wandered so invitingly upon it, and finishing up his
tabulations.

When
he had written down the answer on his gauntlet cuff—his filing system was full
of torn scraps of cuffs—he felt very pleased with himself. He had mostly
forgotten where he had been going, but he was going to pour the pile to her
when his eye focused upon the brook. Ole Doc took his finger off the booster
switch and grinned.

“That
sure is green grass,” he said with a pleased sigh. And then he looked up over
the control panels where he hung his fishing rod.

Lord
knows what would have happened to Junction City if Ole Doc hadn't decided to go
fishing that day.

 

Seated
on the lower step of the port ladder, Hippocrates patiently watched his god
toss flies into the water with a deft and expert hand. Hippocrates was a sort
of cross between several things. Ole Doc had picked him up cheap at an auction
on Zeno just after the Trans-System War. At the time he had meant to discover
some things about his purchase, such as his metabolism and why he dieted solely
on
gypsum
, but that had been thirty years ago and Hippocrates
had been an easy habit to acquire. Unpigmented, four-handed and silent as space
itself, Hippocrates had set himself the scattered task of remembering all the things
Ole Doc always forgot. He sat now, remembering—particularly that Ole Doc had
some of his own medicine to take at thirty-six o'clock—and he might have sat
there that way for hours and hours, phonograph-recordwise, if a radiating
pellet hadn't come with a sharp
zip
past his left antenna to land with a
clang on the
Morgue
's thick hull.

ZIP!
CLANG!

Page
forty-nine of the
Tales of the Early Space Pioneers
went smoothly into
operation in Hippocrates' gifted if unimaginative skull, which page translated
itself into unruffled action.

He
went inside and threw on Force Field
Beta
minus the Nine
Hundred and Sixtieth Degree Arc, that being where Ole Doc was. Seeing that his
worshiped master went on fishing, either unwitting or uncaring, Hippocrates
then served out blasters and twenty rounds to himself and went back to sit on
the bottom step of the port ladder.

The
big spaceship—dented a bit, but lovely—simmered quietly in
Procyon
's
inviting light and the brook rippled and Ole Doc kept casting for whatever
outrageous kind of fish he might find in that stream. This went on for an hour
and then two things happened. Ole Doc, unaware of the force field, cast into it
and got his fly back into his hat and a young woman came stumbling,
panic-stricken, across the meadow toward the
Morgue
.

From
amongst the stalks of flowers some forty feet high emerged an Earthman, thick
and dark, wearing the remains of a uniform to which had been added civil space
garb. He rushed forward a dozen meters before he paused in stride at the apparition
of the huge golden ship with its emblazoned crossed ray rods of pharmacy. Then
he saw Ole Doc fishing and the pursuer thrust a helmet up from a contemptuous
grin.

It
was nearer to Ole Doc than to the ship, and the girl, exhausted and disarrayed,
stumbled toward him. The Earthman swept wide and put Ole Doc exactly between
himself and the ladder before he came in.

Hippocrates
turned from page forty-nine to page one hundred and fifteen. He leaped nimbly
up to the top of the ship in the hope of shooting the Earthman on an angle
which would miss Ole Doc. But he had no more than arrived and sighted before it
became apparent to him that he would also now shoot the girl. This puzzled him.
Obviously the girl was not an enemy who would harm Ole Doc. But the Earthman
was. Still, it was better to blast girl
and
Earthman than to see Ole Doc
harmed in any cause. The effort at recalling an exact instance made Hippocrates
tremble and in that tremble Ole Doc also came into his fire field.

Having
no warnings whatever, Ole Doc had just looked up from disentangling his hook
from first his shirt and then his thumb and beheld two humans cannonading down
upon him.

The
adrenalized condition of the woman was due to the Earthman, that was clear. The
Earthman was obviously a blast-for-hire from some tough astral slum and he had
recently had a fight, for two knuckles bled. The girl threw herself in a
collapse at Ole Doc's feet and the Earthman came within a fatal fifteen feet.

Ole
Doc twitched his wrist and put his big-hooked fly into the upper lip of the
Earthman. This disappointed Ole Doc a little for he had been trying for the
nose. The beggar was less
hypothyroid
than he had first
estimated.

Pulling
his game-fish bellowing into the stream, Ole Doc disarmed him and let him have
a ray barrel just back of the medulla oblongata—which took care of the fellow
nicely.

Hippocrates
lowered himself with disappointed grunts down to the ladder. At his master's
hand signal he came forth with two needles, filled, sterilized and awaiting
only a touch to break their seals and become useful.

Into
the gluteal muscle—through clothes and all, because of sterilizing radiation of
the point—Ole Doc gave the Earthman the contents of needle one. At the jab the
fellow had squirmed a little and the doctor lifted one eyelid.

“You
are a stone!” said Ole Doc. “You can't move.”

The
Earthman lay motionless, wide-eyed, being a stone. Hippocrates carefully noted
the time with the fact in order to remind his master to let the fellow stop
being a stone sometime. But in noting the time, Hippocrates found that it was
six minutes to thirty-six o'clock and therefore time for a much more important
thing—Ole Doc's own medicine.

Brusquely,
Hippocrates grabbed up the unconscious girl and waded back across the stream
with her. The girl could wait. Thirty-six o'clock was thirty-six o'clock.

“Hold
up!” said Ole Doc, needle poised.

