Ole Doc Methuselah (27 page)

In
this happy holiday mood they came to the lake, dried up a half acre of mud with
one blast of the 110, pitched a canopy at the water's edge complete with table
and chairs, made a wharf by extending a log over the water and generally got
things ready to fish.

Hippocrates
mixed a cool drink and baited a hook while Ole Doc took his ease and drank
himself into a comfortable frame of mind.

“Wonder
what I'll get,” said Ole Doc. He made his first cast, disposed himself
comfortably on the log to watch the motor lure tow its bait around the surface
of the lake.

The
huge jungle trees reared over the water and the air was still and hot. The
yellow lake glowed like amber under a yellow sky. And they began to catch a
strange assortment of the finny tribes.

Hippocrates
swatted at the mosquitoes for a while. Their beaks got dented against his hide
but they annoyed him with their high whine. Finally he was seized with
inspiration—direct from
Camping and Hiking Jaunts on Strange Worlds
—and
unfolded the force umbrella. It was no more than a stick with a driver in it
but its directional lobes could be changed in intensity and area until they
covered half a square mile. It was a handy thing to have in a rainstorm on such
planets as Sargo where the drops weigh two pounds. And it was handy here where
it pushed, on low intensity, the mosquitoes out from the canopy and put them
several hundred yards away where they could
zzzt
in impotent frenzy and
thwarted rage. Hippocrates put the stick on full so its beams, leaning against
the surrounding trees, would keep it in place, and devoted himself to another
book he brought out of his knapsack,
Wild Animals I Wish I Hadn't Known.

And
into this quiet and peaceful scene moved a jetbomb at the silent speed of two
thousand miles an hour. It came straight down from a silver speck which hung in
the saffron sky. It had enough explosive in it to knock a house flat. And it
was armed.

Ole
Doc had just hooked a popeyed monstrosity, Hippocrates had just reached the
place where Daryl van Daryl was being swallowed alive by a ramposaurus on
Ranameed, and the bomb hit.

It
struck the top of the force screen and detonated. The lobes of the screen
cantilevered against the trees and kicked six down so hard their roots stuck
quivering in the air. The canopy went flat. The log went into the water and the
jug of rumade leaped sideways and smote Hippocrates on the back of the neck.

For
an instant neither Hippocrates nor Ole Doc had any idea of what had happened.
It might have been a fish or a ramposaurus. But in a moment, from the smell in
the air, they knew it was a bomb.

Hippocrates
instantly went into Chapter Twenty-one, paragraph nine of,
Tales of the
Space Pioneers,
socked the butt of the 110-mm into the ground, looked at
the silver image in the magnetosight and let drive with two thumbs on the
trips.

The
whole air over them turned flaming red. Another half-dozen trees collapsed from
concussion. Ole Doc dragged himself out of the water and looked up through the
haze at the target.

“Train
right!” he said. “Up six miles. Now left!”

But
although they kept firing, the silver speck had picked up enough speed toward
the zenith to parallel the sizzling, murderous charges, and in a moment,
Hippocrates, with the sight flashing green for out of range, stopped shooting.

Ole
Doc looked at the upset rumade. He looked at his rod being towed aimlessly
across the lake. He looked at Hippocrates.

“Missed,”
said Hippocrates brightly.

“Is
there a force screen over the
Morgue?
”
snapped Ole Doc.

“Certainly,
master.”

“Well,
it probably needs reinforcing. Grab up the remains here and be quick about it.”

 

While
Ole Doc strode rapidly through the jungle to the old landing field, blasting
his way through the creepers with a gun in each hand, Hippocrates hastily
bundled the remains and scurried along at his heels.

They
entered the corridor through the
Morgue'
s
force field and came to
the side of the ship. “At least she's all right,” said Ole Doc.

Hippocrates
bounced in and stowed the tattered gear while Ole Doc pulled down the switches
on the battle panel. After a few minor accidents he had had a complete band of
force fields installed and he turned them all on now.

He
went forward to the control room and was, as usual, startled by the dulcet
tones of his audio recorder. It never seemed right to him that the
Morgue
should talk soprano, but he liked soprano and he'd never had it changed.

“There
was a battle cruiser overhead eighteen minutes ago,” said the
Morgue
complacently. “It dropped a bomb.”

“Are
you hurt?” said Ole Doc to the board.

“Oh,
it didn't drop a bomb on me. It dropped a bomb on you.”

“Dimensions
and armament?”

“It
isn't friendly,” said the
Morgue.
“I recorded no data on it except
hostility. Advice.”

“Okay.
What?”

“Turn
on invisioscreens and move me into the jungle cover.”

Ole
Doc threw off the switch. Even his ship was ordering him around these days.

He
turned to the remote-control battle panel and punched the button marked “Invisible”
and a moment later a series of light-baffling planes, acting as reflectors for
the ground below and so making the
Morgue
disappear from the outside
except to detectors, hid them entirely. He rang “under weigh” so that
Hippocrates would have warning to grab something and, without seating himself
in the control chair, shot the
Morgue
toward the only hole in the
towering jungle trees, a thousand yards from her former location. Lights
flashed as the force screen went out and then re-adjusted itself to the natural
contour of the landscape and obstacles. Ole Doc dusted his hands. The ship was
safe for a moment. Now if that battle cruiser wanted to come low enough to
prowl, it would get a most frightening surprise. Leaving the fire panel tuned
to shoot down anything which did not clip back a friendly recognition signal,
Ole Doc moved toward the salon.

