“So I heard. But I thought that would mean a lawyer coming.”
“We don’t have any lawyers,” said Ole Doc, easing his holstered blaster around into sight.
“But this terrible disease, it will change your plans, eh? Who would want a planetary system full of diseases! What a horrible disease!”
“Kills people?”
“Kills them! They die in windrows! They scream and then they die. But I will take you and you will see it. I have a helmet here so that I can enter infected areas. I have one for you.”
“I have my own helmet,” said Ole Doc.
“No, no!” cried Lebel. “I could not risk it. I know this helmet here is germproof. It was tested. These germs come through the smallest, the tiniest air leak!”
“Why did you risk that crowd back there?” said Ole Doc.
“That! Poof! My own people. My aides. My airport people. They would not infect me with any disease! Here, try this helmet for size.”
Ole Doc blinked a little at the man’s terrible conceit and was on the verge of remarking that he had yet to meet a respectful germ when the first casualties caught his eye.
A street ahead was barricaded. Bodies were piled in either gutter, bodies in various stages of decomposition, of both sexes, of many races and castes. Velvet and burlap were brothers in that grisly display.
“Ought to bury them,” said Ole Doc. “You’ll have cholera or something if you don’t watch it.”
“Bury them! Who’d go near them! They are thrown out of the houses, like that young girl there, and nobody—”
“Wait a minute,” said Ole Doc. “Stop the car!”
For the young girl was not dead. She was dressed in satin, probably in her wedding dress, for a church stood fifty feet further on, and her hair was a golden flood upon the pavement. She was pressing up with her hands, seeking to rise and falling back, each time screaming.
Ole Doc reached for the door handle but Lebel blocked him. “Don’t risk it!” said Lebel.
Ole Doc looked at the frantic effort of the girl, looked at her young beauty, at the agony in her eyes and then took Lebel’s offer of a helmet. When he had it strapped on—an act which prompted both Lebel, his guards and drivers to hastily do the same—he shot the bolt on the door and stepped to the pave. He gazed at the girl in satin for a moment, in deep thought.
Ole Doc advanced, fumbling for the speaker buttons on the side of the helmet and finding with annoyance that the phones were squeaky in the upper frequencies. The screams came eerily through this filter. He turned down the volume in haste.
He helped her up and tried to speak to her but her eyes, after an instant of trying to focus, rolled out of concentration and screams tore up from her as though they would rip her throat to shreds. She beat at him and fought him and her gown tore down the side. Ole Doc, aware that Lebel was fearfully at his side and trying to get him away, let the girl slide back to the ground, moving her only so that she now lay upon the grass.
“Hippocrates!” said Ole Doc.
But there was no Hippocrates there and Ole Doc had to fumble into the kit himself. He laid out all the volumes of law in some amazement, holding the girl down with one hand and fishing in the case with the other, and was much wroth at all this weight. Finally he found his hypo gun and an instant later the generalissimo’s aides were gripping his wrist.
“Let go!” stormed Ole Doc, too busy holding the girl to make much of a fight of it. But they continued the contest, wrenched his shoulder and made him give up what they thought was a weapon.
“Nobody draws around the generalissimo!” said the big guard, his voice shrill and squeaky in the filter of the phones.
Ole Doc glared at them and turned to his patient. He felt her pulse and found that it was racing somewhere around a hundred and forty. He took her temperature and found it only slightly above normal. Her skin was dry and pale, her blood laked in the depths of her body. Her palms were wet. Her pupils were dilated to their entire diameter. Through the rents in the dress it could be seen that no blemish marked her lovely body.
Ole Doc stood up. “Lebel, give me that gun.”
Lebel looked uncertain. He had taken no part in the brief skirmish but it was plain that he was not sure exactly what the weapon was.
“Then do it yourself,” said Ole Doc. “Point it at her side and pull the trigger.”
“Oh!” said Lebel, seeing some parallel between this and the treatment he gave cavalry horses with wounds. He brightened and with something close to pleasure did as he was bidden.
The small hypo gun jumped, a small plume of spray-fog winding up from its muzzle. The girl quivered, stiffened and then sank back unconscious. Lebel looked in disappointment at the gun, gazed with contempt into its muzzle and threw it into the kit.