Hippocrates
grunted and kept on walking. He went directly into the main operating room of
the
Morgue
and there amidst the cleverly jammed hotchpotch of trays and
ray tubes, drawers, masks, retorts and reflectors, he unceremoniously dropped
the girl. Monominded now, for this concerned his master—and where the rest of
the world could go if it interfered with his master was a thing best expressed
in silence—Hippocrates laid out the serum and the proper rays.

Humbly
enough, the master bared his arm and then exposed himself—as a man does before
a fireplace on a cold day—to the pouring out of life from the fixed tubes. It
took only five minutes. It had to be done every five days.

Satisfied
now, Hippocrates boosted the girl into a proper position for medication on the
center table and adjusted a lamp or two fussily, while admiring his master's
touch with the needle.

Ole
Doc was smiling, smiling with a strange poignancy. She was a very pretty girl,
neatly made, small waisted, high breasted. Her tumbling crown of hair was like
an avalanche of fire in the operating lights. Her lips were very soft, likely
to be yielding to—

“Father!”
she screamed in sudden consciousness. “Father!”

Ole
Doc looked perplexed, offended. But then he saw that she did not know where she
was. Her wild glare speared both master and thing.

“Where
is my father?”

“We
don't rightly know, ma'am,” said Ole Doc. “You just—”

“He's
out there. They shot our ship down. He's dying or dead! Help him!”

Hippocrates
looked at master and master nodded. And when the servant left the ship it was
with a bound so swift that it rocked the
Morgue
a little. He was only a
meter tall, was Hippocrates, but he weighed nearly five hundred kilos.

Behind
him came Ole Doc, but their speeds were so much at variance that before the
physician could reach the tall flowers, Hippocrates was back through them
carrying a man stretched out on a compartment door wrenched from its strong
hinges for the purpose. That was page eight of
First Aid in Space,
not
to wrestle people around but to put them on flat things. Man and door weighed
nearly as much as Hippocrates but he wanted no help.

“‘Lung
burns,”' said Hippocrates, “‘are very difficult to heal and most usually
result in death. When the heart is also damaged, particular care should be
taken to move the patient as little as possible since exertion. . . .”'

Ole
Doc listened to, without heeding, the high, squeaky singsong. Walking beside
the girl's father, Ole Doc was not so sure.

He
felt a twinge of pity for the old man. He was proud of face, her father, gray
of hair and very high and noble of brow. He was a big man, the kind of a man
who would think big thoughts and fight and die for ideals.

The
doctor beheld the seared stains, the charred fabric, the blasted flesh which
now composed the all of the man's chest. The bloody and gruesome scene was not
a thing for a young girl's eyes, even under disinterested circumstances—and a
hypo would only do so much.

He
stepped to the port and waved a hand back to the main salon. There was a
professional imperiousness about it which thrust her along with invisible
force. Out of her sight now, Ole Doc allowed Hippocrates to place the body on
the multi-trayed operating table.

Under
the gruesome flicker of ultraviolet, the wounded man looked even nearer death.
The meters on the wall counted respiration and pulse and hemoglobin and all
needles hovered in red while the big dial, with exaggerated and inexorable
calm, swept solemnly down toward black.

“He'll
be dead in ten minutes,” said Ole Doc. He looked at the face, the high
forehead, the brave contours. “He'll be dead and the breed is gone enough to
seed.”

At
the panel, the doctor threw six switches and a great arc began to glow and snap
like a hungry beast amid the batteries of tubes. A
dynamo
whined to a muted scream and then another began to growl. Ozone and brimstone
bit the nostrils. The table was pooled in smoky light.

The
injured man's clothing vanished and, with small
tinks,
bits of metal
dropped against the floor—coins, buckles, shoe nails.

Ole
Doc tripped another line of switches and a third motor commenced to yell. The
light about the table graduated from blue up to unseen black. The great hole in
the charred chest began to glow whitely. The beating heart which had been laid
bare by the original weapon slowed, slowed, slowed.

With
a final twitch of his wrist, Ole Doc cut out the first stages and made his
gesture to Hippocrates. That one lifted off the top tray which bore the man
and, holding it balanced with one hand, opened a gravelike vault. There were
long green tubes glowing in the vault and the feel of swirling gases.
Hippocrates slid the tray along the grooves and clanged the door upon it.

Ole
Doc stood at the board for a while, leaning a little against the force field
which protected him from stray or glancing rays, and then sighing a weary sigh,
evened the glittering line. Normal light and air came back into the operating
room and the salon door slid automatically open.

The
girl stood there, tense question in her every line, fear digging nails into
palms.

Ole
Doc put on a professional smile. “There is a very fair chance that we may save
him, Miss—”

“Elston.”

“A
very fair chance. Fifty-fifty.”

“But
what are you doing now?” she demanded.

Ole
Doc would ordinarily have given a rough time to anyone else who had dared to
ask him that. But he felt somehow summery as he gazed at her.

“All
I can, Miss Elston.”

“Then
he'll soon be well?”

“Why
. . . ah . . . that depends. You see, well . . .” How was he going to tell her
that what he virtually needed was a whole new man? And how could he explain
that professional ethics required one to forgo the expedience of kidnapping, no
matter how vital it might seem? For what does one do with a heart split in two
and a lung torn open wide when they are filled with foreign matter and
ever-burning rays unless it is to get a new chest entire?

“We'll
have to try,” he said. “He'll be all right for now. . . for a month, or more
perhaps. He is in no pain, will have no memory of this and if he is ever cured,
will be cured entirely. The devil of it is, Miss Elston, men always advance
their weapons about a thousand years ahead of medical science. But then, we'll
try. We'll try.”