Ole Doc Methuselah (21 page)

But
Garth was uncomfortable around all this greatness and he managed to get away,
still giving his feeble thanks, still with awe in his eyes.

Suddenly
Hippocrates appeared, an accusative gleam in his eyes, antennae waving with
wrath. “What you give him? What you do with this out of place in the operating
room?”

“Oh,
by the way, Hippocrates,” said Ole Doc, pulling out a handkerchief and handing
it gingerly over. “Boil that when you wash. It's slightly septic.”

“You
did something! You gave somebody some disease! What you doing with—”

“Hippocrates,
that bottle you keep stabbing at me is just common-cold virus catalyzed to work
in two or three hours. It's very weak. It wouldn't kill anyone. I merely put
some on my handkerchief—”

Hippocrates
suddenly stopped and grinned. “Aha! The admiral had the sniffles. Well, serve
him right for kill all those innocent people. But sometime you get in trouble.
You wait.” He started to march off and then, impelled by a recalled curiosity,
came back.

“What
was the matter with all those people?”

“Too
well cared for by doctors,” said Ole Doc.

“How?”

“Hit
by a disease which they hadn't contacted for a long, long time—say five hundred
years.”

“What
disease?” demanded Hippocrates. “Not one that you spread?”

“No,
no, heaven forbid!” laughed Ole Doc. “It has a perfectly good name but it
hasn't been around for so long that—”

“What
name?”

“Common
measles,” said Ole Doc.

A Sound Investment

The
self-righteous Hippocrates was just returning from a visit to the
Alpheca
when
the first blast hit him.

It
was, however, not a very serious blast. The entire force of it emanated from
the larynx of Ole Doc Methuselah, Soldier of Light and member extraordinary of
the Universal Medical Society.

But
if it came from a larynx, it was a much revered organ and one which, on
occasion, had made monarchs jump and thrones totter.

“Where
are my old cuffs?” howled Ole Doc.

This
was a trifle unnerving to the little four-armed slave, particularly since
during the entire afternoon on the
Alpheca
Hippocrates had been telling
stewards and cooks, in the course of lying and bragging, what a very wonderful
master Ole Doc was.

“You
multi-finned monkey! If you've thrown out those cuffs I'll . . . I'll throw
enough water on you to make a plaster demon of you! Tie into those cabinets and
locate them! On the double!”

Hippocrates
hurriedly began to make pieces of paper and bits of correspondence fly out of
the file case in a most realistic fashion. He was innately neat, Hippocrates.
He kept things in order. And like most neat people he kept things in order in
very much his own way.

The items in question he knew very well.
Ole Doc Methuselah possessed a horrible habit of writing on the cuffs of his
golden shirts whenever he thought of a calculation of great intricacy and these
cuffs Hippocrates tore off and filed. Now for some three hundred and twenty
years he had been tearing off cuffs and filing cuffs and never once had Ole Doc
so much as whispered that he ever wanted to look at an old one or consult the
data so compiled, working always from a magnificent memory. And these
particular items had piled up, got moldy, spilled over and been crammed back a
thousand times without ever once serving a purpose.

Hippocrates,
two weeks ago, had burned the entire lot.

“Look
for them, you gypsum
idiot!” roared Ole Doc.

“Yes,
master! I'm looking, master. I'm looking everyplace, master!” And the filing
cases and the office became a snowfall of disturbed papers, old orders, report
copies, pictures of actresses, and autographed intimate shots of empresses and
queens. “I'm looking, master!”

Nervously
Hippocrates wondered how long he could keep up this pretense. He had a phonograph-recordwise
mind which, while wonderful in copying past situations, was not very good at
inventing new ones. “They can't be very far, master. Where did you lose them?”

Ole
Doc snapped up his head out of a liquor cabinet currently in search and glared
hard enough to drill holes in plate. “Where did I lose them?
Where
did I
lose them? If I knew that—”

“Just
which cuff did you want?” said Hippocrates, antennae waving hopefully.

“The
sonic notes, you featherbrained
fop
!
The sonic notes I made two years ago last
Marzo
. The equations! I wrote them
on my cuff and I tore it off and I distinctly recall giving it—” Ole Doc
looked at the wreck of the file case in sudden understanding.

“Hippocrates,
what have you done with those cuffs?”

“Me?
Why, master! I—”

“Don't
lie to me! What have you done with them?”

