Ole Doc Methuselah Part 17

She was slight, but strong enough to bear this iron. She was curved just so and thus. And her eyes and nose and mouth made a triangle, just. . . well, and her hair flowed back and down her back.

Ole Doc sat up and the pipe dropped unheeded to the ground. He looked harder. The lines before and behind her vanished. The guards vanished. The gra.s.s, the sun- light, all Arphon vanished. And there was this girl. Ole Doc stood up and his knees wobbled a little which was odd because Ole Doc was in a physical recondition far superior to most men of twenty-five.

She saw him and for an instant, as she looked and he looked broke her stride. The slave behind her was old and stumbled. The slave ahead was jerked back by his collar.

The Persephon humanoid whirled off the screen he had just b.u.mped and came around to see the tangle. And down came his bra.s.s rod.

It never touched the young lady. Ole Doc had not prac- tised drawing and hip shooting for about four hundred years but his hand had not forgotten. That Persephon humanoid sort of exploded into a mist. His arm flew up sixty yards, turned at the top and came down with a thump on the Morgue's screen where it lay, dripping, suspended in air. The guard's blaster belt went off after an instant like a chain of small cannons and blew tufts of gra.s.s in the air. The hole smoked and the other guards came up sharply, gaped and as one faced about with guns drawn looking for their quarry.

It was not quite fair. Ole Doc was out of the screen where he could shoot without deflection and he was shoot- ing. And even if he was a fine target it was still not sporting. He had five Persephons only to shoot at him and then there was four, three, two, none. And patches of gra.s.s smoked and there was silence. A final belt cartridge exploded in a hole and there was silence again.

The Persephons never knew that they had had the honor of being shot by a Galactic Medalist in short arms.

The slaves stood still and s.h.i.+vered. A wild one had pinked an old woman at the end of the column and she was sitting down staring at her own blood. The rest were gazing miserably at this new menace who had risen up from the tall gra.s.s. Ole Doc found he was shaking with the excitement and he disliked finding it so for he had often told himself that one should never get a thrill out of killing, that being a barbarous sort of joy and besides at the end there it had been but five to one. He picked up his fallen pipe, jammed it into his mouth and took a drag.

The slaves screamed and fell back from this smoking monster, the tobacco habit having been extinct most ev- erywhere for hundreds of years.

Hippocrates grunted with disgust. He had not been able to more than slew the 600 mm. into position and had not had the satisfaction of shooting even one round.

He came out. Shrilly shrewish he said: "You ought to know better. I have told you and told you and told you and you ought to know better. You'll get hurt. I've said you'll get hurt and you will. You leave that to the bravos and buckos. It says right in your code that "Whosoever shall kill large numbers of people solely for satisfaction shall be given a hearing and shall be fined a week's pay, it being the mission of this Society to preserve mankind in the galaxy-'" He brought up short. His terror for Ole Doc had brought him into an error of quoting the Parody Code. It actually said "... kill large numbers for experi- mentation shall . . ." This fussed him so that he shut oft the force screens and came down and would have carried Ole Doc straight back into the s.h.i.+p for a takeoff had not his revered master been staring so hard, pipe again forgot- ten.

Hippocrates took the pipe. He looked for the objection.

He knocked out the bowl. He looked again, more wonder in his antennae waves, and slyly broke the pipe to bits.

Still no objection. Hippocrates poured out the contents of the pouch and heaved bits and leather as far as his very powerful arms could throw. Still no objection. Hippocrates walked all the way around Ole Doc and stared at him. His master was staring at the line of slaves.

No, at the center of the line. And someone there was staring as though hypnotized.

"Oh," moaned Hippocrates, seeing plenty of trouble. "A girl!"

Now it was no plan of Ole Doc's to inspect Arphon of Sun12. He was on his leisurely way to hand a deposition warrant to a System Chief over in Sub-Rim 18, 526, that worthy having failed to respect Section 8, Paragraph 918 of Code 94 of the Universal Medical Society. And if Arphon has slaves like this, it was theoretically none of his medical business.

But she was staring at him.

He flushed a little and looked down. But he was caped in gold and belted in scarlet with metal wings on his yellow boots and was decent.

Hippocrates sighed with the depth of resignation. He went over and chopped the girl out of the line with a simple twist of the iron links, bare-handed. Then he set her bodily to one side and to the rest made pus.h.i.+ng motions with his hands.

