Ole Doc Methuselah (22 page)

“So
I heard. But I thought that would mean a lawyer coming.”

“We
don't have any lawyers,” said Ole Doc, easing his holstered blaster around
into sight.

“But
this terrible disease, it will change your plans, eh? Who would want a
planetary system full of diseases! What a horrible disease!”

“Kills
people?”

“Kills
them! They die in windrows! They scream and then they die. But I will take you
and you will see it. I have a helmet here so that I can enter infected areas. I
have one for you.”

“I
have my own helmet,” said Ole Doc.

“No,
no!” cried Lebel. “I could not risk it. I
know
this helmet here is
germproof. It was tested. These germs come through the smallest, the tiniest
air leak!”

“Why
did you risk that crowd back there?” said Ole Doc.

“That!
Poof!
My own people. My aides. My airport people. They would not infect
me with any disease! Here, try this helmet for size.”

Ole
Doc blinked a little at the man's terrible conceit and was on the verge of
remarking that he had yet to meet a respectful germ when the first casualties
caught his eye.

A
street ahead was barricaded. Bodies were piled
in either gutter, bodies in various stages of decomposition, of both sexes, of
many races and castes. Velvet and burlap were brothers in that grisly display.

“Ought
to bury them,” said Ole Doc. “You'll have cholera or something if you don't
watch it.”

“Bury
them! Who'd go near them! They are thrown out of the houses, like that young
girl there, and nobody—”

“Wait
a minute,” said Ole Doc. “Stop the car!”

For
the young girl was not dead. She was dressed in satin, probably in her wedding
dress, for a church stood fifty feet further on, and her hair was a golden
flood upon the pavement. She was pressing up with her hands, seeking to rise
and falling back, each time screaming.

Ole
Doc reached for the door handle but Lebel blocked him. “Don't risk it!” said
Lebel.

Ole
Doc looked at the frantic effort of the girl, looked at her young beauty, at
the agony in her eyes and then took Lebel's offer of a helmet. When he had it
strapped on—an act which prompted both Lebel, his guards and drivers to hastily
do the same—he shot the bolt on the door and stepped to the pave. He gazed at
the girl in satin for a moment, in deep thought.

Ole
Doc advanced, fumbling for the speaker buttons on the side of the helmet and
finding with annoyance that the phones were squeaky in the upper frequencies.
The screams came eerily through this filter. He turned down the volume in
haste.

He
helped her up and tried to speak to her but her eyes, after an instant of
trying to focus, rolled out of concentration and screams tore up from her as
though they would rip her throat to shreds. She beat at him and fought him and
her gown tore down the side. Ole Doc, aware that Lebel was fearfully at his
side and trying to get him away, let the girl slide back to the ground, moving
her only so that she now lay upon the grass.

“Hippocrates!”
said Ole Doc.

But
there was no Hippocrates there and Ole Doc had to fumble into the kit himself.
He laid out all the volumes of law in some amazement, holding the girl down
with one hand and fishing in the case with the other, and was much wroth at all
this weight. Finally he found his hypo gun and an instant later the
generalissimo's aides were gripping his wrist.

“Let
go!” stormed Ole Doc, too busy holding the girl to make much of a fight of it.
But they continued the contest, wrenched his shoulder and made him give up what
they thought was a weapon.

“Nobody
draws around the generalissimo!” said the big guard, his voice shrill and
squeaky in the filter of the phones.

Ole
Doc glared at them and turned to his patient. He felt her pulse and found that
it was racing somewhere around a hundred and forty. He took her temperature and
found it only slightly above normal. Her skin was dry and pale, her blood laked
in the depths of her body. Her palms were wet. Her pupils were dilated to their
entire diameter. Through the rents in the dress it could be seen that no
blemish marked her lovely body.

Ole
Doc stood up. “Lebel, give me that gun.”

Lebel
looked uncertain. He had taken no part in the brief skirmish but it was plain
that he was not sure exactly what the weapon was.

“Then
do it yourself,” said Ole Doc. “Point it at her side and pull the trigger.”

“Oh!”
said Lebel, seeing some parallel between this and the treatment he gave cavalry
horses with wounds. He brightened and with something close to pleasure did as
he was bidden.

The
small hypo gun jumped, a small plume of spray-fog winding up from its muzzle.
The girl quivered, stiffened and then sank back unconscious. Lebel looked in
disappointment at the gun, gazed with contempt into its muzzle and threw it
into the kit.

“I
thought it was a weapon!” he said. “Ten—fifteen—twenty times people have tried
to assassinate me. That I should fear a Soldier of Light is very foolish of me.
Of course it was just a medication, eh? Well, well, let's get off this street.
The sight of civilian dead worries me. On the battlefield is another thing. But
civilian dead I do not like. Come!”

Ole
Doc was coming but he was also bringing the girl.

“What
do you mean to do with that?” said Lebel.

“I
want a case history of this thing,” said Ole Doc.

“Case—
No, no! Not in my car! I am sick of this helmet! Leave it there where it was, I
tell you! Smorg! Dallison! Put that girl back—”

The
two aides didn't wait for the full command. They surged up. But Ole Doc wasn't
trying to hold a struggling girl now. She quietly slid to the grass while Ole
Doc's hands moved something faster.

He
could have drawn and burned them to glory long before they could have reached
him. He contented himself with flicking a dart from each sleeve. The action was
very quick. The feathered ends of the darts fell back without their points.
Smorg and Dallison stopped, reached for their weapons and froze there.

“Attention!”
said Ole Doc. “You will obey only me. You can never obey anyone else again. Get
into the car!”

And
the two aides, like wound-up clockwork, turned around and got into the car like
obedient small boys.

“What
have you done?” yelped Lebel.

