Ole Doc Methuselah Part 13

In six hundred years of batting about s.p.a.ce, 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 ma.s.s.

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 a.s.sumed instantly that life lived below surface and he was not wrong. He pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed body after body lying in the gutters, unburied, rotting and spoiling the already foul air of the town. They skirted empty ware- houses 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 guard room. Beyond, offices were abandoned and papers lay like snow. Outside a door marked "George Jasper Arlington" the youth stopped, afraid to go any further. Ole Doc went by him and found his man.

He had eyes like a caged lion and his hair ma.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 fibre used anywhere for s.p.a.ceships. 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 s.p.a.ceship and killed half the crew and then it started to work its way through the entire planet here. By-"

"Is there another doctor here?"

"No. There were only two. Not Soldiers of Light, natu- rally. 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 an 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 non-slaying order. You can shoot them if you wish. But, 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 gla.s.s o.

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," Alrington 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? . . . 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. Some- how, away back in Nineteen Forty-six when he graduated from Johns-Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, people had got the idea that human things should be free and that Man, after all, was a pretty n.o.ble 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.