But
as he passed a port something caught his eye. And it also caught the eye of the
alert autoturret on the starboard side. He heard the wheels spinning over his
head as the single gun came down to bear on an object in the jungle and he only
just made the battle panel to isolate the quadrant from fire.

There
was a dead spaceship in there.

Ole
Doc checked both blasters and jumped out of the air lock. He went up to his
boot tops in muck but floundered ahead toward the grisly thing.

It
was crashed and well sunk in the mud and over it had grown a thick coating of
slime from which fed countless creepers and vines. It was not only dead. It was
being buried by greedy life.

His
space boots clung magnetically to the hull as he pushed his way up through the
slimy growths and then he was standing at a broken port which stared up at him
like an eyeless socket. He stabbed a light into it. What had been an Earthman
was tangled amongst the stanchions of a bunk. What had been another was crushed
against a bulkhead. Small furry things scuttled out of these homes as Ole Doc
dropped down.

The
ship had been there, probably, a year. It had ended its life from heavy
explosive and had been skewered through and through by five charges.

Ole
Doc burned through a jammed door, going forward to get to the control room. He
stumbled over some litters of boxes and his playing light showed up their
mildewed lettering:

Department
of Agriculture.
Perishable.
Keep
under Preservative Rays.

Horses.

Ole
Doc frowned and picked his way through this decaying litter. In the control
room he found what seepage and bacteria had left of the log. The ship was the
Wanderho
out of Boston, a tramp under charter to the government, delivering
perishables, supplies and mail to Department of Agriculture Experimental
Stations.

With
sudden decision Ole Doc blew his way out through the bow and walked on logs
back to the
Morgue.
He had headed for the only opening he had seen in
the jungle wall ahead and that opening had been made by a killed ship.

He
came back up through the air lock and opened all the switches on the battle
panel except the screens.

“We
can go now, master,” said Hippocrates brightly. “Scanner shows nothing to stop
us.”

“Shut
that off and fix me a biological kit,” said Ole Doc.

“You're
not going?” gaped Hippocrates.

“According
to article something-or-other, when the majority of a human population on a
planet is threatened a Soldier has to stay on the job.”

“But
I said that,” said Hippocrates.

“When?”
said Ole Doc.

 

Hippocrates
retreated hurriedly into the operating room and began to throw together the
hundred and seventy-two items which made up a biological kit, and when he had
them in cases on his back he shot after Ole Doc who was already a quarter of
the way back to the compound.

Ole
Doc walked up the steps of O'Hara's bungalow, thrust open the office door and
walked in. O'Hara looked up and gaped.

“Why
didn't you tell me?” snapped Ole Doc.

“You
have an accident with some animal?” said O'Hara. “I heard some shots but I
knew you were armed. I thought—”

“About
this jettisoned cargo!” said Ole Doc impatiently.

“What
about it?” said O'Hara. “They just stacked it up and left.”

“You
saw them leave?”

“Well,
no. The captain was in here telling me he was having trouble with his ship and
when I saw they were gone in the morning I went over to see if he'd left our
supplies in good shape and I found his cargo. It'd rained and the labels—”

“Was
it scattered around?” demanded Ole Doc.

“Why
would he scatter it around?” said O'Hara.

“What
was the name of that ship?”

“The
Wanderho,
” said O'Hara. “Same old tub. The only one which ever comes.
Undependable. She's about a month overdue now—”

“O'Hara,
you won't ever see that ship again. She's lying over there in the jungle shot
full of holes and her crew dead inside. You didn't hear a takeoff a year ago.
You heard a ship being shot to pieces.”

O'Hara
looked a little white. “But the cargo! It was all stacked up in a neat pile—”

“Precisely.”

“You
mean— I don't follow this!”

“Neither
do I,” said Ole Doc. “Have you got any force screen protection?”

“No.
Why should I have? Who'd want to trouble an experimental station? We haven't
got
anything,
not even money.”

“No
screen,” said Ole Doc. “Then we may have to work fast. Can you arm these
Achnoids?”

“No!
And my only weapon is a hunting rifle and a side arm. I haven't got anything.”

“Hippocrates,”
said Ole Doc, “dismount two turrets and have them set in towers here. They
won't do much but they'll stop an attack from land. And, if I'm right, that's
all we have to fear.”

Hippocrates
looked helplessly around for a place to put down the half ton of equipment he
was lugging like a mountain above him.

“Just
drop it,” said Ole Doc. “We're making a lab right here on the porch where it's
cool.”

O'Hara
suddenly flamed brightly. “You mean,” he cried in sudden hope, “that you're going
to help me? You mean it?”

Ole
Doc paid him no attention. He was already fishing in the pile of equipment for
a portable ultraelectron microscope and a box of slides. He put them on the
table. “Have somebody start bringing me phials out of that preservation room.
One sample from every box you've got!”

 

In
the many, many weeks which followed there was no wine, there was only work. And
over Ole Doc hung two intelligences which made him very skeptical of his
chances of getting out of this one alive. First was the fact that something or
somebody had now supercharged the planet's ionosphere thoroughly enough to damp
every outgoing and incoming message, and as Ole Doc's last reported whereabouts
was many a light-year from Gorgon, the chances of any relief were slender to
the vanishing point—for a search party would have to look over at least a
hundred planets and a nearly infinite cube of sky. Second was the sporadic
presence of a silver dot in the sky, the battle cruiser, out of range,
unfriendly, waiting. Waiting for what?

“I
guess this is a pretty tight spot,” grinned Hippocrates, all four arms deep in
research assistance. “In
Tales of the Early Space Pioneers
—”