Ole Doc Methuselah: The Intergalactic Adventures of the Soldier of Light

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “And now you don’t?” said Ole Doc.

  “Now I don’t. Now this whole thing has got me. I may be indulging in mass murder or something. Will they hang me if any of these kids die or something?”

  “Well, I expect that a small loss would be excusable,” said Ole Doc.

  “Yes, but you see I didn’t pay any attention to these Achnoids. And now I think there’s the devil to pay. You see, all the fluids used and the strengths used and all were for lions. And that has radically altered things. At least something has. I thought that just a couple had got here by mistake and I didn’t know how and I got them born all right. But three days ago when I sent that emerg two things had happened. I found this whole shed full of babies and I found that they were all set to be born. And they have gestated only three months!”

  “Hmmm,” said Ole Doc, getting faintly interested. “Well, I see what you’re excited about. A three months’ gestation on lion fluid would be liable to upset anyone, I suppose. So—”

  “Wait!” said the wild-eyed O’Hara. “That isn’t the problem. I haven’t showed you the problem yet!”

  “Not yet!” Ole Doc blinked in astonishment.

  O’Hara led them rapidly out of the shed and into a big concrete compound. There was a trapdoor in one concrete wall at the far end. O’Hara closed the gate behind them and got them into an observer’s box.

  “This is where I test the fighting qualities of lions,” he said. “I go get a catbeast and turn him loose in here and I let a young lion in on him. It’s a control test on the batch. I pick a lion at random by number and let him in. Mookah! Hey there. Mookah! Let go one catbeast!”

  An Achnoid pinwheeled into view, cast respectful eyes at the observer’s box and began to take the pins out of a door. There were eight pins and he removed them all at once, one hand to a pin.

  “Monstrosity,” sniffed Hippocrates.

  The Achnoid went sailing to safety over the wall and the cage door crashed open with a bang. Out of it stalked a beast with a purple hide and enormous, sharp-fanged jaws. It bounded into the arena, reared up on its hind legs to stand ten feet tall, waltzed furiously as it looked around for enemies and then settled back with a vicious, tail-lashing snarl.

  “Pleasant character,” said Ole Doc.

  “That’s a small one,” said O’Hara. “We couldn’t capture any large ones if we tried. Lost about fifty Achnoids to them already, I guess. Okay, Mookah! Let her go!”

  Mookah wasn’t going to be down on the ground for this one. He had a wire attached to the door release which led into a shed. He pulled the wire. And out sauntered a cocky half-pint of a kid, about half the height of Hippocrates but of the physiological structure of a ten-year-old. He was clad in a piece of hide which was belted around his waist and he had a pair of furred buskins on his feet. His hair was wild and long and his eyes were wild and intelligent. Pugnacity was stamped upon him but there was a jauntiness as well. In his hand he carried a sling and on his wrist, hung by a thong, a knife.

  “Whoa!” said Ole Doc. “Wait a minute! You’re not sacrificing that kid just for my amusement.” And he had a blaster up so fast that only a lunge by O’Hara deflected his aim at the catbeast.

  The kid looked curiously at the plowed hole the blaster had made and then glanced disdainfully at the box. O’Hara, recovered from the lunge, hastily pushed a button and got a bulletproof shield in place.

  “All right, all right,” said Ole Doc. “I’ll stand here and watch murder.” But he held the blaster ready just in case.

  The catbeast had scented the enemy. He got up now and began his waltz, going rapidly forward, his teeth audibly gnashing, his tail kicking up a cloud of dust. On he came. The kid stood where he was, only shifting his sling and putting something into his pocket.

  The catbeast was hungry. It began to rave and its sides puffed like bellows. The stench of decayed meat floated up from it as it exhaled its breath in a thundering aa-um.

  Hippocrates was decidedly interested. He glanced excitedly at Ole Doc and then back at the kid. But that glance had cost Hippocrates the best part of the show.

  The kid let the sling spin and go. There was a sickening crunch of pierced and battered bone and the top of the catbeast’s head vanished in a fountain of blood and leaping brains.

  Down went the catbeast.

  The kid walked forward, kicked the still-gnashing jaw, grabbed what was left of an ear and hacked it off. He put the ear in his pocket, booted the convulsing catbeast in his expiring guts and turned to face the observation platform. Then, in a flash, he put a chunk of steel into his sling and whipped it at the glass. The bulletproof shield crawled with cracks and a shower of chips went forward from it.

  The kid gave his “pants” a hitch, turned on his heel and strode back into the shed. The door fell. Mookah dropped into the arena and began to call for help to get the catbeast en route to the cookshack.

  “I knew he’d shoot at us,” said O’Hara. “The shield was for him, not for you, sir.”

  Ole Doc let out his breath with the realization that he must have been holding it for some time. “Well!”

  “Now that’s my problem,” said O’Hara. “There are eighteen thousand of them and they are all males. Sir, what in the name of all that’s holy have I done wrong?”

  “Took a job with the United States Department of Agriculture,” said Ole Doc.

