Ole Doc Methuselah (13 page)

After
a little he rose up on his elbows and looked at the
Morgue.
The alloy
had stopped dripping and the smoke had cleared away but the poor old ship
looked ready for a spare-parts house. The upper turret had been straight-armed
back, a ten-foot hole lay under her keel and the keel was
bent, and the near port had been melted entirely out of line. And then he took
heart. For she wasn't hulled that he could see and her tubes
at one end and her
texas
on the other were untouched. He started to spring up
but the second he put weight on his right hand it collapsed and he felt sick.

He
looked down and saw that his palm was seared away and his wrist sprained or
broken. He felt rapidly of his shoulders and chest but his cloak had protected
him there. One boot was almost seared off but his ankle and foot were
uninjured. Aside from singes, his wrist and hand, he had survived what must
have been a considerable conflagration. He came up swiftly then and went
through the hot door. Small spirals of smoke were rising from the salon upholstery.
One huge gold panel had curled off its mountings from heat and a silver
decanter was lying in a puddle on the charred rug, struck squarely by a ray
translating itself through the hull.

But
the young woman was gone and Ole Doc, looking back at the trampled meadow
through the misshapen door, understood suddenly how he must have got out here.
No calloused space ranger would have tried to rescue him. Either the girl had
tried or Hippocrates—

“Hippocrates!”

“Hippocrates.”

“Hippocrates,”
echoed the empty cabins.

Ole
Doc raced into the texas and looked around. He went aft to the tube rooms and
found them empty. And he had nearly concluded that they must have taken his
little slave when he thought of the jammed turret.

The
ladder was curled into glowing wreckage and the trap at the top had fused
solidly shut from the impact of a direct hit. Ole Doc stood looking upward, a
lump rising in his throat. He was afraid of what he would find behind that
door.

He
went casting about him for a burning torch and was startled by a whir and clang
in the galley as he passed it. In a surge of hope he thrust open the door. But
little Hippocrates was not there. Pans, spoons and spits were just as he had
left them. A bowl of gooey gypsum and mustard, the slave's favorite concoction
for himself, stood half eaten on the sink, spoon drifting minutely from an
upright position to the edge of the bowl as the neglected mixture hardened. A
small pink-bellied god grinned forlornly in a niche, gazing at the
half-finished page of a letter to some outlandish world. The whir and clang had
come from the opening oven door on the lip of which now stood the ejected cake,
patiently waiting for icing, decorations and nine hundred and five candles.

Ole
Doc closed the galley softly as though he had been intruding on a private life
and stood outside, hand still on the latch. For a long, long time he had never
thought about it. But life without Hippocrates would be a desperate, hard thing
to bear.

He
swore a futile, ordinary oath and went to his operating room. His hand was
burning but he did not heed it. There was an amputator in here someplace which
would saw through diamonds with cold fire. He spilled three drawers on the
floor and in the blinding glitter of instruments finally located the tool.

It
wasn't possible to reach the trap without taking away the twisted ladder and
for some minutes he scorched himself on the heated metal until he could cut it
all away. Then it occurred to him that he would have no chance of getting
Hippocrates down if there was anything left of him, for that little fellow
weighed five hundred kilos, even if he was less than a meter tall.

Ole
Doc found rope and mattresses and then, standing on a chair, turned the cold
fire on a corner of the trap. He stopped abruptly for fear the excess jet would
touch Hippocrates' body on the other side and for a while stood frowning
upward. Then he seized a thermometer from his pocket and began to apply it all
over the steel above him. In a minute or two he had found a slightly higher temperature
over an area which should compare with the little slave's body and he chalked
it off. Then, disregarding the former lines of the trap, he jetted out five
square feet of resistant metal as though it had been butter. The torch was
entirely spent when he had but an inch to go, but the lip had sagged from
weight enough for him to pry down. A moment later he was crawling into the
turret.

Hippocrates
lay curled into himself as though asleep. He was seared and blackened by the
heat of the melting girder which had buckled and pinned him down.

Ole
Doc hurriedly put a heart counter against the slave's side and then sagged with
relief when he saw the needle
beat-beat-beat
in faint but regularly
spaced rhythm. He stood up, feeling his own life surging back through him, and
wrenched away the confining girder.

Carefully,
because he had never made any study of the slave's anatomy—which anatomy had
been the reason Ole Doc had bought him at that auction God knew how many, many
scores of years ago, two centuries? three?—Ole Doc trussed the little fellow in
a rope cradle and, by steadying the standing part over a split jet barrel,
began the weary task of lowering the enormous weight down to the mattresses
below.

It
took a full twenty minutes to get Hippocrates on an operating table, but when
that was done, Ole Doc could only examine him in perplexity. Other than diet,
which was gypsum, Ole Doc knew nothing about the slave.

The
antennae were not injured. The arms were bruised but whole. The legs appeared
sound. But there was a chipped look about the chest which argued grave injury.
Hippocrates was physician to himself and, knowing this, Ole Doc went back to
the tiny cabin off the galley.

He
found some amulets which looked like witchcraft, and a bottle which his keen
nose identified as diluted ink with a medical dosage on the label. He found
some chalky-looking compresses and some white paint.

Completely
beaten he went back and sat down beside the table. Hippocrates' heart was
beating more faintly.

His
anxiety becoming real now, like a hand around his throat, Ole Doc hurried to
the galley. He had seen Hippocrates tipsy a few times and that meant a
stimulant. But it wasn't a stimulant which Ole Doc found.

The
letter was addressed in plain lingua spacia.

 

Bestin
Karjoy
Malbright,
Diggs Import Co.
Minga,
Arphon.

