Ole Doc Methuselah (25 page)

There
he stopped.

The
bloodiest, messiest man it had ever been his fate to see was trying to crawl up
from the floor. He was dripping blood from massive contusions. He was dripping
rags. He was blind with fair blows and staggering on the borders of beyond. His
remaining teeth were set behind lips so puffed that they looked like pillows.

And
Ole Doc, standing there with his broken fists still ready, said: “Get up! Get
up and fight! Get up and fight!” But Ole Doc wasn't even looking at his
adversary. He couldn't see him.

Hippocrates
reversed a blaster and was about to knock Lebel out with one smart blow when
Lebel fell of his own accord and lay completely still.

 

Half
an hour later, when Hippocrates had his master well healed up, the little slave
turned to gather the remains of the equipment for a return to the ship. He
picked up several items, rendered more or less secondhand by the combat, and
then laid them down, puzzled.

“What
is all this, master?”

Ole
Doc ranged his puffy eyes over the equipment. “Busted experiment,” he said.

“What
experiment, master?”

“That
condemned cuff note!” said Ole Doc, a little peevish. “It sounded so good when
I was working on it fifty or sixty years ago. If you could just calculate the
harmonic of memory retention, you could listen to whatever a dead man had been
told. But,” he added with a sigh, “it doesn't work.”

“But
what's this record then?”

“Fake.
Bait to get Lebel to the door.”

“You
want this junk?”

“Let
it lie,” said Ole Doc. “There's a silly girl around here we'll have to gather
up and we've got a lot of psychotherapy to attend to where we can find anyone
left alive and I've got a dispatch to send Center to tell them the state of
this endowment. We've got to get busy.”

“What
about this?” said Hippocrates, touching Lebel with a toe.

“That?”
said Ole Doc. “Well, I really don't know yet. I think I'll try him for the next
couple months from time to time and then sentence him to death and then
reprieve him.”

“Reprieve?”
gaped Hippocrates.

“So
that the survivors can try him,” said Ole Doc. “Then I'll pardon him and send
him to Hub City to be tried.”

“Drive
him mad,” said Hippocrates practically.

Ole
Doc swished his cloak over his shoulder. “Let's get out and get busy.”

Hippocrates
bounced to the door and cleared it importantly.

But
Ole Doc didn't pass on through. “Hippocrates, why on earth did you burn up
those cuffs?”

“They
didn't seem very important to me when I read,” said Hippocrates, hangdog
instantly.

Ole
Doc gaped. “When you read . . . you mean you read all of them?”

“Yes,
master.”

Ole
Doc laughed suddenly and laughed loudly. “If you read them, you remember them,
then!”

“Yes,
master!”

“But
why didn't you say so?”

“I
thought you just mad because I not file right. You didn't ask me.”

Ole
Doc laughed again. “Well, no loss at all then.
Some
of the notes may
work despite this fiasco today. Hippocrates, when I bought you at that auction
a few hundred years back, I think I made the soundest investment of my life.
Let's go.”

Hippocrates
stared. He almost staggered. And then he grew at least another half meter in
height. He went out into the corridor breasting a pleading, hopeful, begging
throng, carving a wide swathe through them and crying out in a voice which
cracked chips from the pillars in the place. “Make way! Make way for Ole Doc
Methuselah, Soldier of Light, knight of the UMS and benefactor of Mankind! Make
way! Make way!”

Ole Mother Methuselah

Bucketing
along at a hundred and fifty light-years, just entering the Earth Galaxy, the
Morgue,
decrepit pride of the Universal Medical Society, was targeted with a
strange appeal:

ANY UMS SHIP ANY UMS SHIP ANY DOCTOR ANYONE EMERG EMERG EMERG
PLEASE CONTACT PLEASE CONTACT UNITED STATES EXPERIMENTAL STATION THREE THOUSAND
AND TWO PLANET GORGON BETA URSA MAJOR.
RELAY RELAY EMERG.

Ole
Doc was in his salon, boots on a gold-embroidered chair, head reclined against
a panel depicting the
Muses
crowning a satyr, musing upon the
sad and depleted state of his wine “cellar” which jingled and rattled, all two
bottles of it, on a shelf above the coffeemaker. He heard the tape clicking but
he had heard tapes click before. He heard it clicking the distinctive three
dots of an emergency call but he had heard that before also.

“Hippocrates!”
he bellowed. And after a silence of two days the loudness and suddenness of
this yell brought the little slave out of his galley as though shot from a gun.

Four-armed,
antennaed and indestructible, little Hippocrates was not easily dismayed. But
now he was certain that they were hard upon a dead star—nay, already struck.

“Master?”

“Hippocrates,”
said Ole Doc, “we've only got two bottles of wine left!”

Hippocrates
saw that the ship was running along on all drives, that the instrument panel,
which he could see from where he stood in the passage, half a ship length
forward from the salon, was burning green on all registers, that they were on
standard speed and that, in short, all was well. He wiped a slight smear of
mustard and gypsum from his mouth with a guilty hand—for his
own supplies of the delicacy were so low that he had stolen some of Ole Doc's
plaster for casts.

