Garth caught his breath. “How did you know,” he roared, “where to find this fleet?” He could get to the roots of things, Garth. That was why he was a galactic admiral and the rest here his juniors, even if his seniors in age.
“I cracked your code,” said Ole Doc. “It was not a very hard code to crack, I might caution you. But then one does not need much of a code to fool one battered liner with a cargo of sick and dead.”
Garth’s blue jowl trembled. “Our medical men have already investigated. The disease cannot be cured. It is unknown. Nothing like it has ever been known. Do you know what has happened down there?”
Ole Doc didn’t.
“Two men escaped from your precious liner five minutes after it landed. This morning there were fifty cases of that disease near Piedmont! There were nine cases in Hammerford and twelve in Hartisford! The planet lines have not been interrupted. Not even a road has been blocked. The planet is rotten with it. That means one thing and one thing only. I am here to give orders. This matter is well in hand!”
Ole Doc looked at Garth and suddenly understood why the man was fighting him. Authority. Garth had battled his way to the height of all naval ambition. Since the age-old abolition of seniority leadership, the dynamic people got quickly to the top. And although this was hard on juniors, it was wonderful for efficiency. Its only flaw was power hunger, but nothing in all the Universe would work without that.
“What is the population of Green Rivers?” asked Ole Doc, with a quiet born of his understanding.
“Nine million, the whole planet. Thirty cities and two hundred-odd towns. Are you going to weigh that against the good of all space? No, I think not. I am in charge here. I will not be bullied by a pill roller. According to regulations, this system must be sterilized and sterilize we will!”
“By?” said Ole Doc.
“By scorching that planet. By leveling everything with rays that will last for ten years. Be sentimental if you will, surgeon, but there are fifty million men in these navies. Do you want them to catch this stuff and die, too?”
“Admiral,” said Ole Doc, “I have no desire to see anyone die. That is my profession. That is why I am here. The Star of Space needs help. She is an Earth ship, manned by officers and people like yourselves. And she has women and children aboard.”
“I’d have been saved all this if she’d been disintegrated at the start!” said Garth.
“Down there on this planet, Green Rivers, there are nine million human beings or breeds. They have homes and farms and children. They have churches and projects for celebrating the harvest. They have plans and hopes. And they’ve carved a wilderness into something of which they are proud. And you,” he said to the assembled, “are going to destroy it all.”
It made them uncomfortable. They would not look at his face.
“You’ve forgotten,” said Garth, “what happened during the red death. I commanded a corvette under Van der Ruys. We were at Guyper in Galaxy 809 in ’71. I saw what disease could do when it was not checked. Guyper is still a ruin and the stories I heard—”
“Are not half as bad as those which will be told of Green Rivers if you sterilize it,” concluded Ole Doc.
“We don’t want sickness in our fleets,” said Garth, “and that’s final. I give the orders here. At nineteen hours we cleanse this system. We have no other choice. You yourself,” he hurled at Ole Doc, “admit that you have no notion of what this may be.”
“You must first let me go down there,” said Ole Doc doggedly.
“And come back to reinfect? No!”
“One moment,” said Ole Doc. “You have forgotten something.”
Garth glared.
“I am not under your orders, Admiral.”
“Your ship is staying where it is,” said Garth. “When you go back you will find a cruiser alongside.”
“He’ll not dare detain me,” said Ole Doc.
Garth was dangerously angry. Authority was as precious as blood to him. “If you defy me—”
Ole Doc said, “Admiral, I am leaving.” He shook out a handkerchief and delicately fanned the air before his face and then restored it. “We’ve got warm in here, haven’t we?”
Ole Doc left, went by the speechless men on the deck and was taken in a gig back to the Morgue.
How very small the portable little hospital looked amid all this naval might, thought Ole Doc. The Morgue was tiny against the side of the attending cruiser which, it must be admitted, was having a very hard time due to an incessant demand to shift bumpers from a little four-armed being on parade.