  “First I was very loving,” said O’Hara. “There were only two of them in the lion shed and I thought they’d been overlooked somehow by these condemned Achnoids. I didn’t know what had happened. I was puzzled but not really upset. Strange things occur out here on these far stations. So I took them into the house as soon as they were “born” and had a female Achnoid feed them with good cow’s milk. And they lay and cooed and I figured out life was a fine thing. And then I was gone on a month’s trip to the next continent to see how my plant culture was doing there—planted a million square miles in redwoods—and when I came back I couldn’t find the Achnoid nurse and the house was in shreds. So they been out here ever since, confound them. For a while I thought they’d eaten the nurse but she finally came whimpering back home, after two weeks lying in the bayonet grass. So here they are. They evidently mature quick.”

  “Evidently,” said Ole Doc.

  “Maybe they won’t be full grown for several years,” said O’Hara. “But every day they get worse. That concrete blockhouse you see down there is just in case.”

  Ole Doc glanced down to where a dozen Achnoids were slaving in the harsh daylight, building what seemed an impregnable fortress. “Prison?” said Ole Doc.

  “Refuge!” said O’Hara. “In six months or less this planet won’t be safe for Achnoids, catbeasts, scumsnakes, gargantelephants, pluseagles or me!”

  Ole Doc looked amusedly back at the Achnoids who were carting away the catbeast’s body. “Well, you’ve got one consolation—”

  An Achnoid had come up from another shed labeled “Horses” and was giving O’Hara an excited account of something. O’Hara looked pale and near a swoon.

  “I said,” said Ole Doc, “that you at least have the consolation that it’s one generation only. With no females—”

  “That’s just it,” said O’Hara, tottering toward the horse incubation shed.

  They went in and found a cluster of Achnoids standing around the first vat. O’Hara thrust them aside and looked and grew even paler. He barked a question and was answered.

  “Well?”

  “Twenty thousand vats,” said O’Hara. “In the third week.”

  “Babies?” said Ole Doc.

  “Females,” said O’Hara, and then more faintly, “females.”

  Ole Doc looked around and found Hippocrates. “Saw a couple lakes coming in. With all the other fauna you have on this planet, fishing ought to be interesting.”

  O’Hara straightened as though he had had an electric shock. “Fishing!”

  “Fishing,” said Ole Doc. “You are the man who is in cha
rge here. I’m just an innocent bystander.”

  “Now look!” said O’Hara in horror. “You’ve got to help me.” He tried to clutch Ole Doc’s cape as the Soldier of Light moved away. “You’ve got to answer some riddles for me! Why is the gestation period three months? Why do they develop in six months to raging beasts? Why are they so antisocial? What have I done wrong in these vats and what can I do to correct it? You’ve got to help me!”

  “I,” said Ole Doc, “am going fishing. No doubt to a bacteriologist, a biochemist or a mutologist your problem would be fascinating. But after all, it’s just a problem. I am afraid it is not going to upset the Universe. Good day.”

  O’Hara stood in trembling disbelief. Here was a Soldier of Light, the very cream of the medical profession, a man who, although he looked thirty, was probably near a thousand years old in medical practice of all kinds. Here was a member of the famous Seven Hundred, the Universal Medical Society, who had taken the new and dangerous developments out of political hands centuries ago and had made the Universe safe for man’s dwelling and who patrolled it now. Here he was, right here in O’Hara’s sight. Here was succor. Here was the lighthouse, the panacea, the miracle he needed.

  He ran beside Ole Doc’s rapid striding toward the compound gate. “But sir! It’s thirty-eight thousand human beings! It’s my professional reputation. I can’t kill them. I don’t dare turn them loose on this planet! I’ll have to desert this station!”

  “Desert it then,” said Ole Doc. “Open the gate, Hippocrates.”

  And they left the distracted O’Hara weeping in the dust. “Get my fishing gear,” said Ole Doc.

  Hippocrates lingered. It was not like him to linger when no emergency was in the wind. His antennae felt around in the air and he hefted the 110-mm with three hands while he scratched his head with the fourth.

  “Well?” barked Ole Doc.

  Hippocrates looked straight at him. He was somewhat of a space lawyer, Hippocrates. “Article 726 of Code 2, paragraph 80, third from the top of page 607 of the Law Regulating the Behavior of Members of the Universal Medical Society, to wit: ‘It shall also be unlawful for the Soldier of Light to desert a medical task of which he has been apprised when it threatens the majority of the human population of any planet.”’

  Ole Doc looked at his little slave in some annoyance. “Are you going to get my fishing gear?”

  “Well?” said Hippocrates.

  Ole Doc glared. “Did I invent the Department of Agriculture? Am I accountable for their mistakes? And are they so poor they can’t send their own man relief?”

  “Well—” said Hippocrates. “No.”

  “Then you still expect me to spend a year here nursing babies?”

  Hippocrates spun his antennae around thoughtfully and then brightened up. He put down the 110-mm and there was a blur and a big divot in the mud where he had been. Ole Doc kept walking toward the lake he had seen at the far end of the savannah and exactly three minutes and eight seconds later by his chronograph, Hippocrates was back beside him with about a thousand pounds of rods, tackle and lunch carried in two hands and a force umbrella and the 110-mm carried in another. With his fourth hand he held a book on lures and precautions for strange planets and from this he was busily absorbing whole pages at a glance.

  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.