By
Transcript Corporation of the Universe charge UMS ODM

 

Dear
Human Beings:

Forty-six years ago you had one Bestin Karjoy of
my people doing your accounts. Please to give same Bestin this message.

Hello Bestin. How are you? I am fine. I have not
been feeling too good lately because of the old complaint and if your father
still employ with you, you tell him Hippocrates needs to come see him and get
some advice. My master got birthday today so I give him happy birthday with
nine hundred and five candles which surprise you for human, but you know how
big and famous he is and anyway, I can come in gig tonight and see you about
dawn-dark halfway on park front because I don't know where you really live and
your father . . .

 

The
cake must have demanded something there, for it stopped in a blot. “At five
dollars a word outer-space rates!” exclaimed Ole Doc. But when he had read it
through he was willing to have it at five hundred a word.

He
hastened back to the operating table and put the gypsum and mustard close to
hand, stacking with it water, the diluted ink and a call phone turned on to the
band of his own, propping up a note:

“Hold
on, old fellow. I'm returning with your friend Bestin or his father. I'll stay
tuned on this phone.”

His
hand annoyed him as he tried to write with it and when the note had been placed
he plunged his arm to the elbow into a catalyst vat and felt the painful
prickling which meant a too-fast heal. It would scar at this speed but what was
a scar?

He
saw that the gig, which had been on the side away from the blast, was
uninjured, and he had almost launched it when he saw it would never do to go
demanding things in his present charred state.

Impatiently
he threw on a new shirt, boots and cloak and, thrusting a kit and a blaster
into his belt, lost no further time.

 

The
gig was a small vacuum-atmosphere boat, jet powered and armed. It was capable
of several light-years' speed and was naturally very difficult to handle at
finites like ten thousand miles an hour. Ole Doc went straight past Minga twice
before he properly found it, glimpsed it just long enough to see the landing
strip in the middle of town and put the gig down to paving at three hundred and
eighty.

Ordinarily
Ole Doc disliked middle-sized towns. They didn't have the chummy “hello stranger”
attitude of the pioneer villages of space and yet lacked any of the true
comforts of the city. Built by money-hungry citizenry around a space repair
yard, such towns were intent upon draining off the profit of the mines and
farms incoming and outgoing. They were, in short, provincial. A rover port had
some color and danger, a metropolis had comfort and art. Such as Minga had law
and order and a
Rotarian club
and were usually most
confoundedly proud of being dull.

And
so Ole Doc didn't give Minga much of a glance, either passing over or walking
in. Brick fronts and badly painted signs—houses all alike—people all— But even
Ole Doc in his rush had to slow and stare.

Minga
was a city, according to the
Star Pilot,
of ninety thousand people where
“a limited number of fuel piles, ice, fresh water, provisions and some ship
chandlery
can be obtained” and “repairs can be made to small
craft in cradles with capacity under one hundred tons” and “the space hospital
is government staffed by the Sun
¹²
System Navy with limited medical stores available” and “two small hotels and
three restaurants provide indifferent accommodations due to the infrequency of
stopovers.” Not exactly the sort of town where you would expect to see a
well-dressed man of fifty carefully but unmistakably stalking a cat.

It
was not even a fat cat, but a gaunt-ribbed, mat-furred, rheumy-eyed sort of
feline which wouldn't go a pound of stringy meat. But from the look on the
well-dressed gentleman's face, there was no other reason than that.

Had
he seen a riot, a golden palace, a ten-tailed dog or a parade of seals singing
“Hallelujah,” Ole Doc would not have been much amazed, for one sees many
things strange and disorders unreasonable in a lifetime of rolling through the
systems great and small. Ole Doc had been everywhere and seen everything, had
long ago come to the conclusion that it wasn't even curious, but a
well-dressed, obviously influential old man engaging in the stalk of a mangy
cat—well!

The
gentleman had crept around the corner to pursue his game and now he had a fence
for cover and with it was using up the twenty-yard lead the cat had had
originally. In his hand the gentleman held a butterfly net and in his eye there
was hunger.

The
cat was unable to locate its pursuer now and stopped a bit to pant. It looked
beleaguered as though it had been hunted before and the old gentleman had it
worried. It crouched warily behind a post and condensed itself anew when it saw
Ole Doc some thirty feet away. This new distraction was its undoing.

Soft
footed and alert, the old gentleman left the fence and crossed the walk out of
the cat's range of vision. Too late the animal caught the shadow beside it and
sprang to escape. There was a swish of net and a blur of fur, a yowl of dismay
and a crow of triumph and the old gentleman, by twisting the net into a bag
below the hoop, struck an attitude of victory.

Ole
Doc started breathing again and walked forward. The old gentleman, seeing him,
held up the prize.

“A
fine morsel now, isn't it, sir?” said the old gentleman. “Been three solid
weeks since we've dined on good, tasty cat. Don't yowl, my good rabbit-
avec
-croutons-to-be, for it won't do you a bit of good.
My, my, my, that was a long chase. Ten solid blocks and tortuous, too, what
with thinking every instant some guttersnipe would leap out and snatch my prize
from me. For I'm not as young as once I was. Dear me.”

Ole
Doc could see no insanity in the fellow's eyes nor find any fault other than
this enthusiasm for dining on mangy cats. But, he decided suddenly, this was no
time to follow the quirks of the human mind. Serious business—very serious
business—was waiting for him in the wrecked hull of the
Morgue.
He
glanced anxiously at his radio pack. The
tick-tick-tick
of the heart
counter was very slow.

“Sir,”
said Ole Doc, “while I can't share your enthusiasm for cat on toast, I could
use some of your knowledge of this town. Could you tell me where I might find a
company known as Malbright, Diggs? They import, I think, and have their main
office here in Minga.”