Ole Doc went through the lock and into the cruiser. He found the commanding officer very nervous with his duty.
“I say, sir,” said the captain to Ole Doc, “you’ve a very devil aboard, you know. He’s made us do everything but wrap ourselves in silk to keep from scratching his precious ship. We’ve been awfully decent about it—”
“I want permission to leave,” said Ole Doc. “I ask it as a formality, because I am going to leave anyway.”
The captain was shocked. “But you can’t! You absolutely can’t! I’ve got orders to stay right where I am and to keep you hard alongside. The second you were sighted lying here, Admiral Garth sent me a positive injunction—” He fumbled on his mess table for it and found the radioscript.
“You would fire on a Soldier of Light?” said Ole Doc, dangerous.
“No, heavens no! But . . . well, sir, you haven’t the power to pull us around and I’m afraid the grapplers are sealed.”
Ole Doc looked calculatingly at the man. In Ole Doc’s pocket was a hypo gun that would make this captain agree the stars were all pink with yellow circles. The second button of Ole Doc’s cloak, if lighted, would fix said captain in his tracks. A capsule in Ole Doc’s kit released into one ventilator of the ship would immobilize the whole crew for hours.
But Ole Doc sighed. It was so flagrantly against the UMS code to interfere with an official vessel in performance of its ordered duty. And if the young man disobeyed, it would be his finish in the Navy. Ole Doc took a cup of coffee from a very deferential and grateful captain. A little later he went back to his ship.
At eighteen-thirty sgt, Ole Doc awoke from a short nap. He looked out of the port and saw the lovely green of the planet through its clouds. He frowned, looked at his watch and then went into the operating room.
He gargled and blew antiseptic jets into his nose and dusted himself off with a sweet-smelling light which incidentally washed his face and hands. He puttered for a while with a new lancet Soldier Isaac had given him last Christmas and then made short passes with it in the air as though he was cutting somebody’s jugular—not Garth’s, of course.
Orders. Orders were inexorable soulless things which temporarily divorced a man from rationality and made him an extension of another brain. Orders. Born out of inorganic matter contained in some passionless book, they yet had more force than all the glib conversations of a thousand philosophers. Orders. They made men slaves. Garth was a slave. A slave to his own orders.
Ole Doc opened a text on electro-deductive psychiatric diagnosis and turned to “paranoia.” It was eighteen-fifty. If Garth was going to blast at nineteen—
The command speaker barked up. “Galactic Admiral Garth to UMS Morgue. Galactic Admiral Garth to UMS Morgue.” It came over the commercial channel as well and was echoing up there in the control room.
Ole Doc went to his communications panel. He turned a switch and swung a dial. “Morgue to Garth. Over.”
“Morgue. Urgent. The disease has reached the fleet. Something must be done. What can you do? Please do something! Anything!”
“Coming aboard,” said Ole Doc and shut off his panel.
They almost mobbed him trying to get him aboard this time. They rushed him to the cabin. They saluted and bowed and pushed him in.
During the few hours which had elapsed, a considerable change had taken place in Garth.
The admiral was pale. Five admirals attend
ed him and they were pale.
Garth was courageous.
“I suppose this means we are doomed,” he said, trying to keep his hand away from his throat, which ached frighteningly. “The scout vessels which approached the Star of Space must have been infected in the air. Their captain reported to me here. He must have been the carrier. I . . . I have infected the officers who were with me today. They, returning to their ships, have exposed their crews. My own medical officer”—and it was easy to tell how difficult this was for Garth to beg a favor—“has no idea of what this can be. You must do something. You have asked for a case so that you could study symptoms. You have that case, Doctor.”
Ole Doc sat on the edge of the desk and swung a boot. He shrugged. “When you deal with diseases which have not been studied over a full course of sickness, you can form no real judgment. I am sorry, Admiral, but there is nothing much which can be done just now.”
