Dazed, the boy could only stare at him.
“You are going to retire her to a villa and keep her in luxury. Do I have your word?”
“Yes. Of course. But I—”
“You see that he does keep it,” said Ole Doc to Ayilt.
“Never fear. We’ll do whatever you say. My God, to think that only a few short hours ago Rudolf was dying . . . Truly, you must be an angel.”
“Others think very differently, I fear,” said Ole Doc with a grin. “Charge it up to the Soldiers of Light, the Universal Medical Society. And never breathe a word of how I’ve taken a hand in politics here. Now, any questions?”
They looked at him numbly but there was life and hope in them once more. “We have inherited a terrible job, but we’ll do it,” said Rudolf, pumping Ole Doc’s hand.
Ole Doc had to restrain Ayilt from kneeling to him. Brusquely he placed the two of them on the old restored thrones and led Pauma out from the curtains which were now destroyed.
Pauma stood looking obediently at Ole Doc until, after a few swift words, he broke the spell.
It was their show then. King and queen on their thrones nodded graciously to the queen mother at her greeting, but before they could speak more than a few words, the great doors burst inwards and the place was flooded with people, commoners, burghers, soldiers, come to know where they stood, and their mouths were full of fled garrisons and a populace burst from the bonds of slavery.
They didn’t notice Ole Doc. He glanced at the old queen. She, too, had been thrust back but she was preening herself before a mirror, coquettishly turning her head this way and that to admire herself.
Ole Doc grinned. Sometimes he couldn’t help but be proud of his handiwork.
Shortly afterwards, in a commandeered sled, Ole Doc arrived at the supply sheds of the hangars. The place was deserted. Two guards were dead and shackles were scattered about, broken. But the supplies were all in order and Ole Doc carefully selected a small two-billion-footthrust pile, pocketing it.
The light seemed brighter as he walked back to the field. Then it was clear why, for the dark star had been quarter covering the bright one on his arrival and had now spun clear.
The trees around the field were free of any burden but green leaves, and the old Morgue gleamed golden in the pleasant expanse. A moment after, Ole Doc stepped aboard.
Hippocrates was waiting peevishly. The little creature threw down the tome on stellar radiations he had been reading and began to shrilly berate his master for having taken so long.
“One would think piles were hard to get!” he complained.
“This one,” said Ole Doc, “was.”
“Let’s see it,” said Hippocrates, not believing.
Ole Doc showed him and the little fellow was all smiles. He bounced below to install it, singing the ribald “Fiddler of Saphi” as he went.
Shortly after, the Morgue was leaping out toward the Hub and all was peace aboard her.
The pile was working perfectly.
The Expensive Slaves
George Jasper Arlington fancied himself as an empire builder. He had gone up to Mizar in Ursa Major when he was ten and simply by dint of sheer survival had risen to grandeur on Dorab of that system. His huge bulk defied Dorab’s iciness and his inexhaustible energy overrode the cold-paralyzed government. It might have been said that George Jasper Arlington was Dorab, for nothing moved there unless his shaggy head gave the jerk.
He had overcome the chief obstacle of the place, which made for riches. In the early days of the second millennium of space travel, when mankind was but sparsely settling the habitable worlds, land was worth nothing—there was too much of it. But it is an economic principle that when land is to be had for little, then there are but few men to work it and wealth begins to consist not of vast titlings of soil but numbers of men to work it. Inevitably, when man not earth is the scarcity, capital invests itself in human beings; and slavery, regardless of the number of laws which may be passed against it, is practiced everywhere.
But George Jasper Arlington, thunderous lord of Dorab, had evolved two answers and so he had become rich.
The first of these was the simple transportation plan whereby people in “less advantageous” areas were given transport to and land on Dorab in return for seven years’ labor for George Jasper Arlington. He had created a space fleet of some size and he could afford this. But sooner or later it was certain to be discovered that the man who could live on Dorab seven years as a laborer had not been born, and so there came a time when recruits for his project answered not the lurid advertisements of George Jasper Arlington. Indeed in some systems, they threw filth at the posters.
