In lingua spacia, Ole Doc saluted him.
“There is trouble,” said Ole Doc. “I am your friend.” There are but four hundred and eighty-nine words in lingua spacia but they would serve here.
The old creature paused and saluted Ole Doc. “There are no friends to the Kufra on Mizar’s Dorab.”
“I am not of Dorab-Mizar. I belong to no world. I salute you as a cithw for this I also may be called. You are in trouble.”
“In grievous trouble, wise one. My people are hungry. They are a free people, wise one. They have homes and sons and lands where light shines.”
“What do your people eat, cithw?”
“Kufra, wise one. That is why we are called the Kufra people.”
“And what is this kufra, cithw?”
The ancient one paused and thought and shook his head at last. “It is kufra, wise one. There is none here.”
“How often do you eat this, cithw?”
“Our festivals come each second year and it is then we feast upon the sacred food.”
“What is meant by year, wise one?”
“A year, wise one. I cannot tell more. We are not of the galactic empire. We know little of the human save what we have learned here. They call our home Sirius Sixty-eight but we call it Paradise, wise one. We long to return. These frozen snows and dead faces are not for us.”
“I must know more, cithw. Is there sickness amongst your people?”
“There is not, wise one. There has never been what you call sickness and we saw it only here for the first time. Wise one, if you are a man of magic among these peoples, free us from this living death. Free us and we shall worship you as a god, building bright temples to your name as a deliverer of our people. Free us, wise one, if you have the power.”
Ole Doc felt a choke of emotion, so earnest were these words, so real the agony in this being’s soul.
“Return to your places here and I shall do everything I can to free you,” said Ole Doc.
The old one nodded and turned back. Shortly, after a conversation with other leaders, the slaves left the corridor. Ole Doc met the captain.
“They are going back to quarters,” said Ole Doc. “I must do what I can for them and for you.”
“Say, who the hell are you anyway?” asked the captain.
“A Soldier of Light,” said Ole Doc.
The captain and the men stood speechless and watched the golden cloak flow out of sight beyond a turn.
Hippocrates met Ole Doc, as ordered by communicator, outside the government house, carrying some fifteen hundred pounds of equipment under one arm. Hippocrates was lawful in everything but obeying Newton’s law of gravity.
“‘When plague strikes an area it is usual to issue yellow tickets to all transport and then proceed on certain well-defined lines . . .”’ Automatically he was quoting a manual, meanwhile looking about him at the chill, deserted squares of the subsurface city.
Ole Doc saw with satisfaction that the little fellow was dressed in a cast-off insulator, which though much too large was fine protection against anything except blasters.
Shortly, on the broad steps of the castle, the instruments were laid out in orderly shining rows, a small table was set up, a number of meters were lined to one side and a recorder was in place by the table.
Hippocrates went off in a rush and came back carrying a stack of bodies which he dumped with a thud on the steps. He kicked the wandering arms and legs into line and sniffed distastefully at the mound, some of which had been there too long.
Ole Doc went methodically to work. He took up a lancet and jutted it at the corpse of a young girl which was promptly banged down on the table. Ole Doc, hampered by his gloves, went quickly to work while Hippocrates handed him glittering blades and probes.
In an upper window of the government house the big face of one George Jasper Arlington came into view. His eyes popped as he stared at the scene on the steps and then, ill, he slammed down the blind.
At first a small, timid knot of people had come forward but it had not taken the officious wave of Hippocrates to send them scurrying.
The abattoir then fascinated nothing but the professional curiosity of Ole Doc.
“Would have died from Graves’ disease anyway,” said Ole Doc looking at the table and then at the full buckets. “But that couldn’t be the plague. Next!”
The lancet glittered under the flashing arc and with a neat perfection which could separate cell from cell, nerve from tissue, nay, the very elements from one another, Ole Doc continued on his intent way.
“Next!”
“Next!”
“Next!”
And then, “Hippocrates, look at these slides for me.”
