Two naval vessels had come in before the System Police craft could leave.
Twenty-inch rocket rifles had bored into the village of Placer. For five minutes the naval vessels had scorched the place.
When they left, a thousand people were dead, the once pleasant and rich valley a charred wreck. The passes were sealed through the peaks and a plague cross was painted on a dozen square miles from the air.
That was the end of Placer.
Ole Doc stood on the plain before the peaks and watched the rising smoke beyond. He had been late because he had not been promptly informed.
A thousand guiltless human beings had died.
Plague still lived in this galaxy.
It was no use to rail at Garth or excommunicate Emperor Smith.
Ole Doc went back to the Morgue and began anew the anxious search. Next time he had to be in at the end.
A lot depended upon it.
The Morgue cometed along at orbiting speed, automatically avoiding debris pockets, skipping over a dark mass here and bypassing a dead star there. Ole Doc had calculated, on the basis of information received from the Spica System, which included a list of passengers with countries—at fourteen dollars a word, high space rates priority—that he had a sixty percent chance of being somewhere near the next landing place of the Star of Space.
He had pounded the key ceaselessly in an effort to drum up the ship herself, but either he was on a course diverging faster than he could contact ion beams or the Star of Space had no communications operator left alive. Ole Doc gave it up, not because a naval flagship had tried to shut him off and bawl him out, but because he had suddenly shifted his plans.
He had to find that ship. He had to find her or the UMS would be slaving on this disease for the next thousand years, for such are the depths of space that unknown systems and backwash towns can harbor something for centuries without notifying anyone else. The method of this notification would be grim.
Ever since the first adoption of the standard military and naval policy of “sterilization,” the UMS had had its grief. When men found they could take a herd of innocent bacteria, treat it with mutatrons and achieve effectively horrible and cure-resistant diseases, the military had had no patience with sick people.
The specific incident which began the practice was the operation against Holloway by the combined Grand Armies of the Twin Galaxies wherein sown disease germs by the attackers had been re-mutated by the defenders to nullify the vaccine in the troops. The Grand Armies, as first offenders, had gone unsuspectingly into the Holloway Galaxy to be instantly chopped down by the millions, by what they comfortably supposed was harmless to them. With an entire galaxy in quarantine, with millions of troops dead—to say nothing of two billion civilians—the Grand Armies had never been able to recover and reassemble for transshipment to their own realms but had been relegated to the quarantine space, a hundred percent casualty insofar as their own governments were concerned.
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: “Comm
and 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.
The officer of the deck, a commander, had been having his eyes dazzled enough that day, what with the flood of gold lace coming through the side, and his Marines and sideboys were nearly spent with standing to. The chief warrant bos’n saw the flashing gold but he could not spot the uniform. The OOD saw the strange being coming up with this new “
officer” and hurriedly grabbed a book of traditions, customs and courtesy throughout the galaxies.
Hippocrates had been there to run the lifeboat back, but when he saw all these cross-belts and naked swords he became frightened. “I wait,” he said.
“Return to the ship,” said Ole Doc.
“You watch the adrenaline!” said Hippocrates, not daring to disobey.
The chief warrant bos’n took a breath and hoped he would pipe whatever was proper on his whistle and then, breath still sucked in, stared and blew not at all. It was the first time in his life he had ever seen a Soldier of Light and for the first time that day he was impressed.
“Belay the honors,” said Ole Doc to the now stammering commander. “I want to attend this conference.”
The commander gave him a Marine for a guide and then, on second thought, gave him two more. When the group had gone on, the OOD turned wonderingly back to his book of courtesy.
“It won’t be there, Commander,” said the chief warrant bos’n, for he had known the commander as a midshipman and ever afterward treated him with a hint of it, the way old spacemen will. “That’s a Soldier of Light.”
“It isn’t here,” said the commander.
“Neither,” said the old chief warrant, “is God.”
Ole Doc entered the admiral’s quarters just as Garth’s fist was coming down to smite a point into his palm. The fist halted, Garth stared. Twenty-six admirals stared.
“I see,” said Ole Doc, ignoring the chair his guide had stiffly pulled up for him, “that it takes a very large weight of naval metal to sterilize one poor liner today.”
They regarded him in confused silence, recognizing the gold gorget, startled by the obvious youth of this man who stood before them, failing to recognize the arts which kept him young, failing also to grasp just why they were confused. But admirals or not, they had been young once. They had heard the legends and tales. Some of them felt like guilty children.
Ole Doc Methuselah: The Intergalactic Adventures of the Soldier of Light Page 15
