Hippocrates jumped to the panel, making the Morgue rock with his great weight, and four-handedly threw on a combination of switches which utterly camouflaged the Morgue, screened Ole Doc without making him invisible, trained outward a brace of 600-mm blasters rated at a thousand rounds a second, and turned down the oven so that his cake wouldn’t burn. These four importances attended to, Hippocrates hung invisible in the door and eyed the column with disfavor as it came in sight.
Ole Doc saw it at last. It would have been very difficult to have avoided it, seeing that the vanguard—a huge Persephon renegade—would momentarily stumble against the screen, the limit of which he was paralleling.
It was a weird sight, that column. The lush grass bent under white human feet and became stained with red. Clothing ripped to nothing, eyes sunken and haunted, bent with iron fetters and despair, the hundred and sixteen people captive there appeared like shades just issued forth from hell for a bout with Judgment Day.
The guards were brutish humanoids, eugenicized for slave tending. And this was odd because Ole Doc himself, a hundred—or was it fifty—years before, had thought the practice stopped by his own policing. These ape-armed, jaguar-toothed devils were like humans mad with a poisonous stimulant or like Persephons dragged from their pits and injected with satanic human intelligence. Their pointed heads were as thick as helmets, their necks were collared with an owner’s mark, their shoulders and shaggy loins girded about with blasters and brass cases, and their elephant-pad feet were shoed in something resembling spittoons. Whoever owned and controlled that crew, who in turn controlled these human slaves, must be a very rough lad himself.
Ole Doc raised a microglass to his eye and read the collar brand. It wasn’t a man’s name, it was a commercial company stamp: “Air, Limited.”
Maybe they would have gone on by and nothing whatever would have been written in the Morgue’s log. But then Ole Doc saw her.
She was slight, but strong enough to bear this iron. She was curved just so and thus. And her eyes and nose and mouth made a triangle, just . . . well, and her hair flowed away from her face and down her back.
Ole Doc sat up and the pipe dropped unheeded to the ground. He looked harder. The lines before and behind her vanished. The guards vanished. The grass, the sunlight, all Arphon, vanished. And there was this girl. Ole Doc stood up and his knees wobbled a little, which was odd because Ole Doc was in a physical recondition far superior to most men of twenty-five.
She saw him and for an instant, as she looked and he looked, broke her stride. The slave behind her was old and stumbled. The slave ahead was jerked back by his collar. The Persephon humanoid whirled off the screen he had just bumped and came around to see the tangle. And down came his brass rod.
It never touched the young lady. Ole Doc had not practiced drawing and hip shooting for about four hundred years but his hand had not forgotten. That Persephon humanoid sort of exploded into a mist. His arm flew up sixty yards, turned at the top and came down with a thump on the Morgue’s screen where it lay, dripping, suspended in air. The guard’s blaster belt went off after an instant like a chain of small cannons and blew tufts of grass in the air. The hole smoked and the other guards came up sharply, gaped and as one, faced about with guns drawn looking for their quarry.
It was not quite fair. Ole Doc was out of the screen where he could shoot without deflection and he was shooting. And even if he was a fine target it was still not sporting. He had five Persephons only to shoot at him and then there were four, three, two, none. And patches of grass smoked and there was silence. A final belt cartridge exploded in a hole and there was silence again.
The Persephons never knew they had had the honor of being shot by a Galactic Medalist in short arms.
The slaves stood still and shivered. A wild one had pinked an old woman at the end of the column and she was sitting down staring at her own blood. The rest were gazing miserably at this new menace who had risen up from the tall grass. Ole Doc found he was shaking with the excitement and he disliked finding it so, for he had often told himself that one should never get a thrill out of killing, that being a barbarous sort of joy, and besides, at the end there, it had been but five to one. He picked up his fallen pipe, jammed it into his mouth and took a drag. The slaves screamed and fell back from this smoking monster, the tobacco habit having been extinct most everywhere for hundreds of years.
Hippocrates grunted with disgust. He had not been able to more than slew the 600-mm into position and had not had the satisfaction of shooting even one round.