But none of this was the business of the Universal Medical Society, for man, it seemed, would be man, and big fleas ate smaller ones inevitably. It was the second method which brought the Soldiers of Light down upon the magnificent G. J. Arlington, in the form of one of their renowned members, Ole Doc Methuselah.
Located here and there throughout space were worlds which held no converse with man. Because of metabolism, atmosphere, gravity and such, many thousands of “peoples” were utterly isolated and unapproachable. Further, they did not want to be approached, for what possible society could they have formed with a carbon, one-G being? Man now and then explored such worlds in highly insulated ships and suits, beheld the weird beings, gaped at the hitherto unknown physiological facts and then got out rapidly. For a two-foot “man,” for instance, who ate pumice and weighed two tons—Earth—had about as much in common with a human being as a robot with a cat. And so such worlds were always left alone. And therein lay the genius of George Jasper Arlington, lordly in his empire on Dorab.
He had sent out expeditions to surrounding systems, had searched and sifted evidence and had at last discovered the people of Sirius Sixty-eight. These he had investigated, sampled, analyzed and finally fought and captured. He had brought nine hundred of them to Dorab to labor in the wastes—and then the employees, the overseers, of George Jasper Arlington had begun to sicken and die. He reacted violently.
Ole Doc Methuselah, outward bound in the Morgue on important affairs, received the Medical Center flash.
IF CONVENIENT YOU MIGHT LOOK IN ON DORAB-MIZAR WHERE UNKNOWN DISEASE DECIMATES PLANET. DR. HOLDEN WON INTERGALACTIC TAMERLANE CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP. MISS ROGERS WOULD LIKE A FLASK OF MIZAR MUSK IF YOU STOP. BEST, FOLLINGSBY.
Ole Doc altered course and went back to the dining salon to eat dinner. The only controls he had there were the emergency turn, speed and stop buttons, but recently the Morgue had been equipped with the Speary Automatic Navigator—Ole Doc had not trusted the thing for the first hundred and twenty years it had been out but had finally let them put one in—and she now responded to the command “Dorab-Mizar, capital” and went on her own way.
Hippocrates, his ageless slave, bounced happily about the salon, ducking into the galley for new dishes, quoting Boccaccio, a very ancient author, phonograph-recordwise. When he had served the main course on a diamond-set platter of pure gold and when he saw that his beloved Ole Doc was giving the wild goose all the attention it deserved, the weird little creature began to chant yet another tale, Rappaccini’s Daughter, wherein an aged medic, to revenge himself upon a rival, fills up his own daughter on poison to which he immunizes her and then sets her in the road of his rival’s son, who, of course, is far from proof against the virulence of the lovely lady.
Although the yarn had lain quietly amongst his books—which library Hippocrates steadily devoured—Ole Doc had not heard of it for two or three hundred years. He thought now of all the advantages he had over that ancient Italian writer. Why, he knew of a thousand ways, at least, to make a being sudden death to any other being.
Maybe, he mused over dessert, it was just as well that people didn’t dig into literature anymore but contented themselves on sparadio thrillers and washboard weepers. From all the vengeance, provincialism, wars and governments he had seen of late, such devices could wel
l depopulate the galaxies.
But his thoughts paused at the speaker announcement.
“We are safely landed at Dorab-Mizar, capital Nanty, main space field, conditions good but subarctic cold.” That was the Morgue talking. Ole Doc could not quite get used to his trusty old space can having a dulcet voice now.
Hippocrates got him into a lead-fiber suit and put a helmet on his head and armed him with kit and blasters and then stood back to admire him and, at the same time, check him out. Hippocrates was small, four-armed and awful to behold, but where Ole Doc was concerned, the little creature was life itself.
Ole Doc stepped through the space port and stopped.
In six hundred years of batting about space, Ole Doc had seldom seen a gloomier vista.
