Ole Doc Methuselah Part 16

By my hand and seal, under the watchfulness of G.o.d, by the power invested in me, so witness my command:

ODM.

Soldier of Light

"Enshrine this," said Ole Doc when he had explained.

"Enshrine this and forget the rest. And show it to all who would come for you and be deluded by your man-like appearance into thinking you could be slaves. None will violate it for the men who conquer s.p.a.ce are not the men who rule its petty planets and they know. Good-bye, then.

G.o.d bless you."

The ancient one clutched at the hem of his cloak and kissed it and then, certificate securely clutched, boarded the first ship.

Six minutes later the port was empty and the slaves were gone.

But the work of Ole Doc was not yet done and through sixteen wearisome hours he labored over the inhabitants of the city who had contacted the slaves even indirectly.

Fortunately it took but a short time to correct, with proper rays, all the effects that might have been made.

George Jasper Arlington, there on the steps where the station had been set up, looked with awe at Ole Doc.

"I never met one of you guys before," said Arlington.

"I guess I must have been mistaken. I thought you were just some kid even if I'd always heard about Soldiers of Light. They sure take you in young."

"They do at that," said Ole Doc, seven hundred and ninety-two Earth years young.

"Can't you tell me more about what was wrong?"

"I don't mind telling you," said Ole Doc, "now that they're gone. Slavery is a nasty thing. It is an expensive thing. The cheapest slave costs far too much in dignity

and decency. For men are created to do better things than enslave others. You'll work out your industries some bet- ter way I know."

"Oh, sure. You got a swell idea. But can't you tell me what was wrong?"

"Why, I don't mind," said Ole Doc. "It was a matter of metabolism. All creatures you know, haven't the same metabolism. They run on various fuels. In the galaxies we've found half a hundred different ones in use by plants, animals and sentient beings. My man there runs, weirdly enough, on gypsum. Others run on silicon. You and I happen to run on carbon, which is after all a rather specialized element. Earth just got started that way. Your slaves had a new one. I knew it as soon as I saw that healed cancer."

"Healed?"

"Yes. Only the woman was healed too well."

"I don't get it."

"Well," said Ole Doc, "you will. There was a fine reason not to shoot the Kufra people or to keep them."

"Well?"

"Why, they had a very efficient metabolism which ac- counted for their great weight and physical composition, also for their endurance and their apparent small need for food. They," said Ole Doc quietly, "had a plutonium metabolism."

"A plu . . . oh my G.o.d!"

"On their planet, so close to the Sirius twin, everything is upper scale and plutonium is the carbon of higher range. So you couldn't have shot them or buried them in ma.s.s graves, you see. They were, I think, rather expensive slaves."

In a voice of hushed respect Arlington said, "Is there anything I can give you?"

"Nothing," said Ole Doc. And then, "Oh yes! You have Mizar musk here. I'll take a bottle of it for a friend."

Which was how Miss Rogers received a full hogshead of Mizar musk and why the Soldiers of Light, wandering through a thousand galaxies, bear to this day the right to forbid the transportation of slaves from anywhere to anywhere on the pain of any one of those peculiar little ways they have of enforcing even their most capricious laws.

The Great Air Monopoly

Ole Doc sat in the cool sunlight of Arphon and pulled at a fragrant pipe. The Morgue, his ship-laboratory, sat in lush gra.s.s up to its belly beside the sparkling lake and from its side came out an awning to make a stately pavilion for the master.

Sun12 was thirty degrees high and Arphon's autumn sucked hungrily at the warmth, even as Ole Doc sucked at the pipe. He was getting away with something with that pipe. His little supergravitic slave Hippocrates was bustling around, all four hands busy, now and then coming to a full stop to lower his antennae at Ole Doc in disapproval. It was not of his master that he disapproved, it was the pipe.

"What if it is his birthday?" growled Hippocrates. "He shouldn't. He said he wouldn't. He promised me. Nicotine, ugh! and three whole days until he takes his treatment.

Nicotine on his fingers, poisoning him; nicotine in his lungs.

Poison, that's what it is. In the pharmacopoeia ... ! !"