He came out. Shrilly shrewish, he said: “You ought to know better. I have told you and told you and told you and you ought to know better. You’ll get hurt. I’ve said you’ll get hurt and you will. You leave that to the bravos and buckos. It says right in your code that ‘whosoever shall kill large numbers of people solely for satisfaction shall be given a hearing and shall be fined a week’s pay, it being the mission of this Society to preserve mankind in the Galaxy—”’ He brought up short. His terror for Ole Doc had brought him into an error of quoting the Parody Code. It actually said “ . . . kill large numbers for experimentation shall . . .” This fussed him so that he shut off the force screens and came down and would have carried Ole Doc straight back into the ship for a takeoff had not his revered master been staring so hard, pipe again forgotten.
Hippocrates took the pipe. He looked for the objection. He knocked out the bowl. He looked again, more wonder in his antennae waves, and slyly broke the pipe to bits. Still no objection. Hippocrates poured out the contents of the pouch and heaved bits and leather as far as his very powerful arms could throw. Still no objection. Hippocrates walked all the way around Ole Doc and stared at him. His master was staring at the line of slaves.
No, at the center of the line. And someone there was staring as though hypnotized.
“Oh,” moaned Hippocrates, seeing plenty of trouble. “A girl!”
Now it was no plan of Ole Doc’s to inspect Arphon of Sun12. He was on his leisurely way to hand a deposition warrant to a System Chief over in Sub-Rim 18, 526o, that worthy having failed to respect Section 8, Paragraph 918, of Code 94 of the Universal Medical Society. And if Arphon had slaves like this, it was theoretically none of his medical business.
But she was staring at him.
He flushed a little and looked down. But he was caped in gold and belted in scarlet with metal wings on his yellow boots and was decent.
Hippocrates sighed with the depth of resignation. He went over and chopped the girl out of the line with a simple twist of the iron links, barehanded. Then he set her bodily to one side and to the rest made pushing motions with his hands.
“Shoo! Shoo!” said Hippocrates. “You are free. Go!”
“Nonsense,” said the girl in a voice which made tingles go up and down Ole Doc’s spine. “How can they go anywhere? They have no money to pay the air tax.”
“The air—” Hippocrates gaped at her. She was just a human being to him. Personally he liked machines. “Nonsense yourself. The air’s here and the air’s free. Shoo! SHOO! You stay,” he added over one of his shoulders to the girl. “Shoo!”
And the slaves sank down and began to inch forward on their knees to the little slave. “No, no,” they cried. “We cannot pay the tax. We have sickened already in our homes when the air was shut off. We cannot pay. We are repossessed and on our way to remarketing. Don’t send us away! Help us! Money, money! You pay our tax and we will work—!”
“Master!” cried Hippocrates, scuttling back. For there were definite limits on his skills and when these were reached he had but one god. “Master!”
But the slaves just came on, inching forward on their knees, hands pitifully upraised, begging and whining, and Hippocrates fell hastily back again.
“Air, air. Buy us air! You pay our tax. Don’t send us away!”
“MASTER!”
Ole Doc paid no heed to his slave now behind him, to the pathetic cries, to the creeping throng or to anything else on Arp
hon for that matter. He was still staring at the girl and now she blushed and pulled the rags of a robe around her.
That did it. “Put her in the ship!” said Ole Doc. “The rest of you get out of here. Go back to your homes! Beat it!” But this relapse into the vernacular of his youth had no effect on the crowd. They had crept forward, leaving flattened grass behind them.
Suddenly an old man with a ragged gray stubble and thin chest caught at his throat, rose up and with a wild scream cried, “Air! Air! Oh—” And down he went, full length into the grass. Two others shortly did the same thing.
Ole Doc sniffed alertly. He looked at his third cloak button but it was still gold and so the atmosphere was all right. He sniffed again. “Test for air,” he said to Hippocrates.
The little fellow leaped gladly into the Morgue and in his testing brought visibility back to the ship. He saw through the port that this startled half a dozen of the slaves out there into fits and the fact made him feel very superior. He, master of machinery, tested for the air. And it was good.
Ole Doc pulled down his helmet to cover his face and walked forward. He rolled over the senseless antique of sixty-five winters and examined him for anything discoverable.
