“Quite,” smiled Ole Doc. “A hoax!”
“Well, better be getting on.” And they left, courteously and rather humbly refusing refreshment.
It was a very staggered little slave who watched them go. The small boy lingered and gazed at the ship as though trying to put a finger on something in his mind. He was a very adventurous boy, exactly the same that had scaled the ship the night before. He frowned, puzzled.
“Man child,” said Hippocrates, “do you recall a riot?”
The little boy shook his head. “I . . . I kind of forget. Everybody seems to think maybe there should have been one. . . .”
“Do you remember anybody named Blanchard getting killed?” thrust Hippocrates, producing a cake mystically from the pantry behind him.
“Oh, he didn’t get killed. Everybody knows that. He ran away when Mr. Elston came.”
“You remember a Soldier of Light addressing a crowd last night?”
“What? Did he?”
“No,” said Hippocrates, firmly. “He was not out of this ship all day yesterday nor last night either.” And he tossed down the cake which was avidly seized.
Hippocrates stomped back into the salon.
He did not know what he expected to find, but certainly not such normality. Ole Doc was playing a record about a fiddler of Saphi who fiddled for a crown and, while humming the air, was contentedly filling up a cuff with a number of calculations.
With a gruff voice, Hippocrates said, “You poured powder in the water to make everyone forget, to be angry and then forget. And it’s worn off. Nobody remembers anything. Mr. Elston and Alicia have promised not to speak. I see it. But you should have told me. I worried for you. You should have told me! Nobody will ever know and I was sick with what would happen!”
Ole Doc, between hums, was saying, “Now with the twenty thousand that I got back, and with what is in the safe, I have just enough to cruise to . . . da, dum, de da . . . yes. Yes, by Georgette, I shall!” He threw down the pencil and got up, smiling.
“Hello, Hippocrates, old friend,” said Ole Doc, just noticing him. “And how are you this wonderful noon? What will you fix me for lunch? Make it good, now, and no wine. We’re taking off right away for Saphi. We’re going to buy us a complete new set of raditronic equipment there and get rid of all this worn-out junk. Why . . .” he stopped, staring. “Why, you’re crying!”
Hippocrates bellowed, “I am not!” and hurriedly began to clear the table to spread out the finest lunch ever set before the finest master of the happiest and most won-back slave in the galaxy. In a moment or two, exactly imitating the record which had stopped, he was singing the “Fiddler of Saphi,” the happiest he had been in a very, very long time.
During lunch, while he shoved new dishes about on their golden plates, Hippocrates took a moment to glance, as a well-informed slave should, at the certificate which had made that horrible, detestable woman so gratifyingly scared.
The aged, carefully coated and preserved parchment—brown and spotted with mildew from some ancient time even so—surrendered very little information to Hippocrates. It merely said that the University of Johns Hopkins on some planet named Baltimore in a system called Maryland—wherever that might be—did hereby graduate with full honors one Stephen Thomas Methridge as a physician in the year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Six.
Even if this was seven hundred years ago that Ole Doc first learned his trade, what of that? He knew more than any doctor graduated in the best school they had today.
Well, good riddance, though just why she should so disapprove of that school was more than Hippocrates could figure out.
He sang about the fiddler of Saphi and forgot it in the happy scramble of departure.
Her Majesty’s Aberration
There is a slight disadvantage in being absent-minded. It was this regrettable failing which took Ole Doc Methuselah, highly respected member of the Universal Medical Society, some forty-five light-years out of his way and caused him to land in the Algol System on the planet Dorcon.
Hippocrates had asked him, pointedly and repeatedly, if they had taken aboard a new pile at Spico and Ole Doc had answered him abstractedly in the affirmative. But it developed, some ninety light-years out, that they were traveling on the ship’s reputation and that the poor old Morgue had but three or four grasshopper-power left in her gleaming golden tubes.