And he rattled off a long, gruesome list of poisons for, once going, his phonograph-record-wise mind went on into Nilophine, Novocaine and Nymphodryl. Suddenly he real- ized where all this was heading and in anger at himself now as well as Ole Doc, got back to work with his birthday party preparations. They were very intricate preparations. After all, there had to be nine hundred and five candles on that cake.

Ole Doc paid his little slave no heed. He sat in the sunlight and puffed his pipe and occasionally made intri- cate calculations on his gold cuff-his filing case was full of torn cuffs containing solutions which would have rocked even his brothers of the Universal Medical Soci- ety,* much less the thousand and five humanoid systems in this one galaxy.

*U.M.S.-Universal Medical Society-the supreme council of physicians organized in the late Twenty-third Century after the

He didn't hear the clanking chains or the bark of the guards on the march, even though they came closer with every second and would pa.s.s hard by the ship. It was nothing to Ole Doc that Arphon was a boiling turmoil of revolt and murder. In the eight hundred and eighty years since he had graduated from Johns-Hopkins Medical school in Baltimore, Maryland, First Continental District Earth, Orbit Three, Sun1, Run Zone, Galaxy1, Universe -or 1, 316, 1 m. ly hub1, 264-89, sub-328 which will find it for you on the s.p.a.ce charts if you are going there-he had seen everything, done everything, felt ev- erything, tasted everything, been everything including a Messiah, a Dictator, a humanoid animal in a gla.s.s dome and a G.o.d, and there were few things left to amaze or interest him.

He supposed some day he would crack up or get shot or forget his regular youth treatments for a month and wind up in the quiet crypt where sat the nine hundred coffins of black ebony and gold containing all the mortal remains of Soldiers of Light who had departed the service in the only way possible and whose brothers had carefully brought them home.

He calculated from time to time and filled his pipe.

famous Revolt Caduceus which claimed the lives of two billion humanoids of the Earth-Arcton Empire through the villainous use of new medical discoveries to wage war and dominate entire coun- tries. George Moulton, M.D., Dr. Hubert Sands, the physio-chemist, James J. Lufberry, M.D., and Stephen Thomas Methridge, M.D., who was later to become as well known as Ole Doc Methuselah, had for nearly a hundred years kept to a laboratory studying far beyond contemporary skills and incidentally extending their work by extend- ing their own lives, came out of retirement, issued a p.r.o.nouncia- mento-backed with atomic and du-ray hand weapons and a thou- sand counter-toxins-which denied to the casual pract.i.tioner all specialized medical secrets. Thus peace came to the Empire. Other systems anxiously clamored for similar aid and other great names of medicine quietly joined them. For centuries, as the Universal Medical Society, these men, hiding great names under nicknames, who eventually became a fixed seven hundred in number, main- tained a Center and by casual patrol of the Systems, kept medicine as well as disease within rational bounds. Saluting no government, collecting no fees, permitting no infringement, the U.M.S. became dreaded and revered as The Soldiers of Light and under the symbol of the crossed ray rods impinged their will upon the governments of s.p.a.ce under a code of their own more rigorous than any code of laws. For the detailed records and history of the U.M.S., for conditions governing the hundred-year apprenticeship all future members must serve and for the special codes of call and appeal to the U.M.S. in case of plague or disaster, consult L. Ron Hub- bard's "Conquest of s.p.a.ce," 29th Volume, Chapter XCLII. Rene LaFayette.

After a while, when dinner was over, he'd go to the lake, make an artificial dusk and try out his battery of flies on the trout. Just now he was calculating.

It had come to him that morning that negative could be weighed and if this were so, then it could be canned and if that were true, he could undoubtedly surprise his col- leagues at the Center some two hundred million light-years away by making painless amputations so that new limbs could be grown.

He had just come up to his ninety-sixth variable when Hippocrates heard the chain gang. The little slave was ashamed of himself for being too busy or too provoked to heed sounds audible to him these past sixteen and two- tenths minutes.

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 at- tended 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 gra.s.s 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 h.e.l.l for a bout with Judgement 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 poi- sonous 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 s.h.a.ggy loins girded about with blasters and bra.s.s 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.

Doc raised a microgla.s.s to his eye and read the collar band. It wasn't a man's name, it was a commercial com- pany stamp. "Air, Limited."

Maybe they would have gone on by and nothing what- ever would have been written in the Morgue's log. But then Ole Doc saw her.