Hippocrates
shrank away from Ole Doc, demonstrating the force of mind over gypsum, for
Hippocrates, weighing five hundred kilos in his meter of height, could bend
inch iron plates with any one of his four hands. “I didn't mean any harm. I . .
. I was housecleaning. This ship, the poor
Morgue,
the poor, poor
Morgue!
It isn't as if she was human. And she all cluttered up with junk, junk,
junk and I—” He gulped and plunged. “I burned them!” He shut his eyes convulsively
and kept them shut.

The
deck plates of the UMS
portable hospital, however, did not open and engorge him and the planet on
which they were resting did not fall in halves. After several seconds of
terrible tension, Hippocrates risked opening his eyes. Instantly he went down
on his knees.

Ole
Doc was slumped in a chair, his head in his hands, a reasonable facsimile of
intense despair.

“Don't
sell me,” begged Hippocrates. “Don't sell me, master. I won't ever burn
anything again. I'll let the whole place fill up with anything you want to
bring aboard. Anything! Even women, master. Even
women!!
”

Ole
Doc didn't look up and Hippocrates wandered in his gaze, finally rising and
tottering to his galley. He looked at it as one who sees home for the last time.
A phrase rose out of
Tales of the Early Space Pioneers
of a man saying
goodbye to his trusty
griffin
,
and Hippocrates, sniffling dangerously—because it might soften his upper
lip—said, “Goodbye, old pal. Many the day we've fit through thick and thin, agin
horrible and disastrous odds, battlin' our way to glory. And now we got to
part—”

His
eyes caught on a bottle of ink and he took a long swig of it. Instantly he felt
better. His spirits rose up to a point where he felt he might make a final
appeal.

“Why,”
he said to his master, “you want cuff?”

Ole
Doc dropped the dispatch he had been clutching, and Hippocrates retrieved it.

OLE
DOC METHUSELAH
MORGUE
HUB
CITY
GALAXY16

WILHELM
GIOTINI YESTERDAY ENDOWED UNIVERSAL MEDICAL SOCIETY WITH ALL REVENUE FROM HIS
LANDS IN FOMALHAUT SYSTEM. PROCEED
AND SECURE. FOMALHAUT ADVISED YOUR
FULL AUTHORITY TO ACCEPT PROVISIONS OF GIOTINI WILL.

THORPE
ADJUTANT
CENTER

Appended to this was a second dispatch:

DISTRESS
OPERATIONAL PRIORITY
ANY
SOLDIER OF LIGHT ANYWHERE
FOMALHAUT
FULL QUARANTINE. UNIDENTIFIED DISEASE BEG AID AND ASSISTANCE.

LEBEL
GENERALISSIMO
COMMANDING

And yet a third message:

OLE
DOC METHUSELAH
MORGUE
HUB CITY
GALAXY 16

YOUR
INFORMATION, WILHELM GIOTINI EXPIRED EARTHDAY
UT
OF MIND CONGESTION, FOLLOWING ATTACK BY ASSASSIN USING SONIC WEAPON. AS
REQUESTED, BODY PRESERVED PENDING YOUR ARRIVAL FOMALHAUT.

LEBEL
GENERALISSIMO
COMMANDING

Hippocrates
finished reading and memorizing—these were the same to him—and was about to
comment when he found Ole Doc was not there. The next instant the automatic
locks clanged shut on the hatches, the alarm said quietly, “Steady all. Take
off,” and the
Morgue
stood on her tail and went away from there,
leaving Hippocrates in a very sorry mess of torn papers and photographs, still
clutching the dispatches.

 

It
was not a very cheerful voyage. In the first place, Ole Doc stressed to three Gs above the
ship's gravitic cancelators and put the sturdy old vessel into an advance twice
over what her force field fenders could be expected to tolerate in case of
space dust. All this made food hard to prepare, bent instruments and gauges in
the operating room, pulled down a whole closet full of clothing by breaking the
hold-up bar, and generally spoiled space travel for the little slave.

Not
one word during the next two weeks did Ole Doc breathe to Hippocrates and that,
when only two beings are aboard, is something of a strain on anybody's nerves.

However,
the Universal Medical Society had long since made provisions against space-
neurasthenia
by
providing large libraries in natural and micro form to every one of its vessels
and seeing that the books were regularly shifted. A new batch had come at Hub City and Hippocrates was able to indulge himself somewhat by reading large, thick tomes
about machinery, his penchant.