This was annoying. Hippocrates said so and, waving his four short arms, repeated, phonograph-recordwise, a two-hundred-thousand-word text on fuels and their necessity in space travel. He repeated it in fact so shrilly that Ole Doc in the pilot compartment unhooked every means of communication with the operating room, where Hippocrates was delivering his secondhand oration, and then used inertia converters to get down, somehow, into the Algol System.
He had never been there before, which was odd because it was not too distant from Earth—on the same side of the Earth Galactic Wheel, in fact. He had heard several things about it, now and then, for a man hears quite a bit when he has lived some seven hundred and fifty years. Somewhere near the beginning of that span he had jettisoned most superstition and thus it had not been this which prevented him, though it well might have been.
Algol had a rotten reputation around the spaceports. For some thousands of years men had been looking at it and shuddering only because it winked every three days. They called it the “Evil Eye” and the “Demon Star” and so deep was the feeling that for a century or more after space travel and colonization had begun, people had left Algol alone, not even informing themselves if she had planets.
The wise knew she was a dark star rotating around a bright one, which accounted for her being a variable, but when an expedition crashed on one of her planets, when the first colony vanished, when a transgalactic flier burned in the system, people began to recall her original reputation and shun her. That, of course, made her an excellent pirate base and all six of her variously inhabitable planets were soon messed about with blood and broken loot.
“As is natural in such evolutions, she ultimately gave birth”—it said in the United Planets Vacugraphic Office Star Pilot which Ole Doc was reading on his knees (still holding the buttons down on his creature Hippocrates)—“to a strong ruler who ate up the lesser ones and for the past three hundred and nineteen years has been getting along as a monarchy of six planetic states governed from Dorcon.” It said in the book that “there are spaceship ways and limited repair facilities, fuel and supplies to be had at Ringo, Dorcon’s chief city.” Certainly they would have so small a thing as a pile there.
Ole Doc started to open the switch to tell Hippocrates where they were going but received a flood instead:
“‘The manual circuits must be supplied by auxiliary hanbits of torque-compensated valadium. Five erg seconds of injected . . .”’
Plainly Hippocrates was not pleased. Ole Doc laughed uncomfortably. He had picked the weird little creature up at an auction a century back, meaning to examine his metabolism, which was gypsum, but the gnome had been so willing and his brain was so accurately gauged to remembering that somehow Ole Doc had never thought again about examinations but had succumbed to these deluges of being informed.
A gong rang. A whistle blew. A big plate before him began to flick-flick-flick as it displayed likely landing spots one after another. A metal finger jutted suddenly from the gravity meter and touched off the proximity coil. The ship went on to chemical brakes. The cockpit turned at right angles to ease the deceleration of the last few hundred miles and then there was a slight bump. The Morgue had sat down. There was a clang inside as her safety doors slid open again, a tinkle of ladders dropping and a click-click-click as instruments dusted themselves and put themselves out of sight in the bulkheads.
Ole Doc unbuckled his crash helmet and stood up, stretching. The port guards were sliding open of themselves, displaying a green expanse of field, a surrounding regiment of trees and the plastic towers of a city beyond.
But the instru
ments were not yet through. The analyzer came out, a square massed solid in red and green bulbs which recorded the presence of anything harmful, unnatural or hostile. And while it said green to atmosphere, gravity, vegetation, food, habitations, the weather, storms, the surface temperature, the subsurface temperature, radioactive presences and a thousand others, it said red-red-red to soldiers, weapons, dead men, women and hostility. The strip at the bottom of the board read “Relatively unsafe. Recommend takeoff.”
Ole Doc owed his continued presence in the flesh to a certain superstition about instruments. If they were there they should be observed, and if they gave advice it should be taken. And he was about to take off on chemical and go elsewhere nearby when Hippocrates thrust his outraged antennae into the compartment.
“‘. . . momentary inattention to fissure temperatures may result in ionization of farundium particles and consequent . . .”’
“STOP IT!” said Ole Doc.