“They
are in a fine deep trance,” said Ole Doc. “I dislike being handled by anyone,
Lebel. No Soldier of Light does. We are only seven hundred in the entire
Universe but I think you will find that it pays to be very polite to us. Now,
do you sleep or cooperate?”

“I'll
cooperate!” said Lebel.

“Put
this girl in the car and continue to the place you have kept Wilhelm Giotini.”

The
gawping driver saw his passengers and their cargo in place and then swiftly
took Lebel's orders for the palace. The car rocketed through the death-paved
streets, shot up the ramp of the ruling house and came to a halt in the throne
room.

Lebel
got out shakily. He kept licking his lips and looking around as though on the
watch for guards. But he was at the same time half afraid to give any orders to
guards.

Ole
Doc looked at the furnishings, the golden throne, the alabaster pillars. “Nice
place,” he said. “Where's Giotini?”

“I'll
take you up there,” said Lebel. “But stay a moment. You are not going on under
the misapprehension that I am trying to block you in any way, are you? I am
not! My aides are jumpy. They have orders. I am jumpy. My entire system of
planets is coming apart with a disease. The ruler is dead and I have only some
small notion of what he meant to do. You are the first Soldier of Light I ever
saw. How do I know if you really are one? I have heard that they are all old
men and you look like a boy.”

Ole
Doc looked at him appraisingly, planted his boots firmly on the great orange
squares of the throne room and looked at the assembled guards. “Generalissimo,
you are not the first to question the identity of a Soldier. Therefore I shall
be patient with you. Disease is our concern. Medical research. Any medical
weapon. We safeguard the health of mankind through the stars against plague and
medical warfare. Several hundred years ago we organized the Universal Medical
Society to combat misuse of germs and our scope is broader yet. Now if you
require some proof of my identity, attend me.”

Lebel
walked lumberingly after Ole Doc up to the line of guards who, drawn stiffly to
attention, brilliant in their palace uniforms, looked at nothing and no one.
Ole Doc reached out a finger at a sergeant.

“Step
forth!” said Ole Doc.

The
sergeant took a smart pace forward and saluted. Ole Doc, with legerdemain which
defied the eye, produced a brilliant button which fixed his subject's eyes.

“Extend
your hand!” said Ole Doc.

The
sergeant automatically extended his hand.
He
was weaving a trifle on his feet, his eyelids fluttering rapidly.

“You
cannot feel anything in your entire body!” said Ole Doc. Out came a lancet. Up
went the sergeant's sleeve. Ole Doc gashed a five-inch wound into the forearm,
picked up the beating artery like a rope, dropped it back and pressed the flesh
to stop the bleeding. He reached into a cape pocket and extracted a small rod,
a ray rod of pharmacy with a Greek symbol on it. He passed the rod over the
wound. It closed. He reversed the rod and passed it once more. The scar
vanished. There was nothing but blood on the floor to mark what had happened.

Ole
Doc snapped his fingers to awaken his subject and pushed him back into line.

“Do
you require further proof?” said Ole Doc.

The
line had forgotten to be military and was a little out of rank now with
slack-jawed staring. Lebel backed up, blinking. The sergeant was looking
curiously around and wondering why everybody was so startled, disappointed to
find he had missed something.

“I
never doubted you!” said Lebel. “Never! Come right away into the south hall
where we left him. Anything you say, sir. Anything!”

Ole
Doc went back to the car and shouldered the body of the young girl. He was
beginning to miss Hippocrates. Doing manual labor was a thing which Ole Doc did
not particularly enjoy.

 

Wilhelm
Giotini was lying on a tall bed, a scarlet sheet covering his face, his royal
accouterments neglected on the floor and his crown mixed up with the medicine
bottles. Any physician who had attended him was gone now. Only a woman sat there,
a dumpy, weeping little woman, tawdry in her velvet, unlovely in her sorrow.

“Madame
Giotini,” said Lebel.

She
looked up. Somewhere, in some old forgotten book of legends, she had seen a
picture of a Soldier of Light. Her eyes shot wide and then she came forward,
falling on her knees and gripping Ole Doc by the hand.

“You
come too late,” she said brokenly. “Too late! Poor, poor Will. He is dead. You
have come too late but maybe you can save my people.” She looked pleadingly
up. “Say you will save my people.”

Ole
Doc put her gently aside. He laid the girl down upon a nearby couch and
approached the bed. He threw back the cover and gazed at Wilhelm Giotini.

Wilhelm
Reiter Giotini, unblooded ruler of
Fomalhaut
,
creator of empires and materializer of dreams, was far past any common succor.
The fierce energy he had stored up in the streets of Earth as a gutter gamin
had not served him at the last. The pride and fury of him had not staved off
attack. The greatness of his mind, his beneficence to science, his bequests and
scholarships had not added one single instant to his life. Here he lay, a
sodden lump of dead flesh, inheritor of man's allotted ground, six by two by six,
just the same.

Ole
Doc turned to Madame Giotini and Lebel. “Leave me.”

They
looked at the body and then at Ole Doc and they backed to the door. Ole Doc
fastened them out and returned to the bed and stood there gazing at Giotini.

“Hippocrates!”
he barked.

But
there was no Hippocrates there and Ole Doc had to write his list and slide it through
the door to a messenger. He went back to his thoughtful vigil by the dead.

When
the girl stirred, Ole Doc transferred his attention and approached the couch
with a slight smile. She was, after all, a very pretty girl. He gave her a
small white pill and a swallow from his flask and shortly she returned from the
world of her nightmares and fixed him with pale wonder.

“It
is all right,” said Ole Doc. “I am a Soldier of Light.”

She
blinked, awed, and began to gather up her torn white satin. “But the disease. I
caught the disease. I was dying!”