Ole Doc Methuselah (16 page)

Ole
Doc headed for the stairs and took them four at a time, cloak billowing out
behind him. He had wasted too much time already. But he couldn't leave this
building until— They weren't on the second floor. Nor the third. But the switch
box for the elevator was. Ole Doc shattered its smooth glass with a shot and
finished wrecking it with another. Voltage curled and writhed and smoke rose
bluely.

That
done he went on up with confidence. The only Persephons he found fled down a
fire escape in terror. Ole Doc went on up. The roof door was barricaded and he
shot it in half.

Big
Lem Tolliver might have been the biggest man on Arphon but he didn't have the
greatest courage. He was backing toward the “machine” and holding out his
hands to fend off a shot as though they could.

“You're
not playing fair!” he wailed. “You see the racket and you want it all. You're
not playing fair! I'll make it halves—”

“You'll
face around and let me search you for a gun,” said Ole Doc. “And then we'll
get about our business. You've violated—”

“You
want it all!” wailed Tolliver, backing through the door of the dome. He tried
to shut it quickly but Ole Doc blew the hinges off before it could close.

The
shot was too close for Tolliver's nerves. He leaped away from it, he stumbled
and fell into a vat.

He
screamed and quickly tried to grab the edge and come out. Ole Doc stopped, put
down the bomb and dropped a stirring stick to the man's rescue.

Tolliver
grabbed it and came out dripping, clothes with green scum running off them
hanging ridiculously upon him. The man was trying to speak and then could not.
He clawed at his eyes, he tried to yell. But with each breath he sucked in
quantities of poison and his tortured skin began to flame red under the scum.

Ole
Doc threw the bomb at his feet where it burst in bright green rays. He expected
Tolliver to breathe then, wreathed in the climbing smoke. But Tolliver didn't.
He fell down, inarticulate with agony and lack of breath, and within the
minute, before Ole Doc could find means of tearing the clothes from him and
administering aid now that the AL air bomb had not worked at all, Big Lem
Tolliver was dead.

 

In
the elevator Tinoi still lay, struggling now to come up from his nightmare.
When he saw Ole Doc standing over him, Tinoi's own gun in hand, the lieutenant
of the late Air, Limited could not be convinced that any time had passed. But
he was not truculent, not when he saw Tolliver's body. He could not understand,
never would understand, the sequence of these rapid events. But Tolliver was
dead and that broke Tinoi.

“What
do you want wif me?” he sniveled.

“I
want you to set this place to rights eventually. Meantime, shut off that confounded
machine and come with me.”

Tinoi
shut it off and the ripples in the vats grew still. Ole Doc hiked down the
steps behind the cringing Tinoi and so into the main offices on the ground
floor.

The
clerks stared at the cringing Tinoi.

“You
there,” said Ole Doc. “In the name of the Universal Medical Society, all
operations of Air, Limited are ordered to cease. And find me this instant the
whereabouts of Bestin Karjoy, extraracial being.”

The
clerks stared harder. One of them fell down in a faint.

“The
Univ . . . The Universal Medical Society . . .” gaped another. “The real one.
I told him I thought he was a Soldier,” whimpered the clerk who had first
announced it. “When I read that article— Now I'll never get my weekly check—”

Ole
Doc wasn't listening. He had Tinoi and another clerk by the collars and they
were going down the steps, over the dead Connoly, through the moaning slaves
and up the avenue at a rate which had Tinoi's feet half off the ground most of
the way.

 

At
ten thousand miles an hour, even freighted with her passengers and the thousand
kilos of Bestin and his antennae-waving father, the gig did not take long to
reach the injured
Morgue.

Bestin's
father was making heavy weather of trying to unload the bundles he had brought
when the gig landed and Ole Doc hurriedly helped him. The old extraracial being
hobbled on ahead into the operating room of the
Morgue
and then, when
Ole Doc would have come up, he found himself heavily barred outside by eight
hands. The door clanged shut, didn't quite meet at the bottom, bent and was
shut anyway.

Ole
Doc stood outside in the trampled grass and stared at the
Morgue.
The
girl on her stretcher was forgotten. Tinoi and the clerk might as well have
been grass blades.

