Ole Doc Methuselah Part 23

He went outside and looked thoughtfully at the town below.

The beams were sufficient to carry jets of it far beyond the town limits and the winds would do more. To the east was a large expanse of greenhouse gla.s.s and a monocular told him it was surrounded by Persephon guards and a high, electrified fence. Common sense told him that rag- weed was grown there in large quant.i.ties.

"Well?" said Tinoi. "Ain't I ever going to get that drink?"

"You were right," said Ole Doc. "It's too strong. I'm satisfied. Let's go."

Tinoi grunted with relief and started down. Then he changed his mind and stood aside to let Ole Doc into the elevator first. But Tinoi went just the same. He went very inert with a beautiful uppercut to hoist him and lay him down against the far wall.

Ole Doc rubbed his gloved knuckles as he turned Tinoi over with his foot. The cranial structure told him much.

Tinoi had been born and bred in the slums of Earth.

"Ragweed," said Ole Doc. "Common, ordinary rag- weed. And the older a race gets the more it suffers from allergies. Tinoi, Connoly, Big Lem himself-Earthmen."

He was searching Tinoi's pockets now and he came up with a drug so ancient and common that at first he didn't recognize it and thought it was cocaine.

The a.n.a.lyser set him right.

"Benadryl!" said Ole Doc in amazement. "Ragweed, and here's benadryl. Earthman to begin with and not very susceptible. Benadryl to keep him going and to prevent a serious case of asthma. Air-asthma-oxygen for asthma, benadryl for asthma- But it can't be air in those bombs.

It wasn't benadryl."

He pushed "Bas.e.m.e.nt" and descended. The door opened on a storeroom guard. He took Tinoi's blaster and put a neat and silent hole through the Persephon guard who stood outside the bas.e.m.e.nt storeroom. The guard had alerted, had seen the body on the floor when the elevator opened and had not had time to shoot first. Ole Doc shot the lock off the storeroom door.

And it was there that he came afoul of another ancient custom.

A bell started ringing faintly somewhere in the upper regions of the building. For a moment he was not alarmed for he had safely bypa.s.sed all the offices in the elevator.

And then he saw a wire dangling, cut by the opened door.

An old-fas.h.i.+oned burglar alarm!

He grabbed up a black bomb with its A.L. lettering and sprinted for the elevator. But the door closed before he got there and the car went up without him, carrying Tinoi's unconscious message.

Ole Doc was shaken into the mistaken idea that this place was further guarded by gas for he began to sneeze.

Then he saw that his helmet was not sealed tight and hastily repaired it. Ragweed. He was sneezing from the solution of pollen which still stained his glove. A heavier dose would have left him gasping and as it was his eyes watered and he staggered as he fumbled for the stair door.

It crashed toward him and three Persephons leaped out of the areaway. It was not fair to them just as it had not been fair to their brothers that morning. Ole Doc gripped the searing-hot blaster, picked up the weapons of the first fallen one, stepped over the other two bodies and started on up the stairs. The top door was locked and he shot it open.

The clerks screamed and thrust back away from him for they saw murder in his old-young eyes.

Big Lem was frozen in his office entrance. The burglar alarm gonged clang-clang-clang with furious strength over them all.

"What's in this?" shouted Ole Doc, thrusting out the bomb.

"Put that gun down!" bawled Tolliver. "What the devil's wrong-"

Ole Doc heard in his keyed up phone the tiny whisper of leather above the clanging gong. He spun sideways and back and the shot intended for him fired the wood beside Big Lem Tolliver.

Connoly the gunner was ponderously wheeling for a second shot. Ole Doc snapped a quick one across his chest. Connoly's face vanished in a dirty black gout of smoke. He somersaulted backwards down the front steps and landed, dead but still writhing, in the midst of the slaves he had not had time to herd away and now would herd no more.

Ole Doc was still skipping backwards to avoid a coun- terattack by Big Lem. The elevator door clanged shut and Tolliver was gone.

