Ole Doc Methuselah: The Intergalactic Adventures of the Soldier of Light
Page 14
Hippocrates leaped down, making a minor earthquake, although he was only a meter tall, and the dispatcher, at the sight of this four-armed, antennaed nightmare, quickly yanked the scooter out of the way.
Not even glaring, Hippocrates went to the cab line, grabbed a bumper and pulled. He intended to coax the driver into entering the forbidden field of the ramp but the only result was the loud breaking off of the bumper.
There was an argument, but it wasn’t very long. Three minutes later a cowed driver had the cab beside the Morgue.
Ole Doc swung down. He looked about twenty-five even if he was nine hundred and six, that being the medical privilege and secret of any one of the seven hundred society members, and when the sun struck his gold cloak and flashed from his boots, the dispatcher, again about to protest the actions of this ship, hurriedly drew back. He was looking at a Soldier of Light and it not only awed him, it paralyzed him. He would tell his friends and children about this for the next fifty years.
Ole Doc said, “Spaceway Control Building!”
The driver gave a terrified glance at Hippocrates and shot the cab half again past its governor.
Ole Doc got down and went in so fast his cape stood out straight. He found Conway on the ninety-eighth floor in a magnificent office full of communications equipment and space charts.
Conway was bovine and leaden. He did not have fast reactions. He was a cop. He saw Ole Doc, thought of revolution, grabbed a button to bawl out a receptionist for not announcing and then stared straight into two very angry blue eyes and found that his hand had been swatted hard away from that buzzer.
“You listen to me!” cried Ole Doc. “You imbecile! You . . . you— Good catfish! You haven’t the discernment of a two-year-old kid! You . . . you flatfoot! Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know what ought to happen to you? Do you know where you’ll wind up when I’m through with this? If you—”
Conway’s bullish ire had risen and was about to detonate. He leaped up to have room for his rage and then, just as he was beginning to level a finger, he saw the ray rods on the gold gorget.
“You . . . you’re the UMS,” said Conway, idiotically holding the pose which meant rage, but stammering like a schoolkid. Abruptly he collapsed into his chair. Weakly and with great attention he listened to the detailed faults of police and control systems in general, Conway in particular and Conway’s children and parents and grandparents. Conway learned some pretty terrible things about himself, including his personal appearance and the slightly sub-quality of his wits. Conway would probably go around being an illegitimate imbecile for days afterwards.
“ . . . and,” said Ole Doc, “if you don’t locate that ship in twenty-four hours I’ll yellow-ticket this whole system. I’ll yellow-ticket Mars and Jupiter. I’ll yellow-ticket the whole condemned Galaxy! You won’t move a ship. You won’t move a cruiser or a battleship or a tramp! You won’t even move a lifeboat for more years than I’ve got patience. And,” he concluded illogically, “I’ve got plenty of that!”
“What . . . what—?” begged Conway, the mighty Conway.
“Find me the Star of Space. Find that ship so whoever is on her can be saved. Find her before she lands and infects an entire planet, a system and a galaxy. Find her before you kill off millions, billions, quadrillions—” Ole Doc sat down and wiped his face. Hippocrates let go of the burly police receptionist with a warning wave of a finger and came in.
“You get excited,” said Hippocrates. “Very bad. Take this!”
Ole Doc reached for the pill and then, seeing it completely, struck it aside and leaped up to face the wilted Conway.
“Have the Grand Council in here in ten minutes. I don’t care if they’re in China or digging clams at the North Pole. Have them in here or have trouble!” Ole Doc stamped out, found a seat in a garden looking over New Chicago and composed himself as well as he could to wait. But his eyes kept straying to the blue heavens and he kept pounding a palm with a fist and swearing sharply.
Hippocrates came back in nine minutes. “Grand Council ruling Earth assembled now. You speak. But don’t you get so excited. Five days to your next treatment. Very bad.”
Ole Doc went in. His metal boot soles chewed bits out of the rug.
Eighteen men sat in that room, eighteen important men whose names meant law on documents, whose whims decided the policies of nations and whose intercession, arbitration or command ruled utterly the two and one-half billion people of Earth. The Army officers were imposingly medaled. The Marine commander was grim. The Navy operations chief was hard, staunch, important. The civilians might have appeared to be the most powerful men there, they were so quiet and dignified. But it was actually the naval officer who ranked them all. He commanded, by planetary seniority and the right of Earth’s conquests, the combined space navies of the Galaxy whenever “the greater good of the majority of the systems” was threatened.
They were grave and quiet when Ole Doc entered. They blinked a bit uncertainly when he threw his helmet down on Conway’s desk. And when he spoke, they came very much to life.
“You,” said Ole Doc, “are a pack of fools!”
There came an instant protest against this indignity. Loudest was that of Galactic Admiral Garth. He was a black-jowled, cigar-smoking man of six feet five, a powerful if not brilliant fighter, and he objected to being called a fool.
“You have let hell loose through the systems!” cried Ole Doc above their voices. “You’ve sent a cargo of death away where it can infect trillions of beings! That may be dramatic but by all that’s holy, it’s the truth!”