There was one from each and the little creature bent a microscope over them and counted in a shrill singsong.
“Right,” said Ole Doc. “Anemia. Anemia bad enough to kill. Now what disease would cause that?”
Phonograph-recordwise, Hippocrates began to intone the sixty-nine thousand seven hundred and four known diseases but Ole Doc was not listening. He was looking at the remains of the girl who would have died from Graves’ disease anyway and then at the window of George Jasper Arlington’s office.
“Next,” said Ole Doc hopelessly.
It was a scrawny woman who had obviously suffered for some time from malnutrition. And Ole Doc, with something like pity, began his work once more.
The snick of blade and the drip from the table were all the sounds in the chilly street. And then a sharp exclamation from Ole Doc.
He seized the liver and held it closer to the light and then, with a barked command at Hippocrates, raced up the steps and kicked open the door of George Jasper Arlington’s office.
The big man stared in alarm and then stumbled away from the grisly thing in Ole Doc’s hand.
“You’ve got to return the slaves to Sirius Sixty-eight!” said Ole Doc.
“Return them? Get out of here with that thing. Why should I spend a fortune doing that? Get out!”
“You’ll spend it because I tell you to,” said Ole Doc.
“If you mean they’ve caused the plague and will continue it, I’ll have them shot but that’s all.”
“Oh no you won’t,” said Ole Doc. “And if you see fit to disobey me and shoot them, at least wait until I have departed. If you kill them, you’ll leave the poison here forever.”
“Poison!”
“There is an old tale of a man who poisoned his daughter gradually until she was immune and then sent her to kill his rival’s son. I am afraid you are up against that. You’ll die—everyone on this planet and you included will die if you shoot those slaves. And you will die if you keep them.”
“Go to hell!” said George Arlington.
Ole Doc looked at the thing he carried and smiled wryly through his helmet face. “Then you don’t leave me much chance.”
“Chance for what?”
“To save you. For unless you do this thing, I have no recourse.”
From a pocket in the hem of his golden cloak he drew a sheaf of yellow papers. Dropping his burden on the desk he seized a pen and wrote:
George Jasper Arlington
Never
“What is that?”
“A personal yellow ticket. I go now to give them to all your spaceships, all your captains, all your towns and villages. No one will come to you, ever. No one can go from here, ever. There will be no export, no import. I abandon you and all space abandons you. I condemn you to the death you sought to give your slaves. I have spoken.”
And he threw the yellow paper on the desk before Arlington and turned to leave.
“Wait. Holy hell, doctor. Have you got that power? Look. Listen to reason. Listen, Doctor. You can’t do this. I haven’t tried to buck you. I am trying to cooperate. I’ll . . . Wait! What is wrong? What is the disease, the poison?”
“This,” said Ole Doc, “is the remains of a malignant and commonly fatal tumor of this particular species of colloid.
It is a cancer, Arlington. And now I am going about my business since you will not attend to yours.”
“Cancer! But that’s not catching! I know that’s not catching.”
“Look at it,” said Ole Doc.
Arlington looked away. “What did you say I was to do?”
“Take all available transport and return the Kufra people to Sirius Sixty-eight. Every one of them. Only then can you live. I will have to treat your crews and make other arrangements before departure. But I will only do this if you promise that no single slave will be shot or mauled. That is vital, understand?”
“Good God, what have I done to deserve this? It will cost me half my fortune. I will have no laborers. Isn’t there—”
“There is not,” said Ole Doc. “I suggest you employ the best engineers in the Galaxy to provide machinery for your timber work. When you have done that I will send you a formula so that human beings can stand the cold for a short time without injury. I will do this. But there is your communicator.”
George Jasper Arlington began to look hopeful. But it was fear which made him give the orders, fear and the thing in Ole Doc’s hand.
Four hours later, at the main spaceport, Ole Doc finished giving his orders to the departing crews. They were men of space and they knew their galaxies. They listened reverently to the commands of a Soldier of Light, painted their clothing and helmets as he told them, fixed their compartments at his orders and then began the loading of the suddenly docile slaves.