He examined several more and from the eighth, who just that instant was half blind with airlessness and the flash of Ole Doc’s UMS gorget, flicked out a specimen of spittle and passed it to Hippocrates.
“Culture it,” said Ole Doc.
“Negative,” said Hippocrates six minutes later, still carrying ’scope and speed culture flask. “Bacteriologically negative.”
“Air!” screamed the old man, reviving. And an instant later she went down on her face and didn’t move.
Ole Doc had her in the ship in about ten seconds. Hippocrates threw a force cordon around the rest and four-handedly went through them, spraying a sterilizer all over them with two hands and breaking their chains apart with the remaining sets of fingers.
“Air!” they whined and gasped. “Air, air, air!”
Ole Doc looked sadly down at the girl on the table. She was fragile and lovely, stretched there on the whiteness of the Morgue’s operating room. She was in odd contrast to all these brilliant tubes and trays, these glittering rods and merciless meters. Ole Doc sighed and then shook off the trance and became a professional.
“There’s such a thing as malnutrition,” he said to Hippocrates. “But I never heard of mal-oxygenation. Her chest— Here, what’s this?”
The tag had been clipped solidly through her ear and it read, “Property of Air, Limited. Repossessed Juduary 43rd, ’53. By order of Lem Tolliver, President, Air, Limited.”
That offended Ole Doc for some reason. He tore it off and put a heal compress on the small, handsome ear. When he removed it five seconds later there were no scars.
Ole Doc read the tag again and then angrily stamped it underfoot. He turned to his job and shortly had a mask on the girl which fed her oxygen in proper pulsations and gave her a little ammonia and psi-ionized air in the bargain.
He was just beginning to take satisfaction in the way her lovely eyes were flickering as she came around when Hippocrates leaped in, excited.
“Ship landing!” blurted the little fellow. “Guns ready. Tell me when to shoot.”
“Whoa,” said Ole Doc. “Force screen them off until you see what they are at least. Now, there you are, my dear.”
She struggled up and pulled off the mask. She looked, mystified, at her surroundings until she heard others calling for air outside. Then she flicked her eyes at Ole Doc and it was his turn to sigh.
“Ugh!” said Hippocrates. “Nicotine, women! You never live to be ten thousand, I bet. Next, rum!”
“Fine idea,” said Ole Doc. “My dear, if you’d like to step this way—”
Hippocrates watched him open doors for her. He knew Ole Doc would take her to a stateroom where she could shower and shift into Ole Doc’s robe. And then in the salon that Michalo had newly designed, they’d sit in soft lights and talk above the whine of violins. Ugh! It had been exactly nineteen years and six days since Ole Doc had shown any interest in a woman— The little slave paused. He grinned. After all, this was Ole Doc’s birthday. It was hard enough to live hundreds of years with nothing ever exciting anymore. Hippocrates knew; for his people, gypsum metabolism though they were, normally went utterly stale at twelve thousand and faded into complete boredom. Humans lived faster in the head—
He grinned and swung up into a gun turret. Let him have his birthday and three cheers for it.
But the ship called Hippocrates back sharply. And he was again intensely annoyed with Ole Doc. Women. Now look at the trouble that was coming. The ship was a Scoutcraft Raider for atmosphere travel and it had enough armament to slaughter a city and it was manned with humans who, even at this distance, looked extremely unreliable. It landed on the edge of the screen and five guards leaped down, blasters ready to cover the debark of a huge-shouldered, black-garbed man. Hippocrates was reminded of a vulture and almost whiffed the odor that always clings to those birds. He turned on the near screen and disregarded the fact that its force kicked about twenty slaves a dozen feet or more outward from the Morgue.
The five scouted the grass, found the holes where the guards had been and fished up bits of melted brass. They stood and glared at the slaves who, seeing the ship, had begun to howl and plead and creep toward that as they had toward Hippocrates. The big human stopped and looked at the Morgue. Its stern was toward him and he didn’t see the crossed ray rods on the nose or the meaningful letters UMSS Morgue, Ole Doc Methuselah.
“You better stop,” said Hippocrates in the high turret.
The men stopped.
