"h.e.l.lo Hippocrates, old friend," said 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 radio-tronic equipment there and get rid of all this worn out junk." 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 Hippoc- rates. 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 honours one Stephen Thomas Methridge as a physician in the year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Six Anno Domini.
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 Methuse- lah, 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 travelling on the ship"s reputation and that the poor old Morgue had but three or four gra.s.shopper power left in her gleaming, golden tubes.
This was annoying. Hippocrates said so and, waving his four short arms, repeated, phonograph-record-wise, a two hundred thousand word text on fuels and their necessity in s.p.a.ce travel. He repeated it so shrilly that Ole Doc in the pilot compartment unhooked every means of communica- tion 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 jet- tisoned most superst.i.tion and thus it had not been this which prevented him, though it well might have been.
Algol had a rotten reputation around the s.p.a.ce ports.
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
s.p.a.ce 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 flyer burned in the system, people began to recall her original reputa- tion 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-to a strong ruler who ate up the lesser ones and for the past three hundred and nineteen years had been getting along as a monarchy of six planetic states governed from Dorcon. It said in the book that there were s.p.a.ceship 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 remem- bering that somehow Ole Doc had never thought again about examinations but had succ.u.mbed 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 c.o.c.kpit turned at right angles to ease the deceleration of the last few hundred miles and then there was a slight b.u.mp. 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 them- selves, displaying a green expanse of field, a surrounding regiment of trees and the plastic towers of a city beyond.
But the instruments were not yet through. The a.n.a.lyser came out, a square ma.s.sed solid in red and green bulbs which recorded the presence of anything harmful, unnatu- ral or hostile. And while it said green to atmosphere, gravity, vegetation, food, habitations, the weather, storms, the surface temperature, the sub-surface temperature, radio- active 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 take-off."
Ole Doc owed his continued presence in the flesh to a certain superst.i.tion 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 chemi- cal and go elsewhere nearby when Hippocrates thrust his outraged antennae into the comportment.
" ". . . momentary inattention to fissure temperatures may result in ionization of farundium particles and conse- quent-" "
"STOP IT!" said Ole Doc.
Hippocrates stopped. But not because he was told. He was reading "Relatively unsafe. Recommend take-off." This gave him an impa.s.se 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 beauti- fully designed, done by Siraglio shortly after the turn of the century, panelled in gold and obsidian and exquisitely muraled with an infinity of feasting scenes which, togeth- er, 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 co-operate.
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 most- ly 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 gra.s.s, 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 my- self, 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 sensi- tivities 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 medi- cal 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, prompt- ly brought himself to the sub-surface 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 electrical- ly belled every few yards to warn of its breaking. And overseeing them was not the usual super-educated 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 toss-up 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 occasion- ally 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 stalk, both bearing the brands of prisons on their faces.
"He ain"t got a chain," said Eddy.