Tinoi
grumbled. He knew that he could run away but where could he run to escape the
long arm of a Soldier of Light? “Why didn't you tell me?” he growled at the
clerk. “You punks are supposed to know everything—”

“Be
quiet,” said the clerk.

There
was a sound inside as of plumbers' tools being dropped. And then the clatter of
pipes. A long time passed and the sun sank lower. Ole Doc came out of his
trance and remembered the girl.

She
was moaning faintly from the pain of her burns.

Ole
Doc timidly knocked on the door of his operating room. “Please. Could I have
the red case of ointments on the starboard wall?”

He
had to ask three times before Bestin's two right arms shot impatiently out with
the red case. Ole Doc took it and the door clanged shut again.

The
girl shuddered at the first touch and then a hypo pellet quieted her. Ole Doc
worked quickly but absently, one eye on the ship. Tinoi gaped at what Ole Doc
was doing and the clerk was ill.

The
girl did not move, so strong was the pellet, even when half the skin was off
her face and arm. Tinoi had to turn away, rough character though he called
himself, but when the click and scrape of instruments didn't sound again, he
faced back.

Ole
Doc was just giving the girl another shot. She was beginning to stir and turned
over so that Tinoi could see her face. He gaped. There wasn't a trace of a
scar, not even a red place where the scar had been. And the girl was very, very
beautiful.

“Feel
better?” asked Ole Doc.

She
looked around and saw the clearing. She recalled nothing of the in-between. She
did not know she had been to Minga and back and thought she had that minute
finished dragging Doc from the burning ship. She sat up and stared around her.
It took a little soothing talk to convince her of what had happened.

She
saw Ole Doc's mind was not on what she was saying nor upon her and she soon
understood what was going on in the ship.

“Someone
you like?” she asked.

“The
best slave any man ever had,” said Ole Doc. “I recall . . .” But he stopped,
listening. “The best slave a man ever had,” he finished quickly.

 

The
sun sank lower and then at last the clicking and chanting inside the ship had
stopped. The door opened very slowly and the old man came out, carrying his
clumsy bundles. He put them in the gig. In a moment, Bestin came down the
twisted ladder and walked stolidly toward the gig.

Ole
Doc looked at them and his shoulders sagged. He rose and slowly approached the
old being.

“I
understand,” said Ole Doc, finding it difficult to speak. “It is not easy to
lose . . . to lose a patient,” he finished. “But you did your best, I know. I
will fly you back to Min—”

“No,
you won't!” howled Hippocrates, leaping down from the
Morgue
. “No, you
won't! I will do it and you will tell those two stupid humans there and that
woman to put things to rights in that ship they messed up. Put them to rights,
you bandits! Wreck my
Morgue,
will you! She's more human than you are!”

He
shook four fists in their faces and then turned to beam affectionately at Ole
Doc.

The
little fellow was a mass of fresh plaster of Paris from neck to belt but
otherwise he was very much himself. “New pipes,” he said.
“Whooeee, whoooo,
whoooo!”
he screamed, deafening them. “See? New pipes.”

Ole
Doc saw and heard. He sat down on the grass weakly and began to laugh.
Hippocrates was offended. He did not know that this was from the shock of his
own near demise, from the close shave of never getting aid to him. He did not
know that the biggest swindle in a thousand systems had had to relax its
wealthy sway before he could be cured. He was offended.

“Clean
up that ship!” he shouted, jumping into the gig. “And as for you,” he
declaimed, pointing at his beloved master, “don't you touch that cake. The
birthday party will be at six. You invite girl but those stupid humans, never!
I go now. Be right back.”

And
the gig shot tremendously away.

Ole
Doc wiped away the tears of near hysteria and took one of his own pills. He got
up. “You better do what he says, people. And as for you, Tinoi, tomorrow
morning we'll shut off and destroy those ‘machines' and get this planet running
again. Jump now. You heard him.”

The
clerk and the girl—who gave Ole Doc a lingering, promising glance—entered the
ship to begin their work. But Tinoi lingered. “Better jump,” said Ole Doc.