Ole Doc headed for the stairs and took them four at a time, cloak billowing out behind him. He had wasted too much time already. But he couldn't leave this building until- They weren't on the second floor. Nor the third.

But the switch box for the elevator was. Ole Doc shat- tered its smooth gla.s.s with a shot and finished wrecking it with another. Voltage curled and writhed and smoke rose bluely.

That done he went on up with confidence. The only Persephons he found fled down a fire escape in terror. Ole Doc went on up. The roof door was barricaded and he shot it in half.

Big Lem Tolliver might have been the biggest man on Arphon but he didn't have the greatest courage. He was backing toward the "machine" and holding out his hands to fend off a shot as though they could.

"You're not playing fair!" he wailed. "You see the racket and you want it all. You're not playing fair! I'll make it halves-"

"You'll face around and let me search you for a gun,"

said Ole Doc. "And then we'll get about our business.

"You've violated-"

"You want it all!" wailed Tolliver, backing through the door of the dome. He tried to shut it quickly but Ole Doc blew the hinges off before it could close.

The shot was too close for Tolliver's nerves. He leaped away from it, he stumbled and fell into a vat.

He screamed and quickly tried to grab the edge and come out. Ole Doc stopped, put down the bomb and dropped a stirring stick to the man's rescue.

Tolliver grabbed it and came out dripping, clothes with green sc.u.m running off them, hanging ridiculously upon him. The man was trying to speak and then could not. He clawed at his eyes, he tried to yell. But with each breath he sucked in quant.i.ties of poison and his tortured skin began to flame red under the sc.u.m.

Ole Doc threw the bomb at his feet where it burst in bright green rays. He expected Tolliver to breathe then, wreathed in the climbing smoke. But Tolliver didn't. He fell down, inarticulate with agony and lack of breath and within the minute, before Ole Doc could find means of tearing the clothes from him and administering aid now that the "A.L." air bomb had not worked at all, Big Lem Tolliver was dead.

In the elevator Tinoi still lay struggling now to come up from his nightmare. When he saw Ole Doc standing over him, Tinoi's own gun in hand, the lieutenant of the late Air, Limited could not be convinced that any time had pa.s.sed. But he was not truculent, not when he saw Tolli- ver's body. He could not understand, never would under- stand the sequence of these rapid events. But Tolliver was dead and that broke Tinoi.

"What do you want with me?" he snivelled.

"I want you to set this place to rights eventually.

Meantime, shut off that confounded machine and come with me."

Tinoi shut it off and the ripples in the vats grew still.

Ole Doc hiked down the steps behind the cringing Tinoi and so into the main offices on the ground floor.

The clerks stared at the cringing Tinoi.

"You there," said Ole Doc. "In the name of the Univer- sal Medical Society, all operations of Air, Limited are ordered to cease. And find me this instant the whereabouts of Bestin Karjoy, extraracial being."

The clerks stared harder. One of them fell down in a faint.

"The Univ ... The Universal Medical Society ..."

gaped another. "The real one. I told him I thought he was a Soldier," whimpered the clerk who had first announced it. "When I read that article- Now I'll never get my weekly check-"

Ole Doc wasn't listening. He had Tinoi and another clerk by the collars and they were going down the steps, over the dead Connoly, through the moaning slaves and up the avenue at a rate which had Tinoi's feet half off the ground most of the way.

At ten thousand miles an hour, even freighted with her pa.s.sengers and the thousand Kilos of Bestin and his anten- nae-waving father, the gig did not take long to reach the injured Morgue.

Bestin's father was making heavy weather of trying to unload the bundles he had brought when the gig landed and Ole Doc hurriedly helped him. The old extraracial being hobbled on ahead into the operating room of the Morgue and then, when Ole Doc would have come up he found himself heavily barred outside by eight hands. The door clanged shut, didn't quite meet at the bottom, bent and was shut anyway.

Ole Doc stood outside in the trampled gra.s.s and stared at the Morgue. The girl on her stretcher was forgotten.