“Hold on there!” said Admiral Garth, heard because he could shake ports loose with his voice. “No confounded pill roller can come in here and talk to me like that!”
It stopped the babbling. Most of the people there were frightened for a moment. Those who had been merchants knew the yellow tickets. Those who only nominally governed saw whole nations cut off. The Army saw its strength cut to nothing because it could not be shipped, and the Navy in the person of Galactic Admiral Garth saw somebody trying to stop his operations of fleets and he alone stayed mad.
“The Star of Space was sent away from here,” said Ole Doc, spitting every word, “without medical assistance or supplies. She was rotten with disease but she got no cordon, no quarantine. She got dismissal! She went out into space low on supplies, riddled with disease, hating you and all humanity.
“Further, even though you were in communication with that ship, you did not find out the details, the exact, priceless details of that disease. You did not discover from whence she thought she received the disease or establish which passenger or crewman from what part of the Universe first grew ill. And you failed, utterly failed, to find out where she intended to go!
“That’s why you are fools! You should have provided her with an escort at least! But no! You, the men who supposedly monopolize all the wits on Earth, the Earth which rules the Galaxy, you let the Star of Space go away from here to murder—yes, murder!—possibly millions and millions of human beings. Perhaps billions. Perhaps trillions! I cannot exaggerate the folly of your action. Completely beyond the base-hearted wickedness which refused that ship the help she needed, you will be evil and sinful in the eyes of all men.
“I am publishing this matter to space. The Universal Medical Society can cure anything but stupidity, and where they find that in government, they must leave it alone!”
He sat down suddenly on the edge of the desk and glowered at them.
Hippocrates in the doorway was wondering whether or not he had put too much adrenaline into Ole Doc the last rejuvenation treatment and had about concluded that this was the answer.
Galactic Admiral Garth clamped an angry blue jaw on a frayed cigar. Pill roller, his attitude said. He’d never needed a doctor in his life and when he did he’d take a naval surgeon. Disease, bah! Everyone knew that disease warfare had almost ruined mankind. The stuff was deadly. It said so in the texts. Therefore, a diseased ship
should be launched as far away from humanity as possible and left to rot. It was good sense. Nobody could fight a disease when science could make new, incurable ones at every rumor of war. It had said so in the texts for a long time, for several hundred years in fact. That made it true.
“I won’t cooperate,” said Garth flatly. Nobody would catch him risking any of his valuable equipment.
“Admiral,” said Lionel MacBeth, Council president, “I think it has been foolish of us. We sent the vessel away in a senseless panic amongst ourselves, trying to save this system without regard to others. The best we can do is—”
“It was done without my advice,” said Garth, “but I’d do it myself if it was to be done again. The red death got away from three Army doctors”—and he glowered at the Army—“who were trying to be humane about a camp full of it. I’ve investigated. The Star of Space could get nowhere. She’s branded. She had very little fuel after a run from Spica—”
“She had five hundred light-years of fuel left!” said Ole Doc.
Garth bristled. This was too much from a pill roller. “What do you know about fuel?”
Hippocrates said, “You keep quiet!” and looked mad. Fuel indeed. Didn’t he know whole volumes about fuel and engines? Whole libraries? And didn’t his brain belong to Ole Doc? Of course his master knew about fuels!
Ole Doc said, “I ion-beamed New Earth of Spica.” He pulled out his message log. “The Star of Space was trying out delphi particles. She took her original weight in them. She’d have an excess of five hundred light-years above her normal reserve. She could go anywhere this side of the Hub. And when she gets where she is going, she is going to try to hide her plight. Why hasn’t a general galactic alarm gone out?”
This was news to the Council. The Star of Space should have been completely out of fuel. Two or three nervous coughs sounded and here and there beads of perspiration began to grow.
Garth was silent. He was thinking.
“You’ll have to act!” said Ole Doc. “I demand you throw out a net to intercept her, that you alert all navies to comb space, that you alarm any place she might try to land and that, in conclusion, you hold her at bay until I or another UMS Soldier can get there and take charge.”
Seventeen heads nodded quick assent and then all attention went to Garth. Control and communication were naval functions.
Garth took out a cigar. He inspected it. He threw the frayed one away and replaced it with the fresh one. He bit the end, spat, tilted the cheroot up and looked contemptuously at Ole Doc.
“The warning will be heeded and you probably deserve some thanks for calling this to my attention. It is now in naval hands. With the permission of the Council I shall give my orders.”
They gave it quickly enough.
Garth rose, shrugged into a spacecoat and started to leave.
“May I ask,” said Ole Doc, “just what orders you are going to give?”
“All space navies will be ordered to an emergency standing. Patrols will search their sectors. All Navy bases will be alerted. And wherever found or whenever seen, the Star of Space is to be blown out of existence with some well-placed shots. Good day.”
The door closed behind him.
Ole Doc got up slowly.
“You abide by this?” he demanded of the Council.
They were uncomfortable.
“You do not see that if this ship is disintegrated we will have lost all possible chance of locating the source, type, course and treatment of that plague?”
They saw that but they were still uncomfortable.
“You,” said Ole Doc, “are a pack of fools!” And when he had slammed the door behind him and strode off down the hall, Hippocrates was positive now about that adrenaline. Ole Doc was mad!