In the semidarkness of the subsurface hangars, a few moments before the first ship would burst out into the freedom of space, on course for Sirius Sixty-eight, Ole Doc nodded to the cithw.
The ancient one would have shaken Ole Doc’s hand but Ole Doc adroitly avoided it, smiling through his visor.
“We are grateful,” said the ancient one. “You have delivered us, Soldier of Light, and to you we shall build a shrine so that all our people may know. To you we shall send prayers as to any other god. You have delivered us.”
Ole Doc smiled. And from his kit he took a certificate, brilliant yellow, of eternium satin. It stated:
Quarantine!
Know all wanderers of space, all captains of ships, generals of armies, ministers of governments, princes, kings and rulers whatsoever that this Planet Sirius Sixty-eight has been declared in perpetual quarantine forever and that no inhabitant of this planet is to depart from it for any cause or reason whatsoever until the end of time.
By my hand and seal, under the watchfulness of God, by the power invested in me, so witness my command:
ODM
Soldier of Light
“Enshrine this,” said Ole Doc when he had explained it. “Enshrine this and forget the rest. And show it to all who would come for you and be deluded by your manlike appearance into thinking you could be slaves. None will violate it, for the men who conquer space are not the men who rule its petty planets and they know. Goodbye, then. God bless you.”
The ancient one clutched at the hem of his cloak and kissed it and then, certificate securely clutched, boarded the first ship.
Six minutes later the port was empty and the slaves were gone.
But the work of Ole Doc was not yet done and through sixteen wearisome hours he labored over the inhabitants of the city who had contacted the slaves even indirectly. Fortunately it took but a short time to correct, with proper rays, all the effects that might have been made.
Those who were almost dead, even those, returned to health and strode away and Ole Doc, with a tired smile, watched the last of them go. And then he signaled Hippocrates to gather up the immense weight of equipment and take it to the Morgue.
George Jasper Arlington, there on the steps where the station had been set up, looked with awe at Ole Doc.
“I never met one of you guys before,” said Arlington. “I guess I must have been mistaken. I thought you were just some kid even if I’d always heard about Soldiers of Light. They sure take you in young.”
“They do at that,” said Ole Doc, seven hundred and ninety-two Earth years young.
“Can’t you tell me more about what was wrong? So maybe I could avoid it next time?”
“I don’t mind telling you,” said Ole Doc, “now that they’ve gone. Slavery is a nasty thing. It is an expensive thing. The cheapest slave costs far too much in dignity and decency. For men are created to do better things than enslave others. You’ll work out your industries some better way, I know.”
“Oh, sure. You got a swell idea. But can’t you tell me what was wrong?”
“Why, I don’t mind,” said Ole Doc. “It was a matter of metabolism. All creatures, you know, haven’t the same metabolism. They run on various fuels. In the galaxies we’ve found half a hundred different ones in use by plants, animals and sentient beings. My man there runs, weirdly enough, on gypsum. Others run on silicon. You and I happen to run on carbon, which is, after all, a rather specialized element. Earth just got started that way. Your slaves had a new one. I knew it as soon as I saw that healed cancer.”
“Healed?”
“Yes. Only the woman was healed too well.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well,” said Ole Doc, “you will. There was a fine reason not to shoot the Kufra people or to keep them.”
“Well?”
“Why, they had a very efficient metabolism which accounted for their great weight and physical composition, also for their endurance and their apparent small need of food. They,” said Ole Doc quietly, “had a plutonium metabolism.”
“A plu . . . oh my God!”
“On their planet, so close to the Sirius twin, everything is upper scale and plutonium is the carbon of higher range. So you couldn’t have shot them or buried them in mass graves, you see. They were, I think, rather expensive slaves.”
George Jasper Arlington came out of his daze. In a voice of hushed respect he said, “Is there anything I can give you?”
