“Where is my master?” roared Hippocrates.
The guard didn’t answer fast enough, probably because he did not understand in the least what master was meant, and was promptly banged so hard that he went into some other realm, there to serve other men, no doubt. Hippocrates dropped him. He grabbed at a second and missed.
Then an ominous sound came to him, the thud of bodies in combat and the breaking of furniture, and he plowed his way through a milling throng like a hot knife into butter and found himself outside the Giotini suite.
The door was barred. This was no problem. He blazed away at it at a range no human could have stood and had himself a hole in it in a trice. He fished one hand through, found a bar and slammed the panels back.
There he stopped.
The bloodiest, messiest man it had ever been his fate to see was trying to crawl up from the floor. He was dripping blood from massive contusions. He was dripping rags. He was blind with fair blows and staggering on the borders of beyond. His remaining teeth were set behind lips so puffed that they looked like pillows.
And Ole Doc, standing there with his broken fists still ready, said: “Get up! Get up and fight! Get up and fight!” But Ole Doc wasn’t even looking at his adversary. He couldn’t see him.
Hippocrates reversed a blaster and was about to knock Lebel out with one smart blow when Lebel fell of his own accord and lay completely still.
Half an hour later, when Hippocrates had his master well healed up, the little slave turned to gather the remains of the equipment for a return to the ship. He picked up several items, rendered more or less secondhand by the combat, and then laid them down, puzzled.
“What is all this, master?”
Ole Doc ranged his puffy eyes over the equipment. “Busted experiment,” he said.
“What experiment, master?”
“That condemned cuff note!” said Ole Doc, a little peevish. “It sounded so good when I was working on it fifty or sixty years ago. If you could just calculate the harmonic of memory retention, you could listen to whatever a dead man had been told. But,” he added with a sigh, “it doesn’t work.”
“But what’s this record then?”
“Fake. Bait to get Lebel to the door.”
“You want this junk?”
“Let it lie,” said Ole Doc. “There’s a silly girl around here we’ll have to gather up and we’ve got a lot of psychotherapy to attend to where we can find anyone left alive and I’ve got a dispatch to send Center to tell them the state of this endowment. We’ve got to get busy.”
“What about this?” said Hippocrates, touching Lebel with a toe.
“That?” said Ole Doc. “Well, I really don’t know yet. I think I’ll try him for the next couple months from time to time and then sentence him to death and then reprieve him.”
“Reprieve?” gaped Hippocrates.
“So that the survivors can try him,” said Ole Doc. “Then I’ll pardon him and send him to Hub City to be tried.”
“Drive him mad,” said Hippocrates practically.
Ole Doc swished his cloak over his shoulder. “Let’s get out and get busy.”
Hippocrates bounced to the door and cleared it importantly.
But Ole Doc didn’t pass on through. “Hippocrates, why on earth did you burn up those cuffs?”
“They didn’t seem very important to me when I read,” said Hippocrates, hangdog instantly.
Ole Doc gaped. “When you read . . . you mean you read all of them?”
“Yes, master.”
Ole Doc laughed suddenly and laughed loudly. “If you read them, you remember them, then!”
“Yes, master!”
“But why didn’t you say so?”
“I thought you just mad because I not file right. You didn’t ask me.”
Ole Doc laughed again. “Well, no loss at all then. Some of the notes may work despite this fiasco today. Hippocrates, when I bought you at that auction a few hundred years back, I think I made the soundest investment of my life. Let’s go.”
Hippocrates stared. He almost staggered. And then he grew at least another half meter in height. He went out into the corridor breasting a pleading, hopeful, begging throng, carving a wide swathe through them and crying out in a voice which cracked chips from the pillars in the place. “Make way! Make way for Ole Doc Methuselah, Soldier of Light, knight of the UMS and benefactor of Mankind! Make way! Make way!”