“The
formula for making wine,” began Hippocrates with his phonograph-recordwise
mind, “consists of procuring grapes. The grapes are then smashed to relieve
them of juice and the juice is strained and set aside to ferment. At the end
of—”

“We
don't have any grapes,” said Ole Doc. “We don't have any fuel. We have no food
beyond ham and powdered eggs. All my shirts are in ribbons—”

“If
you would stop writing on the cuffs,” said Hippocrates, “I might—”

“—and
I have not been fishing for a year. See what's on that tape. If it's good
fishing and if they grow grapes, we'll land.”

Hippocrates
knew something had been bothering him. It was the triple click of the recording
receiver. Paper was coming out of it in a steady stream.
Click, click,
click.
Emerg. Emerg. Emerg!

Ole
Doc looked musingly at the Muses and slowly began to relax. That was a good
satyr Joccini had done, even if it was uncomfortably like—

“United
States Experimental Station on Gorgon, Beta Ursa Major,” said Hippocrates.
“Direct call to UMS, master.” He looked abstractedly at the dark port beyond
which the stars flew by. Through his mind was running the
Star Pilot for
Ursa Major.
He never forgot anything, Hippocrates, and the eighteen
thousand close-packed pages whirred by, stopped, turned back a leaf and then
appeared in his mind. “It's jungle and rivers. Wild game. Swamps.” And he
brightened. “No women.”

“What?”
said Ole Doc incuriously.

“Gorgon
of Beta Ursa Major. Lots of fish. Lots of them. And wine. Lots of fish and
wine.”

Ole
Doc got up, stretched and went forward. He punched a pneumatic navigator and
after divers whirs and hisses a light flashed on a screen giving him a new
course departing from a point two light-years in advance of the reading. He
could not turn any sooner. He settled himself under the familiar controls, disconnected
the robot and yawned.

 Two
days later they were landing on Field 1,987,806 United States Army Engineers,
Unmanned, half an hour's jaunt from United States Experimental Station 3,002.

Ole
Doc let Hippocrates slide the ladder out and stood for a moment in the air
lock, black kit in hand. The jungle was about three hundred feet above the
edges of the field, a wild and virulent jungle, dark green with avid growing
and yellow with its rotting dead. For a little space there was complete silence
while the chattering gusts of the landing jets echoed out and left utter
stillness. And then the jungle came awake once more with screams and catcalls
and a ground-shaking
aa-um.

Hippocrates
skittered back up the ladder. He stopped at the top. Again sounded the
aa-um
and the very plates of the old ship shook with it. Hippocrates went inside
and came back with a 110-mm turret cannon cradled
comfortably over his two right arms.

Ole
Doc threw a switch which put an alpha force field around the
ship to keep wild animals off and, with a final glance at the tumbled wrecks of
buildings which had once housed a military post, descended the ladder and
strolled after Hippocrates into the thick growth.

Now
and then Hippocrates cocked an antenna at the towering branches overhead and
stopped suspiciously. But he could see nothing threatening and he relieved his
feelings occasionally by sending a big gout of fire from the
110 to sizzle them out a straight trail and
calcine
the mud
to brick hardness.

Aa-um
shook the jungle. And each time it sounded, the myriad of animal and bird
noises fell still for a moment.

Hippocrates
was about to send another shot ahead when Ole Doc stopped him. An instant later
a gray-faced Irishman with wild welcome in his eyes broke through the sawtrees
to clasp Ole Doc in emotional arms.

“I'm
O'Hara. Thank God I got through. Receiver's been out for six months. Didn't
know if I was getting a signal out. Thank God you've come!” And he closed for
another embrace but Ole Doc forestalled him by calling attention to the
aa-um
which had just sounded once more.

“Oh,
that!” said O'Hara. “That's a catbeast. Big and worry enough when I've got
time to worry about them. Oh, for the good old days when all I had to worry
about was catbeasts getting my cattle, and mesohawks my sheep. But now—” And
he started off ahead of them at a dead run, beckoning them to hasten after him.

They
had two close calls from swooping birds as big as ancient bombers and almost
took a header over a tree trunk ten feet through, which turned out to be a
snake rising from the ooze with big, hungry teeth. But they arrived in a moment
at the station all in one piece.

“You've
got to understand,” panted O'Hara when he found Ole Doc wouldn't run any
faster, “that I'm the only man here. I have some Achnoids, of course, but you
would not call those octopi company even if they can talk and do manual labor.
But I've been here on Gorgon for fifteen years and I never had anything like
this happen before. I am supposed to make this planet habitable in case Earth ever
wants a colony planted. This is an agricultural and animal husbandry station.
I'm supposed to make things easy for any future colonist. But no colonists have
come so far and I don't blame them. This savannah here is the coolest place on
the planet and yet it's hot enough. But I haven't got an assistant or anyone
and so when this happened—”

“Well,
come on, man,” said Ole Doc. “What
has
happened?”