The first contact came when the Morgue was off the Carmack System and was announced as being within the Smith Empire on a planet called Skinner’s Folly.
Ole Doc had guessed five years wrong and he muttered about it as the Morgue skimmed along under gyro control.
“We’ll never make it,” said Ole Doc. “That confounded System Police will get there and wreck everything. I know the Smith Empire!”
Hippocrates served soup in the lovely salon. The murals had been very specially constructed by an Old Seattle artist named Boyd who had been extremely grateful for having his life saved one afternoon when Ole Doc walked by a Venusian grog shop. The murals showed a tree of life growing all around the four walls of the room depicting the evolution of man and there were many trillionaires and kings who would have paid a planet’s ransom for a duplicate. Nobody but a Soldier of Light could have kept Boyd sober that long, however.
“Monkey stage,” said Ole Doc, glaring at a gibbon who was gibbering in a lifelike manner, three-dimensional and moving, it seemed, in a tree. “Few of them ever get beyond the monkey stage. Give ’em fleas to pick and they’re convinced they’re solving all the problems of the world.”
“Too much adrenaline. This afternoon when I fix,” said Hippocrates, testing the coffee for temperature before he served it, “I cut down adrenaline.”
“You’ll cut down nothing, you gypsum freak! I feel fine. I haven’t felt this mad in a hundred years. It does a man good to feel good and mad at something once in a while. It’s therapy, that’s what it is.”
“I cut down adrenaline,” said Hippocrates. “You got bad habits. You fall in love with women and sometimes you get mad. You drink, too,” he added, spitefully setting out the muscatel.
“I’ll fall in love and I’ll get drunk—”
“‘Love is the ambition of the failed man,”’ primly quoted Hippocrates. “‘There is nothing,’” he continued, phonograph-recordwise, “‘so nauseous under all the suns and stars as a gusty-sighing lover, painted like a clown, exchanging spittle with a predatory female under the delusion that he is most nobly discharging the highest injunctions of a divine—”’
“You heathen!” said Ole Doc. “That gibbon has more sense.”
“He can’t make chicken soup,” wisely countered Hippocrates. “That is enough wine. At 4:15 you be ready for treatment. Not so much adrenaline.”
Ole Doc rose and looked at the telltale instruments in the cabin bulkhead. He wrote a few figures on his cuff which told him that they would be landing at Skinner’s Folly by six. He went forward and tried to connect with an ion beam which would permit him to communicate with the Smith Empire. The Smith Dynasty, however, had been a very economical one and kept few beams going, depending more upon its staff of inventors than upon what was already practical and in use elsewhere.
At 4:15 he suffered himself to be stripped and placed before a battery of ray rods, impatiently submitting to the critical ministrations of his slave. From some incalculable system not yet discovered, Hippocrates was about as much affected by these powerful rays as a piece of lead.
The little slave found a tiny scar and that had to be fixed. He saw an off-color hair and the whole follicle system had to be treated. He fussed and clucked over a metabolism meter until he had what he thought was just right and then he shut off the rays.
“You skimped the adrenaline!” said Ole Doc, and before Hippocrates could interfere, he shot on the rheostat which blazed out with adrenal catalyst and flashed it off again. Self-righteously, he began to haul on his clothes.
Hippocrates began to quote long sections of “The Anatomy and the Gland” in a defeated tone of voice.
“Get back there and get to work!” said Ole Doc.
Hippocrates went. But he didn’t go to work. He took down a tome from the library and read a long chapter on “The Reduction of Adrenal Secretion,” paying particular attention to the section “Foods Which Inhibit Adrenal Fluid.” He read the lists, thus memorizing them at a glance, and made note of what to add to his stores when they reached Skinner’s Folly.
But they did not arrive in time. When Ole Doc came to Garciaville, the capital city of the planet, the System Police had been there about six hours before.
At the bleak little town of Placer, the Star of Space had put in, landing at the Tri-System emergency field. The once great liner had made no pretense of its state but had appealed to the mayor of Placer. There was no quarantine there since no intra-galaxy traffic ever dignified the place. But the mayor had known his dangers and he had immediately ordered the liner on.
The speakers of the great ship were not functioning and a communication had been wrapped around the handle of a wrench and thrown out of the vessel. This the mayor had read. His pity had been greatly aroused and he had communicated hurriedly with Emperor Smith III without permitting the remaining people or the sick to disembark.
Smith had answered abruptly and to the point. He had advices from the Galactic Admiral of this eventuality.
It had taken two days for a runner to come from Placer to the outside. And it had taken two days to get back; due to the fifty-thousand-foot peaks around the village, no atmosphere craft cared to brave the currents. A System Police spacecraft had gone in and for four days had examined the situation, carefully keeping a cordon around the Star of Space.
Suddenly the mayor of Placer had come down with spots in his mouth and his temperature had begun to rise.
The mayor had talked to many people in the village. He had talked to the System Police ship officers.
The Star of Space had listened to the System Police band and had the decision of Emperor Smith when it was given. The liner, with its cargo of misery and death, had immediately taken off with destination unknown.