Ole Mother Methuselah
Bucketing along at a hundred and fifty light-years, just entering the Earth Galaxy, the Morgue, decrepit pride of the Universal Medical Society, was targeted with a strange appeal:
ANY UMS SHIP ANY UMS SHIP ANY DOCTOR ANYONE EMERG EMERG EMERG PLEASE CONTACT PLEASE CONTACT UNITED STATES EXPERIMENTAL STATION THREE THOUSAND AND TWO PLANET GORGON BETA URSA MAJOR. RELAY RELAY EMERG.
Ole Doc was in his salon, boots on a gold-embroidered chair, head reclined against a panel depicting the Muses crowning a satyr, musing upon the sad and depleted state of his wine “cellar” which jingled and rattled, all two bottles of it, on a shelf above the coffeemaker. He heard the tape clicking but he had heard tapes click before. He heard it clicking the distinctive three dots of an emergency call but he had heard that before also.
“Hippocrates!” he bellowed. And after a silence of two days the loudness and suddenness of this yell brought the little slave out of his galley as though shot from a gun.
Four-armed, antennaed and indestructible, little Hippocrates was not easily dismayed. But now he was certain that they were hard upon a dead star—nay, already struck.
“Master?”
“Hippocrates,” said Ole Doc, “we’ve only got two bottles of wine left!”
Hippocrates saw that the ship was running along on all drives, that the instrument panel, which he could see from where he stood in the passage, half a ship length forward from the salon, was burning green on all registers, that they were on standard speed and that, in short, all was well. He wiped a slight smear of mustard and gypsum from his mouth with a guilty hand—for his own supplies of the delicacy were so low that he had stolen some of Ole Doc’s plaster for casts.
“The formula for making wine,” began Hippocrates with his phonograph-recordwise mind, “consists of procuring grapes. The grapes are then smashed to relieve them of juice and the juice is strained and set aside to ferment. At the end of—”
“We don’t have any grapes,” said Ole Doc. “We don’t have any fuel. We have no food beyond ham and powdered eggs. All my shirts are in ribbons—”
“If you would stop writing on the cuffs,” said Hippocrates, “I might—”
“—and I have not been fishing for a year. See what’s on that tape. If it’s good fishing and if they grow grapes, we’ll land.”
Hippocrates knew something had been bothering him. It was the triple click of the recording receiver. Paper was coming out of it in a steady stream. Click, click, click. Emerg. Emerg. Emerg!
Ole Doc looked musingly at the Muses and slowly began to relax. That was a good satyr Joccini had done, even if it was uncomfortably like—
“United States Experimental Station on Gorgon, Beta Ursa Major,” said Hippocrates. “Direct call to UMS, master.” He looked abstractedly at the dark port beyond which the stars flew by. Through his mind was running the Star Pilot for Ursa Major. He never forgot anything, Hippocrates, and the eighteen thousand close-packed pages whirred by, stopped, turned back a leaf and then appeared in his mind. “It’s jungle and rivers. Wild game. Swamps.” And he brightened. “No women.”
“What?” said Ole Doc incuriously.
“Gorgon of Beta Ursa Major. Lots of fish. Lots of them. And wine. Lots of fish and wine.”
Ole Doc got up, stretched and went forward. He punched a pneumatic navigator and after divers whirs and hisses a light flashed on a screen giving him a new course departing from a point two light-years in advance of the reading. He could not turn any sooner. He settled himself under the familiar controls, disco
nnected the robot and yawned.
Two days later they were landing on Field 1,987,806 United States Army Engineers, Unmanned, half an hour’s jaunt from United States Experimental Station 3,002.
Ole Doc let Hippocrates slide the ladder out and stood for a moment in the air lock, black kit in hand. The jungle was about three hundred feet above the edges of the field, a wild and virulent jungle, dark green with avid growing and yellow with its rotting dead. For a little space there was complete silence while the chattering gusts of the landing jets echoed out and left utter stillness. And then the jungle came awake once more with screams and catcalls and a ground-shaking aa-um.
Hippocrates skittered back up the ladder. He stopped at the top. Again sounded the aa-um and the very plates of the old ship shook with it. Hippocrates went inside and came back with a 110-mm turret cannon cradled comfortably over his two right arms.