“I thought it was a weapon!” he said. “Ten—fifteen—twenty times people have tried to assassinate me. That I should fear a Soldier of Light is very foolish of me. Of course it was just a medication, eh? Well, well, let’s get off this street. The sight of civilian dead worries me. On the battlefield is another thing. But civilian dead I do not like. Come!”
Ole Doc was coming but he was also bringing the girl.
“What do you mean to do with that?” said Lebel.
“I want a case history of this thing,” said Ole Doc.
“Case— No, no! Not in my car! I am sick of this helmet! Leave it there where it was, I tell you! Smorg! Dallison! Put that girl back—”
The two aides didn’t wait for the full command. They surged up. But Ole Doc wasn’t trying to hold a struggling girl now. She quietly slid to the grass while Ole Doc’s hands moved something faster.
He could have drawn and burned them to glory long before they could have reached him. He contented himself with flicking a dart from each sleeve. The action was very quick. The feathered ends of the darts fell back without their points. Smorg and Dallison stopped, reached for their weapons and froze there.
“Attention!” said Ole Doc. “You will obey only me. You can never obey anyone else again. Get into the car!”
And the two aides, like wound-up clockwork, turned around and got into the car like obedient small boys.
“What have you done?” yelped Lebel.
“They are in a fine deep trance,” said Ole Doc. “I dislike being handled by anyone, Lebel. No Soldier of Light does. We are only seven hundred in the entire Universe but I think you will find that it pays to be very polite to us. Now, do you sleep or cooperate?”
“I’ll cooperate!” said Lebel.
“Put this girl in the car and continue to the place you have kept Wilhelm Giotini.”
The gawping driver saw his passengers and their cargo in place and then swiftly took Lebel’s orders for the palace. The car rocketed through the death-paved streets, shot up the ramp of the ruling house and came to a halt in the throne room.
Lebel got out shakily. He kept licking his lips and looking around as though on the watch for guards. But he was at the same time half afraid to give any orders to guards.
Ole Doc looked at the furnishings, the golden throne, the alabaster pillars. “Nice place,” he said. “Where’s Giotini?”
“I’ll take you up there,” said Lebel. “But stay a moment. You are not going on under the misapprehension that I am trying to block you in any way, are you? I am not! My aides are jumpy. They have orders. I am jumpy. My entire system of planets is coming apart with a disease. The ruler is dead and I have only some small notion of what he meant to do. You are the first Soldier of Light I ever saw. How do I know if you really are one? I have heard that they are all old men and you look like a boy.”
Ole Doc looked at him appraisingly, planted his boots firmly on the great orange squares of the throne room and looked at the assembled guards. “Generalissimo, you are not the first to question the identity of a Soldier. Therefore I shall be patient with you. Disease is our concern. Medical research. Any medical weapon. We safeguard the health of mankind through the star
s against plague and medical warfare. Several hundred years ago we organized the Universal Medical Society to combat misuse of germs and our scope is broader yet. Now if you require some proof of my identity, attend me.”
Lebel walked lumberingly after Ole Doc up to the line of guards who, drawn stiffly to attention, brilliant in their palace uniforms, looked at nothing and no one. Ole Doc reached out a finger at a sergeant.
“Step forth!” said Ole Doc.
The sergeant took a smart pace forward and saluted. Ole Doc, with legerdemain which defied the eye, produced a brilliant button which fixed his subject’s eyes.
“Extend your hand!” said Ole Doc.
The sergeant automatically extended his hand. He was weaving a trifle on his feet, his eyelids fluttering rapidly.
“You cannot feel anything in your entire body!” said Ole Doc. Out came a lancet. Up went the sergeant’s sleeve. Ole Doc gashed a five-inch wound into the forearm, picked up the beating artery like a rope, dropped it back and pressed the flesh to stop the bleeding. He reached into a cape pocket and extracted a small rod, a ray rod of pharmacy with a Greek symbol on it. He passed the rod over the wound. It closed. He reversed the rod and passed it once more. The scar vanished. There was nothing but blood on the floor to mark what had happened.