“Sure.
I'll work,” said Tinoi. “But one thing, Mister Doctor . . . you're a Soldier
of Light and I ain't even good enough to talk to you, I know. But—”

“Well?”

“Sir,”
plunged Tinoi. “It's them bombs. We had our allergy pills, but them bombs was
pretty good, too. If they're so expensive to make like
he
said, how'll
we ever get enough to cure up—”

“My
man,” said Ole Doc, “your precious bombs were one of the oldest known
buncombe
s in medical history. A propellant and
ephedrine
,
that's all. Ephedrine barely permits the allergy patient to breathe. It wasn't
‘air' you were selling but a phony, second-rate drug that costs about a dollar
a barrel. They'd take a little and needed more. You were clear back in the dark
ages of medical history—about a century after they'd stopped using witches for
doctors. Ragweed, ephedrine—but they were enough to wreck the lives of nearly
everyone on this planet.

“Oh,
get into the ship and get busy. It makes me sick to think of it. Besides, if
Hippocrates gets back and finds his
Morgue
still messed up, he'll make
you wish you'd never been born. Jump now, for by all that's holy, there's the
gig coming back now.”

Plague

The
big ship settled in the landing cradle, her ports agleam—and her guts rotten
with sickness. There were no banners to greet her back from her
Spica
run, there was no welcoming mass of people. The field was as still as an
execution dock and the black wagons waited with drivers scared, and the high
yellow blaze of QUARANTINE hung sickly over all.

Five
hundred and ninety-one passengers were dead. The remainder of her list would
probably die. Officers and crew had contributed to the dead. And somewhere
between Spica and Earth, corpses had been flung out the spaceport to explode in
vacuum and gyrate, then, perhaps, as dark comets of putrescent matter around
some darker star.

The
medic at the port, authoritative but frightened, barked into the speaker, “
Star
of Space
ahoy! No personnel or equipment will be given to you until a full
accounting of symptoms has been given by your ship's doctor.”

An
officer's voice speakered out from the
Star of Space
. “The doc's dead!
Let us open the ports! Help us!”

“How
does the disease appear to you?”

There
was a long silence and then another voice answered from the stricken
Star.
“Begins
with sore throat and spots inside the mouth. Swollen throat and then steadily
mounting temperature. Death comes in convulsions in about fourteen days,
sometimes less. If you've got a heart, let us land. Help us!”

The
group on the operations platform looked out at the defiled cradle. The medic
was young but old enough to know hopelessness. The Spaceway Control police
chief, Conway, looked uncertainly at the ship. Conway knew nothing about
medicine but he knew what had happened when the
Vestal
from Galaxy 159
had brought the red death here.

“What
they got?” asked Conway. “Red death?”

“I
don't know. Not that.” And the medic asked other things of the ship.

“You
must have some idea,” said Conway.

“I
don't know,” said the medic. He turned to a phone and called his superiors and
when he came back he was haggard.

A
woman had come to the ship speaker now. She was pleading between broken sobs.
They were trying everything they could out there in that ship. The medic tried
to imagine what it was like with those closed ports. No doctor. The ballrooms
and salons turned over to dying men, women and children. The few live ones
cringing in far places, hoping. Brave ones waiting on sick people. Some officer
with his first command which would be his last. They had a kid at the ship
speaker now.

Conway
asked them for verbal messages and for an hour and a half the recorder took
them. Now and then the speaker on the ship would change.

Mulgrave,
president of Spaceways Intergalactic, Inc., owner of the
Star of Space,
came and looked on.

At
10:72
sidereal galaxy time
, Conway took the dispatcher's
mike and ordered the ship away.

There
were protests. Conway did not answer or repeat his order. Slowly the protests,
the pleas, vanished. Sullenness marked the ship then. For a long while nothing
stirred. But at 11:24 a converter began to whine. At 11:63 the tubes gave a
warning blast. At 11:67 the
Star of Space
lifted from her cradle,
hovered and then slowly rose spaceward, doomed.

 

Ole
Doc Methuselah arrived on Earth at 19:95, five days after. He arrived and Earth
knew it. Ole Doc was mad. Ole Doc was so mad that he bypassed quarantine and
control and landed square before the hangar, gouging big chunks of dirt up with
the
Morgue
's
landing blast.