Ole Doc threw a switch which put an alpha force field around the ship to keep wild animals off and, with a final glance at the tumbled wrecks of buildings which had once housed a military post, descended the ladder and strolled after Hippocrates into the thick growth.
Now and then Hippocrates cocked an antenna at the towering branches overhead and stopped suspiciously. But he could see nothing threatening and he relieved his feelings occasionally by sending a big gout of fire from the 110 to sizzle them out a straight trail and calcine the mud to brick hardness.
Aa-um shook the jungle. And each time it sounded, the myriad of animal and bird noises fell still for a moment.
Hippocrates was about to send another shot ahead when Ole Doc stopped him. An instant later a gray-faced Irishman with wild welcome in his eyes broke through the sawtrees to clasp Ole Doc in emotional arms.
“I’m O’Hara. Thank God I got through. Receiver’s been out for six months. Didn’t know if I was getting a signal out. Thank God you’ve come!” And he closed for another embrace but Ole Doc forestalled him by calling attention to the aa-um which had just sounded once more.
“Oh, that!” said O’Hara. “That’s a catbeast. Big and worry enough when I’ve got time to worry about them. Oh, for the good old days when all I had to worry about was catbeasts getting my cattle, and mesohawks my sheep. But now—” And he started off ahead of them at a dead run, beckoning them to hasten after him.
They had two close calls from swooping birds as big as ancient bombers and almost took a header over a tree trunk ten feet through, which turned out to be a snake rising from the ooze with big, hungry teeth. But they arrived in a moment at the station all in one piece.
“You’ve got to understand,” panted O’Hara when he found Ole Doc wouldn’t run any faster, “that I’m the only man here. I have some Achnoids, of course, but you would not call those octopi company even if they can talk and do manual labor. But I’ve been here on Gorgon for fifteen years and I never had anything like this happen before. I am supposed to make this planet habitable in case Earth ever wants a colony planted. This is an agricultural and animal husbandry station. I’m supposed to make things easy for any future colonist. But no colonists have come so far and I don’t blame them. This savannah here is the coolest place on the planet and yet it’s hot enough. But I haven’t got an assistant or anyone and so when this happened—”
“Well, come on, man,” said Ole Doc. “What has happened?”
“You’ll see!” cried O’Hara, getting wild-eyed with excitement and concern once more. “Come along.”
They entered a compound which looked like a fortress. It sat squarely in the center of a huge grassy field, the better to have its animal targets in the open when they attacked and the better to graze its livestock. As they passed through the gate, O’Hara carefully closed it behind him.
Ole Doc looked incuriously at the long lines of sheds, at the helio motors above each and the corrals where fat cattle grazed. A greenhouse caught his interest because he saw that an Achnoid, who more closely resembled a blue pinwheel than a man, was weeding valuable medicinal herbs from out of, as Ole Doc saw it, worthless carrots. But O’Hara dragged him on through the noisy heat and dust of the place until they stood at Shed Thirteen.
“This is the lion shed,” said O’Hara.
“Interesting,” said Ole Doc disinterestedly.
O’Hara opened the door. A long row of vats lined each side of the passage and the sound of trickling fluid was soothing as it ran from one to the next. A maze of intricate glass tubing interconnected one vat to the next and a blank-beaked Achnoid was going around twiddling valves and reading temperatures.
“Hmmm,” said Ole Doc. “Artificial birthing vats.”
“Yes, yes. To be sure!” cried O’Hara in wild agreement, happy that he was getting some understanding. “That’s the way we get our stock. Earth sends me sperm and ova in static ray preservation and I put them into the vats and bring them to maturity. Then we take them out of the vats and put them on artificial udders and we have calves and lambs and such. But this is the lion shed.”
“The what?” said Ole Doc.
“For the lions,” said O’Hara. “We find that carefully selected and properly evoluted Earth lions kill catbeasts and several other kinds of vermin. I’ve got the deserts to the south of here crawling with lions and someday we’ll be rid of catbeasts.”
“And then you’ll have lions,” said Ole Doc.