"Shoo! Shoo!" said Hippocrates. "You are free. Go!"

"Nonsense," said the girl in a voice which made tingles go up and down Ole Doc's spine. "How can they go anywhere? They have no money to pay the air tax."

"The air-" Hippocrates gaped at her. She was just a human being to him. Personally he liked machines. "Non- sense yourself. The air's here and the air's free. Shoo!

SHOO! You stay," he added over one of his shoulders to the girl. "Shoo!"

And the slaves sank down and began to inch forward on their knees to the little slave. "No, no," they cried.

"We cannot pay the tax. We have sickened already in our homes when the air was shut off. We cannot pay. We are repossessed and on our way to remarketing. Don't send us away! Help us! Money, money! You pay our tax and we will work-!"

"Master!" cried Hippocrates, scuttling back. For there were definite limits on his skills and when these were reached he had but one G.o.d. "Master!"

But the slaves just came on, inching forward on their knees, hands pitifully upraised, begging and whining and Hippocrates fell hastily back again.

"Air, air. Buy us air! You pay our tax. Don't send us away!"

"MASTER!".

Ole Doc paid no heed to his slave now behind him, to the pathetic cries, to the creeping throng or to anything

else on Arphon for that matter. He was still staring at the girl and now she blushed and pulled the rags of a robe around her.

That did it. "Put her in the s.h.i.+p!" said Ole Doc. "The rest of you get out of here. Go back to your homes! Beat it!" But this relapse into the vernacular of his youth had no effect on the crowd. They had crept forward, leaving flattened gra.s.s behind them.

Suddenly an old man with a ragged grey stubble and thin chest caught at his throat, rose up and with a wild scream cried, "Air! Air! Oh-" And down he went, full length into the gra.s.s. Two others shortly did the same thing.

Ole Doc sniffed alertly. He looked at his third cloak b.u.t.ton but it was still gold and so the atmosphere was all right. He sniffed again. "Test for air," he said to Hippoc- rates.

The little fellow leaped gladly into the Morgue and in his testing brought visibility back to the s.h.i.+p. He saw, through the port, that this startled half a dozen of the slaves out there into fits and the fact made him feel very superior. He, master of machinery, tested for the ah*. And it was good.

Ole Doc pulled down his helmet to cover his face and walked forward. He rolled over the senseless antique of sixty-five winters and examined him for anything discover- able.

He examined several more and from the eighth, who just that instant was half blind with airlessness and the flash of Ole Doc's U.M.S. gorget, flicked out a specimen of spittle and pa.s.sed it to Hippocrates.

"Culture it," said Ole Doc.

"Negative," said Hippocrates six minutes later, still carrying 'scope and speed culture flask. "Bacteriologically negative."

"Air!" screamed the old man, reviving. And an instant later She went down on her face and didn't move.

Ole Doc had her in the s.h.i.+p in about ten seconds.

Hippocrates threw a force cordon around the rest and four-handedly went through them spraying a sterilizer all over them with two hands and breaking their chains apart with the remaining sets of fingers.

"Sir!" they whined and gasped. "Air, air, air!"

Ole Doc looked sadly down at the girl on the table. She

was fragile and lovely, stretched there on the whiteness of the Morgue's operating room. She was in odd contrast to all these brilliant tubes and trays, these glittering rods and merciless meters. Ole Doc sighed and then shook off the trance and became a professional.

"There's such a thing as malnutrition," he said to Hip- pocrates. "But I never heard of mal-oxygenation. Her chest- Here, what's this?"

The tag had been clipped solidly through her ear and it read, "Property of Air, Limited. Repossessed Juduary 43rd, '53. By order of Lem Tolliver, President, Air Lim- ited."

That offended Ole Doc for some reason. He tore it off and put a heal compress on the small, handsome ear. When he removed it five seconds later there were no scars.

Ole Doc read the tag again and then angrily stamped it under foot. He turned to his job and shortly had a mask on the girl which fed her oxygen in proper pulsations and gave her a little ammonia and psi-ionized air in the bar- gain.

He was just beginning to take satisfaction in the way her lovely eyes were flickering as she came around when Hippocrates leaped in, excited.

"s.h.i.+p landing!" blurted the little fellow. "Guns ready.

Tell me when to shoot."

"Whoa," said Ole Doc. "Force screen them off until you see what they are at least. Now, there you are, my dear."