A
dispatcher came racing on a scooter to know what and why and he had his mouth
open to become a very mad dispatcher when he saw the crossed ray rods. They
were on the nose of the golden ship and they meant something. The same insignia
was on the gorget at Ole Doc's throat. The ray rods of
pharmacy. The ray rods of the Universal Medical Society which, above all
others, ruled the universe of medicine, said what it pleased, did what it
pleased when it pleased and
if
it pleased. It owed allegiance to no
government because it had been born to take the deadly secrets of medicine out
of the hands of governments. The dispatcher shut his mouth.

Hippocrates
leaped down, making a minor earthquake, although he was only a meter tall, and
the dispatcher, at the sight of this four-armed, antennaed nightmare, quickly
yanked the scooter out of the way.

Not
even glaring, Hippocrates went to the cab line, grabbed a bumper and pulled. He
intended to coax the driver into entering the forbidden field of the ramp but
the only result was the loud breaking off of the bumper.

There
was an argument, but it wasn't very long. Three minutes later a cowed driver
had the cab beside the
Morgue.

Ole
Doc swung down. He looked about twenty-five even if he was nine hundred and
six, that being the medical privilege and secret of any one of the seven
hundred society members, and when the sun struck his gold cloak and flashed
from his boots, the dispatcher, again about to protest the actions of this
ship, hurriedly drew back. He was looking at a Soldier of Light and it not only
awed him, it paralyzed him. He would tell his friends and children about this
for the next fifty years.

Ole
Doc said, “Spaceway Control Building!”

The
driver gave a terrified glance at Hippocrates and shot the cab half again past
its
governor
.

 

Ole
Doc got down and went in so fast his cape stood out straight. He found Conway on the ninety-eighth floor in a magnificent office full of communications equipment
and space charts.

Conway
was bovine and leaden. He did not have fast reactions. He was a cop. He saw Ole
Doc, thought of revolution, grabbed a button to bawl out a receptionist for not
announcing and then stared straight into two very angry blue eyes and found
that his hand had been swatted hard away from that buzzer.

“You
listen to me!” cried Ole Doc. “You imbecile! You . . . you— Good catfish! You
haven't the discernment of a two-year-old kid! You . . . you flatfoot! Do you
know what you've done? Do you know what ought to happen to you? Do you know
where you'll wind up when I'm through with this? If you—”

Conway's
bullish ire had risen and was about to detonate. He leaped up to have room for
his rage and then, just as he was beginning to level a finger, he saw the ray
rods on the gold gorget.

“You
. . . you're the UMS,” said Conway, idiotically holding the
pose which meant rage, but stammering like a schoolkid. Abruptly he collapsed
into his chair. Weakly and with great attention he listened to the detailed
faults of police and control systems in general, Conway in particular
and
Conway's children and parents and grandparents. Conway learned some pretty terrible things
about himself, including his personal appearance and the slightly sub-quality
of his wits. Conway would probably go around being an illegitimate imbecile for
days afterwards.

“
. . . and,”
said Ole Doc, “if you
don't locate that ship in twenty-four hours I'll yellow-ticket this whole
system. I'll yellow-ticket Mars and Jupiter. I'll yellow-ticket the whole
condemned Galaxy! You won't move a ship. You won't move a cruiser or a
battleship or a tramp! You won't even move a lifeboat for more years than I've
got patience. And,” he concluded illogically, “I've got plenty of that!”

“What
. . . what—?” begged Conway, the mighty Conway.

“Find
me the
Star of Space
. Find that ship so whoever is on her can be saved.
Find her before she lands and infects an entire planet, a system and a galaxy.
Find her before you kill off millions, billions, quadrillions—” Ole Doc sat
down and wiped his face. Hippocrates let go of the burly police receptionist
with a warning wave of a finger and came in.

“You
get excited,” said Hippocrates. “Very bad. Take this!”

Ole
Doc reached for the pill and then, seeing it completely, struck it aside and
leaped up to face the wilted Conway.