Ole Doc snapped his fingers to awaken his subject and pushed him back into line.
“Do you require further proof?” said Ole Doc.
The line had forgotten to be military and was a little out of rank now with slack-jawed staring. Lebel backed up, blinking. The sergeant was looking curiously around and wondering why everybody was so startled, disappointed to find he had missed something.
“I never doubted you!” said Lebel. “Never! Come right away into the south hall where we left him. Anything you say, sir. Anything!”
Ole Doc went back to the car and shouldered the body of the young girl. He was beginning to miss Hippocrates. Doing manual labor was a thing which Ole Doc did not particularly enjoy.
Wilhelm Giotini was lying on a tall bed, a scarlet sheet covering his face, his royal accouterments neglected on the floor and his crown mixed up with the medicine bottles. Any physician who had attended him was gone now. Only a woman sat there, a dumpy, weeping little woman, tawdry in her velvet, unlovely in her sorrow.
“Madame Giotini,” said Lebel.
She looked up. Somewhere, in some old forgotten book of legends, she had seen a picture of a Soldier of Light. Her eyes shot wide and then she came forward, falling on her knees and gripping Ole Doc by the hand.
“You come too late,” she said brokenly. “Too late! Poor, poor Will. He is dead. You have come too late but maybe you can save my people.” She looked pleadingly up. “Say you will save my people.”
Ole Doc put her gently aside. He laid the girl down upon a nearby couch and approached the bed. He threw back the cover and gazed at Wilhelm Giotini.
Wilhelm Reiter Giotini, unblooded ruler of Fomalhaut, creator of empires and materializer of dreams, was far past any common succor. The fierce energy he had stored up in the streets of Earth as a gutter gamin had not served him at the last. The pride and fury of him had not staved off attack. The greatness of his mind, his beneficence to science, his bequests and scholarships had not added one single instant to his life. Here he lay, a sodden lump of dead flesh, inheritor of man’s allotted ground, six by two by six, just the same.
Ole Doc turned to Madame Giotini and Lebel. “Leave me.”
They looked at the body and then at Ole Doc and they backed to the door. Ole Doc fastened them out and returned to the bed and stood there gazing at Giotini.
“Hippocrates!” he barked.
But there was no Hippocrates there and Ole Doc had to write his list and slide it through the door to a messenger. He went back to his thoughtful vigil by the dead.
When the girl stirred, Ole Doc transferred his attention and approached the couch with a slight smile. She was, after all, a very pretty girl. He gave her a small white pill and a swallow from his flask and shortly she returned from the world of her nightmares and fixed him with pale wonder.
“It is all right,” said Ole Doc. “I am a Soldier of Light.”
She blinked, awed, and began to gather up her torn white satin. “But the disease. I caught the disease. I was dying!”
“You do not have a disease,” said Ole Doc. “There is none.”
This was so entirely contrary to her terror that she could not digest it and looked at him with eyes of a wondrous jade hue beseeching him to tell her what he meant.
“There is no disease, no poison,” said Ole Doc. “I have no further clue. But in the absence of bacteria and drugs, it is necessary that you tell me what you can of today’s occurrence.”
“I . . . I was bridesmaid at my sister’s wedding. It . . . all of a sudden it began to get terrible. Everybody began to scream. I ran outside and fell down and there were dead people all over and I was afraid—” She caught herself back from some of the horror. “That’s all I know.”
Ole Doc smiled gently. “You can tell me more than that. Was anyone sick from the disease before today?”
“Oh, yes. Over in the eastern quarter of the city. And on all the other planets. The disease kept spreading. There isn’t anything left on Gerrybome and that had almost as many people as this world. But nobody thought it would come here today. It was awful!” She shuddered and averted her face. “My sister, her husband . . . my mother . . . is anyone left alive?”
“You will have to face this bravely,” said Ole Doc. “I do not think there is. I have not been here very long.”
“Is it liable to strike again? Is that why you wear that helmet?”
Ole Doc had been wondering why she didn’t have as pretty a voice as she had a body. He hurriedly unstrapped the helmet and laid it aside. She gazed at him earnestly. “Could you save my family?”