Hippocrates stopped it. But not because he was told. He was reading “Relatively unsafe. Recommend takeoff.” This gave him an impasse and while his dissertation struggled fiercely with this check, Ole Doc dropped down into his dining salon and drank the milk which waited there for him.
The ports were all open there, for the salon was beautifully designed, done by Siraglio shortly after the turn of the century, paneled in gold and obsidian and exquisitely muraled with an infinity of feasting scenes which, together, blended into a large star map of the Earth galaxy as it had been known in his time. The ports were so designed as to permit scenery to become a portion of the mural without ruining it. But in this case the scenery did not cooperate.
Six hundred and nineteen dead men swung from the limbs of the landing field trees. They were in uniforms bleached by suns and snows and their features were mostly ragged teeth and yellow bone. The blasts of the Morgue’s landing had made a wind in which they swung, idly, indolently, as though in their timeless way they waltzed and spun to an unheard dirge.
Ole Doc set down the milk. He looked from flowering beds, well-groomed grass, splendid walks, back to the hanging dead.
“Hippocrates!”
The gnome was there instantly, all five hundred kilos of him.
“Stand by the ship. If anyone approaches her but myself, turn on Force Screen Alpha. Keep in communication with me and the ship in readiness to blast. Questions?”
Hippocrates was too thwarted to reply and Ole Doc changed into a golden tunic, threw a sun-fiber cloak about his shoulders, buckled twin blasters around his waist and stepped down the ladder to the ground.
A man develops, after a few score years, certain sensitivities which are not necessarily recognized as senses. Carrying on the business of the Universal Medical Society was apt to quicken them. For though the members of the society possessed amongst them the monopoly of all medical knowledge forbidden by the various systems and states, and although they had no sovereign and were inviolate, things happen. Yes, things happen. More than a hundred ebony coffins lay in the little chapel of their far-off base—Soldiers of Light who had come home forever.
He directed, therefore, his entire energy to getting a pile and escaping Ringo within the hour if possible. And, guided by the sound of repair arcs and hammers, promptly brought himself to the subsurface shops beside the hangars of the field.
And at the door he halted in stupefied amazement.
There were ten or twelve mechanics there and they did mechanics’ work. But they were shackled one to the next by long, tangling strands of plastiron which was electrically belled every few yards to warn of its breaking. And overseeing them was not the usual supereducated artisan-engineer but a dough-faced guard of bovine attention to the surroundings.
Ole Doc would have backed out to look for the supply office, but the guard instantly hailed him.
“Stand where you be, you!” He advanced, machine blaster at ready and finger on trigger. “Hey, Eddy! Sound it!” A gong struck hysterically somewhere in the dark metallic depths of the place.
It was a tossup whether Ole Doc drew and fired or stood and explained. But an instant later a barrel was digging a hole in his back.
Now if the President of the Vega Confederation had been so greeted by his lackey, he could not have been more amazed than Ole Doc. For though he was occasionally offered violence, he was almost never accosted in terms of ignorance. For who did not know of the Soldiers of Light, the Ageless Ones who ordered kings?
This pair, obviously.
They were animals, nothing more. Mongrels of Earth and Scorpon stock, both bearing the brands of prisons on their faces.
“He ain’t got a chain,” said Eddy.
“Must’ve landed,” hazarded the guard, straining his intellect.
“If you will please—” began Ole Doc.
“They’ll be here in a minute, bud,” said Eddy, planting his thick boots squarely in Ole Doc’s path. He reeked of Old Space Ranger and was obviously a victim of an unmentionable illness.
They were there in less than that. An entire squad-sled of them, complete with dirty uniforms, unshaven faces, yellow eyes and shiny weapons.
“Get in, pal,” said Eddy, disarming Ole Doc with a yank.
“Ain’t he pretty, though,” said a young corporal.
“Get in!” insisted Eddy.
Ole Doc saw no sense in a chance killing. It was not that serious yet. People weren’t entirely stupid on Dorcon. They couldn’t be!