The big human looked up at the turret. He signaled his men to fan out and for his ship to depress its heaviest cannon. Hippocrates shivered a little, for he was not sure his screen would hold against the size of those muzzles.
“I’m Big Lem Tolliver!” shouted the human. “This is Air, Limited talking and if you got a good reason why my Persephons ain’t alive, spill it, for I ain’t withholding my fire long.”
“You better go away!” yelled Hippocrates in derision. “If my master sees you, he’ll cut you open to see the size of your liver or drill holes in your skull to equalize the vacuum. You better go!”
“Only a hundred and fifteen in this gang,” said a shrunken human being who reached only to Tolliver’s elbow but who served him as a lieutenant of sorts. “According to the radio report, that’s one missing.”
“Search the ship!” said Big Lem Tolliver.
Hippocrates swooped down with his 600-mm. “Stop and go away. This is the UMSS Morgue and we specialize in dead men named Lem Tolliver.”
He thought this was pretty apt. After all, he’d never imagined being able to convert lines from Tales of the Early Space Pioneers. He was a success. It stopped them.
“Spacecrap!” said Lem Tolliver in a moment. “That’s no UMS ship! You’d never steal a slave if you were.”
“Slaves are UMS business, pardner,” said Hippocrates. “And even if they weren’t, we’d make it our business, son. You going to go along and tell your mama to wipe your nose or am I going to have to wipe it myself—with ’sploders? Now git!” He was certainly converting well today.
“Up there, Tinoi. Search it and if they’ve got the missing one, haul her out. And then we’ll see about the murder that’s been done here amongst our people.”
Tinoi, the shrunken one, hung back. He’d never had a taste for 600-mm stuff himself. Let them as would be heroes; he valued his daily issue of doi.
Hippocrates saw the hesitation and grew very brave. He spanged a dozen ’sploders into the earth before the group and would have shot a thousand more as warning if the Scoutcraft Raider, ordered so, had not replied with a resounding vomit of fire.
The Morgue reeled as the screen folded. The top turret caved into tangled smoke. The side port fused and dripped alloy gone molten. And Big Lem Tolliver looked on in some an
noyance, for there went his chance of recovering the missing repossessed slave.
The men went about collecting the hundred and fifteen and forming them into lines. They were bitter because they could not imagine what had burst these perfectly good chains and they had to tie lines through the broken links.
“Air!” moaned the prisoners.
“Stow it,” said Big Lem. “We’ll teach you to breathe air you didn’t pay for. Form ’em up, boys, and get them on their way. That spaceship, or what’s left of it, is a shade too hot for me.”
“You ain’t goin’ to make me escort them,” said Tinoi. “It’s a heck of a walk to Minga. I bought them Persephon-castes to do the walking.”
“If I say walk, you’ll walk,” said Big Lem. “And if I say walk straight out into space, you’ll walk. And if I say hoof it from here to Galactropolis, you’ll walk every condemned light-year of it barefoot. If I can’t have my orders obeyed, who can? And if you can’t obey Big Lem Tolliver, you can’t obey nobody. Who thought up this company? Who makes it work? Who handles all the paperwork and hires politicians and abdicates kings when he chooses? Who keeps the whole confounded planet running and your belly full? Lem Tolliver, that’s who. And what’s Air, Limited but Lem Tolliver? And what’s Arphon but Lem Tolliver? And that makes me a planet.”
This syllogism caused a return of good humor. He expanded, rocked on his heels and looked down at Tinoi. “Yessir. That makes me Arphon, or mighty doggone near. Well, Tinoi, do you walk?”
“Guess so, Arphon,” grumped Tinoi and appeared very beaten about it. He knew better than to appear elated. Somebody else would have got the detail if he hadn’t objected and it would be fine to breathe something else besides the ozone stink of the Scoutcraft Raider. Too, he could always sell a slave or two to some farm and turn in a death report. “Guess I’ll have to,” mumbled Tinoi, “but I’ll need two gunners and a marine off the ship, and don’t go making me take Connoly along.”
“That’s Connoly and two marines you’ll get,” said Tolliver. “Now line ’em up and get—”
Ole Doc Methuselah: The Intergalactic Adventures of the Soldier of Light Page 10