“Have
the Grand Council in here in ten minutes. I don't care if they're in China or digging clams at the North Pole. Have them in here or have trouble!” Ole Doc
stamped out, found a seat in a garden looking over New Chicago and composed
himself as well as he could to wait. But his eyes kept straying to the blue
heavens and he kept pounding a palm with a fist and swearing sharply.

Hippocrates
came back in nine minutes. “Grand Council ruling Earth assembled now. You
speak. But don't you get so excited. Five days to your next treatment. Very
bad.”

 

Ole
Doc went in. His metal boot soles chewed bits out of the rug.

Eighteen
men sat in that room, eighteen important men whose names meant law on
documents, whose whims decided the policies of nations and whose intercession,
arbitration or command ruled utterly the two and one-half billion people of
Earth. The Army officers were imposingly medaled. The Marine commander was
grim. The Navy operations chief was hard, staunch, important. The civilians
might have appeared to be the most powerful men there, they were so quiet and
dignified. But it was actually the naval officer who ranked them all. He
commanded, by planetary seniority and the right of Earth's conquests, the
combined space navies of the Galaxy whenever “the greater good of the majority
of the systems” was threatened.

They
were grave and quiet when Ole Doc entered. They blinked a bit uncertainly when
he threw his helmet down on Conway's desk. And when he spoke, they came very
much to life.

“You,”
said Ole Doc, “are a pack of fools!”

There
came an instant protest against this indignity. Loudest was that of Galactic
Admiral Garth. He was a black-jowled, cigar-smoking man of six feet five, a
powerful if not brilliant fighter, and he objected to being called a fool.

“You
have let hell loose through the systems!” cried Ole Doc above their voices.
“You've sent a cargo of death away where it can infect trillions of beings!
That may be dramatic but by all that's holy, it's the truth!”

“Hold
on there!” said Admiral Garth, heard because he could shake ports loose with
his voice. “No confounded
pill roller
can come in here and
talk to me like that!”

It
stopped the babbling. Most of the people there were frightened for a moment.
Those who had been merchants knew the yellow tickets. Those who only nominally
governed saw whole nations cut off. The Army saw its strength cut to nothing
because it could not be shipped, and the Navy in the person of Galactic Admiral
Garth saw somebody trying to stop his operations of fleets and he alone stayed
mad.

“The
Star of Space
was sent away from here,” said Ole Doc, spitting every
word, “without medical assistance or supplies. She was rotten with disease but
she got no cordon, no quarantine. She got dismissal! She went out into space
low on supplies, riddled with disease, hating you and all humanity.

“Further,
even though you were in communication with that ship, you did not find out the
details, the exact, priceless details of that disease. You did not discover
from whence she thought she received the disease or establish which passenger
or crewman from what part of the Universe first grew ill. And you failed,
utterly failed, to find out where she intended to go!

“That's
why you are fools! You should have provided her with an escort at least! But
no! You, the men who supposedly monopolize all the wits on Earth, the Earth
which rules the Galaxy, you let the
Star of Space
go away from here to
murder—yes, murder!—possibly millions and millions of human beings. Perhaps
billions. Perhaps trillions! I cannot exaggerate the folly of your action.
Completely beyond the base-hearted wickedness which refused that ship the help
she needed, you will be evil and sinful in the eyes of all men.

“I
am publishing this matter to space. The Universal Medical Society can cure
anything but stupidity, and where they find that in government, they must leave
it alone!”

He
sat down suddenly on the edge of the desk and glowered at them.

Hippocrates
in the doorway was wondering whether or not he had put too much adrenaline into
Ole Doc the last rejuvenation treatment and had about concluded that this was
the answer.

Galactic
Admiral Garth clamped an angry blue jaw on a frayed cigar. Pill roller, his
attitude said. He'd never needed a doctor in his life and when he did he'd take
a naval surgeon. Disease, bah! Everyone knew that disease warfare had almost
ruined mankind. The stuff was deadly. It said so in the texts. Therefore, a
diseased ship should be launched as far away from humanity as possible and left
to rot. It was good sense. Nobody could fight a disease when science could make
new, incurable ones at every rumor of war. It had said so in the texts for a
long time, for several hundred years in fact. That made it true.