The world of Dorab had an irregular orbit caused by the proximity of two stars. It went between them and as they moved in relation to each other, so it moved, now one, now the other, taking it. A dangerous situation at best, it did things to the climate. The temperatures varied between two hundred above and ninety-one below zero and its seasons were impossible to predict with accuracy. The vegetation had adapted itself through the eons and had a ropy, heavily insulated quality which gave it a forbidding air. And every plant had developed protection in the form of thorns or poisons. Inhibited by cold, every period of warmth was attended by furious growing. The ice would turn into vast swamps, the huge, almost sentient trees would grow new limbs and send them intertwining until all the so-called temperate zone was a canopied mass.
But now, with a winter almost done, the trees were thick black stumps standing on an unlimited vista of blue ice. It was much too cold to snow. The sky was blackish about Mizar’s distant glare. No tomb was ever more bleak nor more promising of death. For the trees seemed dead, the rivers were dead, the sky was dead and all was killed with cold.
Ole Doc boosted his heater up, wrapped his golden cloak about him and bowing his head to a roaring blast, forged toward a small black hut which alone marked this as a field.
He assumed instantly that life lived below this surface and he was not wrong. He passed from the field into a tunnel and it was very deep into this that he encountered his first man.
The wild-eyed youngster leaped up and said, all in a breath, “You are a Soldier of Light. I have been posted here for five days awaiting your arrival. We are dying. Dying, all of us! Come quickly!” And he sped away, impatiently pausing at each bend to see that Ole Doc was certainly following.
They came into the deserted thoroughfares where shop faces were closed with heavy timbers and where only a few lights gleamed feebly. They passed body after body lying in the gutters, unburied, rotting and spoiling the already foul air of the town. They skirted empty warehouses and broken villas and came at last to a high, wide castle chiseled from the native basalt.
Ole Doc followed the youth up the ebon steps and into a scattered guardroom. Beyond, offices were abandoned and papers lay like snow. Outside a door marked George Jasper Arlington the youth stopped, afraid to go any farther. Ole Doc went by him and found his man.
He had eyes like a caged lion and his hair massed over his eyes. He was a huge brute of a man, with strength and decision in every inch of him. It had taken such a man to create all that Dorab had become.
“I am Arlington,” he said, leaping up from his bed where, a moment before, he had been asleep. “I see you are a Soldier of Light. I will pay any fee. This is disaster! And after all I have done! Thank God you people got my wire. Now, get to work.”
“Just a moment,” smiled Ole Doc. “I am a Soldier of Light, yes. But we take no fees. I make no promises about ridding you of any plague which might be on you. I am here to investigate, as a matter of medical interest, any condition you might have.”
“Nonsense! Every man owes a debt to humanity. You see here the entire human population of Dorab dying. You have to do something. I will make it well worth your while. And I am not to be deluded that there lives a man without a price.
“Dorab, Doctor, is worth some fifteen trillion dollars. Of that I own the better part. We raise all the insulating fiber used anywhere for spaceships. That very suit you wear is made of it. Don’t you think that is worth saving?”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t try,” said Ole Doc. “I only said I couldn’t promise. Now where did this epidemic start and when?”
“About three months ago. I am certain it was brought here from the Sirius planet where we procured our slaves. It broke out on a spaceship and killed half the crew and then it started to work its way through the entire planet here. By God . . .”
“Is there another doctor here?”
“No. There were only two. Not Soldiers of Light, naturally. Just doctors. They died in the first part of the epidemic. You have to do something!”
“Will you show me around?”
A look of pallor came over Arlington’s big face. For all his courage in other fields, it was gone in this. “I must stay here to be near Central. The slave guards have withdrawn and there may be an uprising.”
“Ah. Of slaves? What slaves?”
“The people we brought from Sirius Sixty-eight. And good slaves they’ve been. I wouldn’t trade one for thirty immigrants. They’re cheap. They cost us nothing except their transportation.”
“And their food.”
“No,” said Arlington, looking sly. “That’s the best part of it. They eat nothing that we can discover. No food expense at all. We can’t have them running away—not that they’d get far in this weather. They make excellent loggers. They never tire. And whatever the disease our people got on Sirius Sixty-eight—”
“Have any slaves died?”