He mounted the sled which promptly soared off toward the city, ten feet above the ground and traveling erratically. In the glimpse he had of the blue green pavements and yellow houses of the suburbs, Ole Doc was aware of neglect and misery. A number of these inhabitants were evidently of Mongolian origin for the architecture had that atmosphere, but now the once-gay pagodas looked more like tombs, their walled gardens gone to ruin, their stunted trees straggling out from broken bonds. The desolation was heightened by the hobbling gait of a few ancient inhabitants who dodged in fear below the sled. It shocked Ole Doc to see that each was chained to a round ball.
The sled swept on toward the blue towers, but as it neared, the first illusion of palace gave way to a gray atmosphere of prison. For the government buildings were all enclosed within many walls, each complete in its defenses, each manned like some penitentiary on Earth. Here was prison within prison within prison. Or defense within defense within defense. And the central portion, instead of being a courtyard and keep, was a metal-roofed dome, wholly bombproof.
But the sled had no business within. It bounced to a landing outside the guardhouse of the first walls and there Ole Doc was thrust into the presence of a dissolute young man.
Tunic collar unbuttoned to show a dirty neck, greasy hair awry, he sat with heels amongst the glasses and bottles on his desk. Obviously he was of that decayed school which thought that to be dashing one must be drunk.
“Where’s identity card?” he hiccoughed.
Ole Doc, naturally, had no such thing. But the rayed gold medallion around his neck was a passport to the greatest kingdoms in the universe.
“What’s that?” said the young officer.
“My identification,” said Ole Doc. “I am a member of the Universal Medical Society.”
“The what?”
“I am a physician,” said Ole Doc patiently.
The young man thereupon altered. He looked bright and interested. He brought his feet down off the desk, upsetting several glasses and bottles, and snatched up an antique gadget Ole Doc recognized dimly as a telephone.
“I got a doctor out here, Sir Pudno. How do you like that, huh? . . . Sure he looks like one. Why do you think I’d say so? . . . Okay, Sir Pudno. Right away.”
In the wake of the reeling young officer Ole Doc was then delivered through eighteen separate ramparts, each gated, each guarded, until he came at last to a stairway which led underground. The officer having navigated this without falling, Ole Doc was ushered—or rather shoved—into a chamber done in blue silk, a particular
ly gloomy place which had for furniture but one bed and one chair.
Sir Pudno was getting out of bed. He was a flabby, fat Mongolian of no definite features. He rolled himself up in a food-spattered dressing gown, sat soddenly in the chair and stared at Ole Doc.
“You really a doctor, Mac?” said Sir Pudno.
“I am. If you have someone to be treated, I shall be happy to oblige you. However, there is a matter of a pile I need. I landed here—”
“Clam it, Mac,” said Sir Pudno. “We’ll go right up to Her Majesty.”
He tucked his fat into a seam-strained uniform and then Ole Doc was thrust after him into a chamber which was more like a powder magazine than a throne room. It was huge and once it had been pretty. But all the murals and mirrors had been removed and in their places were sheets of steel. No sunlight entered here and the pale blue gleam of lamps thickened the gloom.
The dais was thickly curtained and into the curtains had been set the kind of glass which admits light and therefore sight only one way. Someone or something sat behind on a throne.
Sir Pudno saluted and bowed. “Your Majesty, by great good luck I’ve been able to get a doctor up here.”
“At how much cut of his fee?” said the person behind the curtain. The voice was rasping. Her Majesty was in no good mood.
“There’s been no conversation of fee, Your Majesty,” said Ole Doc. “Nor has there been any talk of services. I am a member of the Universal Medical Society and must not be detained. If you have a patient, I will do what I can without fee other than a pile for my ship. I repeat that I must not be delayed.”
“He talks like he thinks he’s somebody,” said the person behind the curtains. “Well, show him the young fool. And remember this, you. Cure him but not too well. What did you say you were a member of?”
“The Universal Medical Society,” said Ole Doc. “We do not like governments which detain our members.”