“They’ve got full courses on Green Rivers,” said Garth.
“Ah, yes,” said Ole Doc. “But I am, unfortunately, forbidden—”
Garth was steady and stern. How he hated asking this! How he despised this pill roller despite the present plight! “I will release you from that. If you care to risk the sickness, you are free to study it.”
Ole Doc handed up an order blank from the desk and Garth wrote upon it.
“If it were not for the sake of my officers and men,” said Garth, “I would not bother with this. I do not believe anything can be done. I act only on the recommendation of naval surgeons. Is that clear?”
“Orders again,” murmured Ole Doc.
“What?” said Garth.
“In case of sickness, the medical corps, I think, orders the line. Well, I’ll see if I know anything. Good day.”
They let him out and through the side. Back in his ship, Ole Doc presented the order to the cruiser captain and the Morgue was freed. Five minutes later, at the controls, Ole Doc sent the Morgue knifing through the cloud layers and across the verdant surface of the beautiful planet.
He found the shapely towers of Piedmont with no trouble and in a short while was settled down upon the red earth of the landing field.
Within five minutes the Morgue was likely to be crushed by the mob which pressed to it. There was anxiety and hysteria in the welcome. Women held up their children to see the ship and hitherto accounted brave men fought remorselessly to get close enough to it to beg succor. Officials and police struggled with the crowd, half to clear it, half to get near the ship themselves. An old woman in the foremost rank, when the area before the port had been cleared, knelt humbly and began to pray in thankfulness.
Ole Doc swung out, stood on the step and looked down on their heads. The babble which met him was almost a physical force. He waited for them to quiet and at last, by patience alone, won their silence.
“People,” said Ole Doc, “I can promise you nothing. I will try. While I am here you will help by giving me space in which to walk and work”—for he had been in such panic areas before—“so that I can help you. I cannot and will not treat an individual. When I have a solution, you will all benefit if that proves possible. Now go to your homes. Your radios will tell what is taking place.”
They did not disperse but they gave him room to walk. He went across the field and down a tree-lined street under the directions of an Army officer who informed him that the Star of Space was landed, partially disabled, at a flying field near the ballpark.
Data was poured at him by people who fled along on either side and walked backwards a distance before him. Most of it was contradictory. But it was plain that in the last few hours a thousand cases had broken out across the face of Green Rivers.
It was a pleasant town upon a pleasant planet. The neat streets were flanked by wide gardens and trees and the heat of Sirius was comfortable. Ole Doc sighed as he realized how he stood between this homely work and a charred planet of debris.
A quack, selling a box of “fever cure,” saw Ole Doc coming and ashamedly tried to stand before his sign and hide it. How the man expected to get away with any money he made was a mystery of psychology.
The Star of Space was a desolation. She had jammed into the ground on landing, fracturing her tubes. Bad navigation had dented her with space dust. Her sealed ports were like sightless eyes in a skull.
Ole Doc stood for a while within twenty feet of her, gazing in pity. And then he cupped his hands. “Star of Space, ahoy.”
A lock opened and a gaunt young man in a filthy uniform stood there. “A Soldier of Light,” he said in a hushed voice.
A woman was crying on Ole Doc’s left, holding a child cradled in her arms, and when they saw her the crowd shrank from her, for the child had closed eyes and was breathing with difficulty. But Ole Doc did not see her. He advanced on the Star.
The young man tried to say a welcome and could not. He dropped his face into his hands and began to sob soundlessly.
Ole Doc pushed on through. He was, after all, a mortal. Diseases respected no man, not even the UMS. It is valiant to go up against ray guns. It took more nerve to walk into that ship.
The stench was like a living wall. There were unburied dead in there. The salons and halls were stained and disarrayed, the furniture broken, the draperies torn down for other uses. A piano stood gleamingly polished amid a chaos of broken glass. And a young woman, dead, lay with her hair outsplayed across the fragments as though she wore diamonds in her locks.