“None.”
“Ah,” said Ole Doc. “Do these slaves have their own leader?”
“No. That is, not a leader. They have something they call a cithw, a sort of medicine man who says their prayers for them.”
“You’ve talked this over with him, of course.”
“Me? Why should I talk to a filthy native?”
“Sometimes they can help quite a bit,” said Ole Doc.
“Rot!” said Arlington. “We are superior to them in culture and weapons and that makes them inferior to us. Fair game! And we need them here. What good were they doing anyone on Sirius Sixty-eight?”
“One never knows, does one,” said Ole Doc. He was beginning to dislike George Jasper Arlington, for all the fact that one, when he has lived several hundred years, is likely to develop an enormous amount of tolerance.
“I think I had better look around,” said Ole Doc. “I’ll let you know.”
But as he touched the handle of the door a red light flashed on Arlington’s Central and a hysterical voice said, “Chief! They’ve beat it!”
“Stop them!”
“I can’t. I haven’t got a guard that will stand up to them. They’re scared. They say these goo-goos are carrying the plague. Everybody has skipped. In another twenty minutes the whole gang of them will be in the capital!”
“I withdraw my nonslaying order. You can shoot them if you wish. But damn it to hell, stop them!”
Ole Doc eased himself out of the door. He stood for a little while, the cold blasts seeping down through the air shafts and stirring the abandoned papers. The gold glass of his helmet frosted a trifle and he absently adjusted his heat.
Behind him, through the partly closed door, Arlington’s voice went on, issuing orders, trying to head off the escaped slaves, trying to stir the fear-paralyzed city into action.
“They sent a doc,” Arlington was telling someone, a government officer, “but he’s just a kid. Doesn’t look more than twenty and he’s just as baffled as we are. So don’t count on it. . . . Well, all we know about them Soldiers, after all, is their reputation. I never seen one before, did you? . . . Hell, that’s what you keep saying, but without slaves, you might as well quit the planet. Who’d work timber? . . .”
Ole Doc looked down the empty corridors. He didn’t know why he should
save the planet. He had prejudices against slavery and the people who employed it. Somehow, away back in nineteen forty-six, when he graduated from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, people had gotten the idea that human beings should be free and that man, after all, was a pretty noble creature intended for very high destinies. Some of that had been forgotten as the ages marched on but Ole Doc had never failed to remember.
He hitched up his blasters and went out to meet the slaves.
They were at the eighteenth barrier of the city, in a tunnel of shallow roof and frozen floor and they were confronting a captain of guards almost hysterical with the necessity of keeping them back.
“Son,” said Ole Doc, peering down the long corridor at the first ranks of the slaves, “you better put that machine blaster away before somebody gets hurt. I think those people have stopped being afraid.”
The captain had not been aware of company. His two men were just as frightened as himself and the three jumped about to face Ole Doc. In the darkness the buttons of the cloak were as luminescent as panther eyes.
“What language do they speak?” said Ole Doc.
“God knows!” said the captain, “but they understand lingua spacia. Who are you?”
“Just a medic that drifted in,” said Ole Doc. “I hear they have a leader they call a cithw. Do you suppose you could get him to meet me halfway up that passageway?”
“Are you crazy?”
“I have occasionally suspected it,” said Ole Doc. “Sing out.”
A short parley at respectful distance ensued and the uneasy mass at the other end of the corridor stepped back, leaving a tall, ancient being to the fore.
Ole Doc gave a nod to the captain and dropped over the barrier. The cold wind stirred his cloak and the way was dark under the failing power supply of the city. He stopped halfway.
The ancient one came tremblingly forward, not afraid, only aged. Ole Doc had not known what strange form of being to expect and he was somewhat startled by the ordinariness of the creature. Two eyes, two arms, two legs. Why, except for his deep gray color and the obvious fact that he was not of flesh, he might well have been any human patriarch.
Ole Doc Methuselah: The Intergalactic Adventures of the Soldier of Light Page 8