“Not very well,” said Ole Doc. “You were the only one alive in that entire area that I could see. I even glanced in the church. I am sorry.” He fumbled in his belt kit and came up with a cartridge for his hypo gun. He fitted it carefully. She was beginning to shudder again at the nightmare she had just experienced and paid no attention to what he was doing.
The gun, held close against her side, jerked and sent a heavy charge of neo-tetrascopolamine into her. She did not feel it but continued to cry for a little while. Then, blankness overspreading her face, she looked at him and at her surroundings.
“Who are you? Where am I?”
Ole Doc nodded with satisfaction. She had experienced amnesia for the past, reaching back probably three or four days; she would not be able to recall any part of the terrible experience she had undergone.
“There was sickness,” said Ole Doc, “and I brought you here to help me.”
“You . . . you’re a Soldier of Light!” she said, sitting up in astonishment. “A Soldier of Light! Here on Gasperand! I—” She saw her torn dress. “What—?”
“I brought you so fast your dress got torn,” said Ole Doc.
“You promise you’ll get back in time for my sister’s wedding?”
“We’ll do what we can,” said Ole Doc. “Now you don’t mind dead people, do you?”
“Dead—?” It ended in a gasp as she saw the body on the bed.
“That is Wilhelm Giotini,” said Ole Doc. “You heard he had died?”
“Oh, weeks ago! Weeks! But there he is—ugh!”
“Now, now. No time for weak stomachs, my dear. Fix up your dress and we’ll do what we can for him.”
“Do what— Why, bury him, of course!” She added hesitantly and a little afraid: “You are going to bury him?”
“No, my dear. I am afraid I am not.”
There was a heavy creaking outside the door and a knock. Ole Doc unbarred it and let six guardsmen stagger in with a load of equipment. It astonished Ole Doc. He had never thought of that equipment as being heavy before, since Hippocrates had always carried it so lightly. And when th
ey returned with a second load and stumbled with it, Ole Doc almost lost patience.
“Now get out before you break something!” he snapped.
He barred the door again and faced the unlovely thing on the bed. The girl’s golden hair almost rose up in horror. “You’re not going to—”
With a deep sigh which still had a great deal of compassion in it, Ole Doc showed her over to a window seat and let her sit there out of sight of the bed.
He opened the cases they had brought him and laid out a sparkling string of instruments and arctrodes, unpacked a portable generator, hooked up numerous wires, connected several condensers in series and plugged them to one end of a metal box, placing the generator at the other. Then he hefted a scalpel and a chisel and walked toward the head of the bed.
In the window seat the girl shuddered at the sounds she heard and twisted hard at the tassels of an embroidered cushion. She heard a curious sawing sound, surmised what it was and twisted so hard that the tassel came off. She nervously began to shred it, not daring to look over her shoulder. For a long time she felt ill and then became aware of a complete silence which had lasted many minutes. She was about to look when the generator took off with a snarling whine so much akin to the anger of a black panther in the local zoo that she nearly screamed with it in unison.
She could not keep away then. It sounded too bloodthirsty. But when she looked, Ole Doc was sitting on the edge of the bed looking interestedly at the metal box and, outside of a deal of blood on the golden sheets, everything seemed perfectly human.
Cautiously she approached the Soldier. “Is . . . is he in there?”
Ole Doc looked up with a start. “Just his brain, my dear.”
She hastily went back to the window seat. The cushion’s tassels suffered horribly when the thought came to her that she might have been brought here as a part of this experiment, that she was to be something of a human sacrifice to science. And the more she thought about this possibility, the more she believed it. Wilhelm Giotini was a great man; he had built up an entire civilization on five worlds which had hitherto been given to outlaws and casual wanderers; his vast energy had been sufficient to make cities grow in a matter of weeks and whole new industries from mine to finished product in a month or two. Who was she, Patricia Dore, to be weighed in the balance against an experiment involving Giotini? This Soldier was certain, absolutely certain, to use her for his own ends.
Ole Doc Methuselah: The Intergalactic Adventures of the Soldier of Light Page 18