“Oh no,” said O’Hara impatiently. “Then we’ll bacteriacide the lions with a plague. Which is to say, I will. There isn’t any we. I’ve been here for fifteen years—”
“Well, maybe you’ve been here for fifteen years,” said Ole Doc without much sympathy, “but why am I here?”
“Oh. It’s the last cargo. They send my stuff up here in tramps. Unreliable freight. Last year a tramp came in with a cargo for me and she had some kind of director trouble and had to jettison all her freight. Well, I didn’t have any stevedores and they just left it in the rain and the labels came off a lot of the boxes—”
“Ah!” said Ole Doc. “You want me to reclassify sperm—”
“No, no, no!” said O’Hara. “Some of these cargoes were intended for some other experimental stations I am sure. But I have no lading bills for the stuff. I don’t know. And I’m frantic! I—”
“Well, come down to it,” said Ole Doc. “WHAT is your problem?”
Dramatically O’Hara approached the first vat and gave the cover a yank. The pulleys creaked. Lights went on and the glass bowls within glowed.
In this one vat there were five human babies.
Ole Doc pushed the cover up further and looked. These babies were near the end of their gestation period and were, in other words, about ready to be born. They seemed to be all complete, hair, fingernails, with the proper number of fingers and toes, and they were obviously very comfortable.
“Well?” said Ole Doc, looking down at the endless rows of vats.
“All of them,” said O’Hara weakly.
“And they number—?” said Ole Doc.
“About eighteen thousand,” said O’Hara.
“Well, if THIS is your problem,” said Ole Doc, “I would suggest a hurry-up to the Department of Agriculture back on Earth. You need, evidently, half an army corps of nurses. But as for the problem of getting these babies—”
“Oh, that isn’t it!” said O’Hara. “You see, it’s these condemned Achnoids. They’re so confounded routine in everything they do. And I guess maybe it’s my fault, too, because there are so many details on this station that if one Earthman had to listen to them all and arrange them every day he would go crazy. So I guess I’m pretty humpy with them—the ambulating pinwheels! Well, this is the lion shed. We turn out eighteen thousand lions every three months, that being our charted gestation period. Then they go into the pits where they are fed by a facsimile lioness udder and finally they are booted out into the wilderness to go mop up catbeasts. All that is very simple. But these Achnoids—”
“When did you learn about this?”
“Oh, almost six
months ago. But I wasn’t terribly bothered. Not right then. I just sent a routine report through to Earth. But these Achnoids go right on with routine work unless something stops them. And the labels were all mixed up on that jettisoned shipment and they picked up phials marked with our code number for lions and dumped them into these vats. That’s their routine work in this department. That’s the only way we could ship cattle and such things, you see, because I don’t think you’d like to travel on a cattle spaceship, would you? And it would be expensive, what with the price of freight. And we need lots of stock. So to avoid shipping such things as these lions—”
“I’d think it was to be avoided,” said Ole Doc wryly.
“—we’ve developed a very highly specialized system of handling and marking. And evidently our codes aren’t identical with the codes at the intended destination of these babies. There’s an awful lot of paperwork comes off Earth about this sort of thing and frankly I didn’t even know they were shipping babies by this system. I went back through all my reports but I must have misfiled something because there isn’t anything on it which I’ve received. Well—”
“You said you messaged the department,” said Ole Doc.
“Oh, heck. You know government like it is these days. Earth has three billion inhabitants and one and three-quarters billion are working for the government and they still can’t keep up with the administration of colonies and stations in space.”
“One billion,” corrected Ole Doc.
“Well, one billion. And they still can’t get our work out. So they just said that the matter had been referred through the proper channels. Then I sent them a couple urgents and they still said it was being referred to proper channels. Maybe they forgot to dig those channels. Well, anyway, that isn’t what I’m getting at. By some means or other I may be able to devise ways of raising up these infants. I’ve got three thousand Achnoids and I can always take a hunting rifle and go grab a chief hostage until I get two or three thousand more. They train quick. I haven’t got any nurses and none in sight and I have no doctors and what I know about infant maladies is zero. But six months ago I figured I could pull through.”