He
learned all about the new electronic drives for small machinery, went avidly
through the latest ten-place log
table—finding eighteen errors—studied a thousand-page report on
medical force fields, finished up two novels about pirates and reviewed the
latest encyclopedia of medicine, which was only fifteen volumes at a thousand
words shorthand per page. Thus he survived the tedium of Coventry in which he
found himself and was able to look upon the planet Gasperand of
Fomalhaut
with some slight interest when
it came spiraling up, green and pearl and gold, to meet them.

Hippocrates
got out his blasters, recalled the legal import of their visit and packed a law
encyclopedia on wills in the medical kit, and was waiting at the lock when Ole
Doc landed.

Ole
Doc came up, belted and caped, and reached out his hand for the kit.
Hippocrates instinctively withdrew it.

“I
will carry it,” said Hippocrates, put out.

“Henceforward,”
said Ole Doc, “you won't have to carry anything.” He pulled from his belt a
big legal document, complete with UMS seals, and thrust it at Hippocrates. “You
are free.”

Hippocrates
looked dazedly at the paper and read “
Manumitting
Declaration” across its head. He backed
up again.

“Take
it!” said Ole Doc. “You are perfectly and completely free. You know very well
that the UMS does not approve of slaves. Ten thousand dollars is pinned to this
document. I think that—”

“You
can't free me!” cried Hippocrates. “I won't have it! You don't dare! The last
dozen-dozen times you tried to do it—”

“This
time I am serious,” said Ole Doc. “Take this! It makes you a full citizen of
the Confederated Galaxies, gives you the right to own property—”

“You
can't do this to me!” said Hippocrates. His mind was not very long on imagination
and it was being ransacked just now for a good, telling excuse. “I . . . I have
to be restored to my home planet. There is nothing here for me to eat—”

“Those
alibis won't do,” said Ole Doc. “Slavery is frowned upon. You were never
bought to serve me in the first place and you know it. I purchased you for
observation of metabolism only. You've tricked me. I don't care how many times
I have threatened to do it and failed. This time I really mean it!”

He
took the kit, threw the
manumission
on the table and stepped through the air lock.

Hippocrates
looked disconsolately after his Soldier of Light. A deep sigh came from his
gypsum depths. His antennae wilted slowly. He turned despondently to wander
toward his quarters, conscious of how empty were his footsteps in this hollow
and deserted ship.

 

Ole
Doc paused for an instant at the lock as a swimmer might do before he plunges
into a cold pool. The port was thronged by more than a reception committee for
him. Several passenger tramps stood on their rusty tails engorging long queues
of refugee passengers and even at this distance it was plain that those who
wanted to leave this place were frightened. The lines pushed and hauled and now
and then some hysterical individual went howling up to the front to beg for
immediate embarkation. The place was well beyond panic.

Beside
the
Morgue
stood a car and a military group which, with several
civilians, made a compact crowd of welcome for the Soldier of Light. In the
front was a generalissimo.

Lebel
was a big fellow with a big mustache and a big black mane. He had a big staff
that wore big medals and waiting for him was a big bullet-ray-germ-proof car.

“Friend!”
said Lebel. “Come with me! We need you! Panic engulfs us! There are twenty-five
thousand dead. Everyone is deserting the system! We are in terrible condition!
In a few days no one will remain in all
Fomalhaut
!”

Ole
Doc was almost swept up and kissed before he recalled the customs in this part
of the Galaxy. He twisted expertly away to shake an offered hand. Generally he
didn't shake hands but it was better than getting buried in a mustache. The
crowd was surging toward him, cheering and pleading. Lebel took Ole Doc by the
hand and got him into the refuge of the car. It was a usual sort of reception.
The UMS was so very old, so very feared and respected, and its members so
seldom seen in the flesh that welcoming parties were sometimes the most
dangerous portion of the work.

“We
have a disease!” said Lebel. “You must cure it! Ah, what a disease. A terrible
thing! People die.”

If
he expected a Soldier of Light to instantly vibrate with interest, he did not
know his people. Ole Doc, approaching his thousandth birthday, had probably
killed more germs than there were planets in the Universe, and he hoped to live
to kill at least as many more. He leaned back, folded his cape across his knees
and looked at the scenery.

“It
came on suddenly. First we thought it was something new. Then we thought we had
seen it before. Then we didn't know. The doctors all gave it up and we almost
deserted everything when somebody thought of the Soldiers of Light. ‘Lebel!' I
said. ‘It is my duty to contact the Soldiers of Light.' So I did. It is
terrible.”

Ole
Doc restrained a yawn. “I was coming here anyway. Your Wilhelm Giotini left the
revenue of this system to the UMS.”