The young man had followed and Ole Doc turned in the salon. “Bring the other people here.”
“They won’t assemble.”
“Bring them here.”
Ole Doc sat down in a deep chair and took out a notebook. After a long while the people began to come, a few at a time, singly or in large groups. They looked at one another with fear on their faces. Not a few of them were mad.
A girl hurled herself across the salon and dropped to grasp at Ole Doc’s knees. She was a beautiful girl, about twenty. But hunger and terror had written large upon her and her hands were shaking.
She cried out something over and over. But Ole Doc was looking at the people who were assembling there. Then he dropped his eyes, for he was ashamed to look at their misery longer.
He began as orderly as he could and gradually pieced together the tale.
The disease had begun nine days out, with one case, a man from Cobanne in the Holloway System. He had raved and muttered in delirium and when partly conscious had informed the ship’s doctor that he had seen the same sickness in Cobanne, a back-space ruined remnant of war. He was a young man, about twenty. Twenty-one days out he died, but it was the opinion of the doctor that death was due to a rheumatic heart which the patient had had prior to the disease.
This was news enough, to find a place where a rheumatic heart was considered incurable. And then Ole Doc recalled the disease warfare of the Holloway System and the resultant poverty and abandonment of what had once been rich.
The next case had broken out twelve days after departure and had terminated in death a week later. Ole Doc took down the details and made a scan of nearly forty cases to arrive at a course.
The disease had an incubation period of something up to ten days. Then for a period of one week, more or less, the temperature remained low. Spots came in the mouth—though these had also been noted earlier. The temperature then rose rapidly and often caused death in this period. If it did not, the throat was greatly swollen and spots came out on the forehead and spread down over the body. Temperature then dropped to around ninety-nine for a day but rose suddenly to one hundred and five or more, at which point the patient either died or, as had happened in two cases, began to recover. But death might follow any sudden temperature rise and generally did.
Ole Doc went back to a cabin where a currently stricken woman lay and took some phlegm. He processed it quickly and established the disease as a nonfilterable virus.
There were two hundred and twenty well officers, crew and passengers remaining
on the Star of Space. They were without hope but their eyes followed Ole Doc whenever he moved across the salon going to patients in other parts of the ship.
The inspection took an hour and Ole Doc went then into the daylight and sat down on the grass under a tree while Hippocrates shooed people away. After a long time, it looked as if Ole Doc were asleep.
But he was not sleeping. No modern medical text contained any mention of such a disease. But that, of course, proved nothing. The UMS texts were blank about it, that he knew. But it seemed, somehow, that he had heard or read something, somewhere, about it.
The study of such diseases was not very modern after the vigorous campaigns for asepsis five hundred years ago. But still— Ole Doc looked at a stream nearby and wondered if it had any fish in it. Hang it, this area looked like the Cumberland country back in his native Maryland, a long, long way and a long, long time from here. Maybe if he fished—but his dignity here, right now, would not permit that. These people expected him to do something. Like that old woman, when he was a brand-new doctor up in the Cumberland Gap. Her child—
Ole Doc leaped to his feet. He grabbed the kit from Hippocrates and flung out the contents on the grass. After a short space of study he began to call for details and it was like a bucket-brigade line the way Hippocrates was hustled back and forth by people between the Morgue and the Star.
He called for barrels. He called for wrapping paper. He played light on scraps of meat and he had a patient brought out from the ship and made him spit and spit again into a small cup.
The cup was treated and from the contents a drop was put in each barrel. And then the barrels were full of ingredients and being stirred under a light. And then another light, hitched to a thousand pounds of tubes and condensers, was lowered into each barrel and the mixtures left to stew.
It was crude but it was fast.
Ole Doc called for the young man—fourth officer of the Star of Space.
“I can catalyze the course of this disease,” said Ole Doc. “I want a guinea pig.”
Ole Doc Methuselah Page 16
