Ole Doc Methuselah Part 24

Tinoi and the clerk might as well have been gra.s.s blades.

Tinoi grumbled. He knew that he could run away but where could he run to escape the long arm of a Soldier of Light? "Why didn't you tell me?" he growled at the clerk.

"You punks are supposed to know everything-"

"Be quiet," said the clerk.

There was a sound inside as of plumber's tools being dropped. And then the clatter of pipes. A long tune pa.s.sed and the sun sank lower. Ole Doc came out of his trance and remembered the girl.

She was moaning faintly from the pain of her burns.

Ole Doc timidly knocked on the door of his operating room. "Please. Could I have the red case of ointments on the starboard wall?"

He had to ask three times before Bestin's two right arms shot impatiently out with the red case. Ole Doc took it and the door clanged shut again.

The girl shuddered at the first touch and then a hypo pellet quieted her. Ole Doc worked quickly but absently, one eye on the ship. Tinoi gaped at what Ole Doc was doing and the clerk was ill.

The girl did not move, so strong was the pellet, even when half the skin was off her face and arm. Tinoi had to turn away, rough character though he called himself, but when the click and sc.r.a.pe of instruments didn't sound again, he faced back.

Ole Doc was just giving the girl another shot. She was beginning to stir and turned over so that Tinoi could see her face. He gaped. There wasn't a trace of a scar, not even a red place where the scar had been. And the girl was very, very beautiful.

"Feel better?" asked Ole Doc.

She looked around and saw the clearing. She recalled nothing of the in between. She did not know she had been to Minga and back and thought she was that minute finished dragging Doc from the burning ship. She sat up and stared around her. It took a little soothing talk to convince her of what had happened.

She saw Ole Doc's mind was not on what she was saying nor upon her and she soon understood what was going on in the ship.

"Some one you like?" she asked.

"The best slave any man ever had," said Ole Doc. "I recall . . ." But he stopped, listening. "The best slave a.

man ever had," he finished quickly.

The sun sank lower and then at last the clicking and chanting inside the ship had stopped. The door opened very slowly and the old man came out, carrying his clumsy bundles. He put them in the gig. In a moment, Bestin came down the twisted ladder and walked stolidly toward the gig.

Ole Doc looked at them and his shoulders sagged. He rose and slowly approached the old being.

"I understand," said Ole Doc, finding it difficult to speak. "It is not easy to lose ... to lose a patient," he finished. "But you did your best I know. I will fly you back to Min-"

"No, you won't!" howled Hippocrates, leaping down from the Morgue. "No you won't! I will do it and you will tell those two stupid humans there and that woman to put things to rights in that ship they messed up. Put them to rights, you bandits! Wreck my Morgue, will you! She's more human than you are!"

He shook four fists in their faces and then turned to beam affectionately at Ole Doc.

The little fellow was a ma.s.s of fresh plaster of Paris from neck to belt but otherwise he was very much him- self. "New pipes," he said. "Whooeee whoooo whoooo!"

he screamed, deafening them. "See? New pipes."

Ole Doc saw and heard. He sat down on the gra.s.s weakly and began to laugh. Hippocrates was offended. He did not know that this was from the shock of his own near demise, from the close shave of never getting aid to him.

He did not know that the biggest swindle in a thousand systems had had to relax its wealthy sway before he could be cured. He was offended.

"Clean up that ship!" he shouted, jumping into the gig.

"And as for you," he declaimed, pointing at his beloved master, "don't you touch that cake. The birthday party will be at six. You invite girl but those stupid humans, never! I go now. Be right back."

And the gig shot tremendously away.

Ole Doc wiped away the tears of near hysteria and took one of his own pills. He got up. "You better do what he says, people. And as for you, Tinoi, tomorrow morning we'll shut off and destroy those 'machines' and get this planet running again. Jump now. You heard him."

The clerk and the girl-who gave Ole Doc a lingering, promising glance-entered the ship to begin their work.

But Tinoi lingered.

"Better jump," said Ole Doc.

"Sure. I'll work," said Tinoi. "But one thing, Mister Doctor . .. you're a Soldier of Light and I ain't even good enough to talk to you, I know. But-"

"Well?"

"Sir," plunged Tinoi. "It's them bombs. We had our allergy pills, but them bombs were pretty good, too. If they're so expensive to make like he said, how'll we ever get enough to cure up-"

"My man," said Ole Doc, "your precious bombs were one of the oldest known buncombes in medical history. A propellant and ephedrine, that's all. Ephedrine barely per- mits the allergy patient to breathe. It wasn't 'air' you were selling but a phony, second-rate drug that costs about a dollar a barrel. They'd take a little and needed more. You were clear back in the dark ages of medical history- about a century after they'd stopped using witches for doctors. Ragweed, ephedrine-but they were enough to wreck the lives of nearly everyone on this planet.

"Oh, get into the ship and get busy. It makes me sick to think of it. Besides, if Hippocrates gets back and finds his Morgue still messed up, he'll make you wish you'd never been born. Jump now, for by all that's holy, there's the gig coming back now."

Plague

The big ship settled in the landing cradle, her ports agleam-and her guts rotten with sickness.

There were no banners to greet her back from her Spica run, there was no welcoming ma.s.s of greeters. The field was as still as an execution dock and the black wagons waited with drivers scared and the high yellow blaze of QUARANTINE hung sickly over all.

Five hundred and ninety-one pa.s.sengers were dead. The remainder of her list would probably die. Officers and crew had contributed to the dead. And somewhere be- tween Spica and Earth, corpses had been flung out the airport to explode in vacuum and gyrate, then, perhaps, as dark comets of putrescent matter around some darker star.

The medic at the port, authoritative but frightened, barked into the speaker, "Star of s.p.a.ce ahoy! No person- nel or equipment will be given to you until a full account- ing of symptoms has been given by your ship's doctor."

And officer's voice speakered out from the Star of s.p.a.ce. "The doc's dead! Let us open the ports! Help us!"

"How does the disease appear to you?"

There was a long silence and then another voice an- swered from the stricken Star. "Begins with sore throat and spots inside the mouth. Swollen throat and then stead- ily mounting temperature. Death comes in convulsions in about fourteen days, sometimes less. If you've got a heart, let us land. Help us!"

The group on the operations platform looked out at the defiled cradle. The medic was young but old enough to know hopelessness. The s.p.a.ceway Control Police Chief, Conway, looked uncertainly at the ship. Conway knew nothing about medicine but he knew what had happened when the Vestal from Galaxy 159 had brought the red death here.

"What they got?" asked Conway. "Red death?"

"I don't know. Not that." And the medic asked other things of the ship.

"You must have some idea," said Conway.

"I don't know," said the medic. He turned to a phone and called his superiors and when he came back he was haggard.

A woman had come to the ship speaker now. She was pleading between broken sobs. They were trying every- thing they could out there in that ship. The medic tried to imagine what it was like with those closed ports. No doctor.

The ballrooms and salons turned over to dying men, women and children. The few live ones cringing in far places, hoping. Brave ones waiting on sick people. Some officer with his first command which would be his last. They had a kid at the ship speaker now.

Conway asked them for verbal messages and for an hour and a half the recorder took them. Now and then the speaker on the ship would change.