“You'll
see!” cried O'Hara, getting wild-eyed with excitement and concern once more.
“Come along.”

 

They
entered a compound which looked like a fortress. It sat squarely in the center
of a huge grassy field, the better to have its animal targets in the open when
they attacked and the better to graze its livestock. As they passed through the
gate, O'Hara carefully closed it behind him.

Ole
Doc looked incuriously at the long lines of sheds, at the
helio
motor
s above each and the corrals where fat cattle grazed. A greenhouse
caught his interest because he saw that an Achnoid, who more closely resembled
a blue pinwheel than a man, was weeding valuable medicinal herbs from out of,
as Ole Doc saw it, worthless carrots. But O'Hara dragged him on through the
noisy heat and dust of the place until they stood at Shed Thirteen.

“This
is the lion shed,” said O'Hara.

“Interesting,”
said Ole Doc disinterestedly.

O'Hara
opened the door. A long row of vats lined each side of the passage and the
sound of trickling fluid was soothing as it ran from one to the next. A maze of
intricate glass tubing interconnected one vat to the next and a blank-beaked
Achnoid was going around twiddling valves and reading temperatures.

“Hmmm,”
said Ole Doc. “Artificial birthing vats.”

“Yes,
yes. To be sure!” cried O'Hara in wild agreement, happy that he was getting
some understanding. “That's the way we get our stock. Earth sends me sperm and
ova in static ray preservation and I put them into the vats and bring them to
maturity. Then we take them out of the vats and put them on artificial udders
and we have calves and lambs and such. But this is the lion shed.”

“The
what?” said Ole Doc.

“For
the lions,” said O'Hara. “We find that carefully selected and properly
evoluted Earth lions kill catbeasts and several other kinds of vermin. I've got
the deserts to the south of here crawling with lions and someday we'll be rid
of catbeasts.”

“And
then you'll have lions,” said Ole Doc.

“Oh
no,” said O'Hara impatiently. “Then we'll bacteriacide the lions with a
plague. Which is to say, I will. There isn't any
we.
I've been here for
fifteen years—”

“Well,
maybe you've been here for fifteen years,” said Ole Doc without much sympathy,
“but why am
I
here?”

“Oh.
It's the last cargo. They send my stuff up here in tramps. Unreliable freight.
Last year a tramp came in with a cargo for me and she had some kind of director
trouble and had to jettison all her freight. Well, I didn't have any stevedores
and they just left it in the rain and the labels came off a lot of the boxes—”

“Ah!”
said Ole Doc. “You want me to reclassify sperm—”

“No,
no, no!” said O'Hara. “Some of these cargoes
were intended for some other experimental stations I am sure. But I have no
lading bills for the stuff. I don't know. And I'm frantic! I—”

“Well,
come down to it,” said Ole Doc. “WHAT is your problem?”

Dramatically
O'Hara approached the first vat and gave the cover a yank. The pulleys creaked.
Lights went on and the glass bowls within glowed.

In
this one vat there were five human babies.

Ole
Doc pushed the cover up further and looked. These babies were near the end of
their gestation period and were, in other words, about ready to be born. They
seemed to be all complete, hair, fingernails, with the proper number of fingers
and toes, and they were obviously very comfortable.

“Well?”
said Ole Doc, looking down at the endless rows of vats.

“All
of them,” said O'Hara weakly.

“And
they number—?” said Ole Doc.

“About
eighteen thousand,” said O'Hara.

“Well,
if THIS is your problem,” said Ole Doc, “I would suggest a hurry-up to the
Department of Agriculture back on Earth. You need, evidently, half an army
corps of nurses. But as for the problem of getting these babies—”

“Oh,
that isn't it!” said O'Hara. “You see, it's these condemned Achnoids. They're
so confounded routine in everything they do. And I guess maybe it's my fault,
too, because there are so many details on this station that if one Earthman had
to listen to them all and arrange them every day he would go crazy. So I guess
I'm pretty
humpy
with them—the ambulating pinwheels! Well,
this is the lion shed. We turn out eighteen thousand lions every three months,
that being our charted gestation period. Then they go into the pits where they
are fed by a facsimile lioness udder and finally they are booted out into the
wilderness to go mop up catbeasts. All that is very simple. But these
Achnoids—”

“When
did you learn about this?”

“Oh,
almost six months ago. But I wasn't terribly bothered. Not right then. I just
sent a routine report through to Earth. But these Achnoids go right on with
routine work unless something stops them. And the labels were all mixed up on
that jettisoned shipment and they picked up phials marked with
our
code
number for lions and dumped them into these vats. That's their routine work in
this department. That's the only way we could ship cattle and such things, you
see, because I don't think you'd like to travel on a cattle spaceship, would
you? And it would be expensive, what with the price of freight. And we need
lots of stock. So to avoid shipping such things as these lions—”

“I'd
think it was to be avoided,” said Ole Doc wryly.