“Nothing,” said Ole Doc. And then, “Oh, yes! You have Mizar musk here. I’ll take a bottle of it for a friend.”
Which was how Miss Rogers received a full hogshead of Mizar musk and why the Soldiers of Light, wandering through a thousand galaxies, bear to this day the right to forbid the transportation of slaves from anywhere to anywhere on the pain of any one of those peculiar little ways they have of enforcing even their most capricious laws.
The Great Air Monopoly
Ole Doc sat in the cool sunlight of Arphon and pulled at a fragrant pipe. The Morgue, his ship-laboratory, sat in lush grass up to its belly beside the sparkling lake and from its side came out an awning to make a stately pavilion for the master.
Sun12 was thirty degrees high and Arphon’s autumn sucked hungrily at the warmth, even as Ole Doc sucked at the pipe. He was getting away with something with that pipe. His little super-gravitic slave Hippocrates was bustling around, all four hands busy, now and then coming to a full stop to lower his antennae at Ole Doc in disapproval. It was not of his master that he disapproved, it was the pipe.
“What if it is his birthday?” growled Hippocrates. “He shouldn’t. He said he wouldn’t. He promised me. Nicotine, ugh! And three whole days until he takes his treatment. Nicotine on his fingers, poisoning him; nicotine in his lungs. Poison, that’s what it is. In the pharmacopoeia . . . !!” And he rattled off a long, gruesome list of poisons, for, once going, his phonograph-recordwise mind went on into Nilophine, Novocain and Nymphodryl. Suddenly he realized where all this was heading and, in anger with himself now as well as Ole Doc, got back to work with his birthday party preparations. They were very intricate preparations. After all, there had to be nine hundred and five candles on that cake.
Ole Doc paid his little slave no heed. He sat in the sunlight and puffed his pipe and occasionally made intricate calculations on his gold cuff—his filing case was full of torn cuffs containing solutions which would have rocked even his brothers of the Universal Medical Society, much less the thousand and five humanoid systems in this
one galaxy.
He didn’t hear the clanking chains or the bark of the guards on the march, even though they came closer with every second and would pass hard by the ship. It was nothing to Ole Doc that Arphon was a boiling turmoil of revolt and murder. In the eight hundred and eighty years since he had graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Maryland, First Continental District, Earth, Orbit Three, Sun1, Rim Zone, Galaxy1, Universe—or 1, 3160, 1 m. ly hub1, 264–89, sub-328, which will find it for you on the space charts if you are going there—he had seen everything, done everything, felt everything, tasted everything, been everything including a messiah, a dictator, a humanoid animal in a glass dome, and a god, and there were few things left to amaze or interest him.
He supposed someday he would crack up or get shot or forget his regular youth treatments for a month and wind up in the quiet crypt where sat the nine hundred coffins of black ebony and gold containing all the mortal remains of Soldiers of Light who had departed the service in the only way possible and whose brothers had carefully brought them home.
He calculated from time to time and filled his pipe. After a while, when dinner was over, he’d go to the lake, make an artificial dusk and try out his battery of flies on the trout. Just now he was calculating.
It had come to him that morning that negative could be weighed and if this were so, then it could be canned and, if that were true, he could undoubtedly surprise his colleagues at the Center some two hundred million light-years away by making painless amputations so that new limbs could be grown.
He had just come up to his ninety-sixth variable when Hippocrates heard the chain gang. The little slave was ashamed of himself for being too busy or too provoked to heed sounds audible to him these past sixteen and two-tenths minutes.
Hippocrates jumped to the panel, making the Morgue rock with his great weight, and four-handedly threw on a combination of switches which utterly camouflaged the Morgue, screened Ole Doc without making him invisible, trained outward a brace of 600-mm blasters rated at a thousand rounds a second, and turned down the oven so that his cake wouldn’t burn. These four importances attended to, Hippocrates hung invisible in the door and eyed the column with disfavor as it came in sight.
Ole Doc Methuselah Page 9
