Ole Doc Methuselah Part 43

"Neither do I," said Ole Doc. "Have you got any force screen protection?"

"No. Why should I have? Who'd want to trouble an experimental station? We haven't got anything, not even money."

"No screen," said Ole Doc. "Then we may have to work fast. Can you arm these Achnoids?"

"No! And my only weapon is a hunting rifle and a sidearm. I haven't got anything."

"Hippocrates," said Ole Doc, "dismount two turrets and have them set in towers here. They won't do much but they'll stop an attack from land. And, if I'm right, that's all we have to fear."

Hippocrates looked helplessly around for a place to put down the half ton of equipment he was lugging like a mountain above him.

"Just drop it," said Ole Doc. "We're making a lab right here on the porch where it's cool."

O'Hara suddenly flamed brightly. "You mean," he cried in sudden hope, "that you're going to help me? You mean it?"

Ole Doc paid him no attention. He was already fis.h.i.+ng in the pile of equipment for a portable ultraelectron mi- croscope and a box of slides. He put them on the table.

"Have somebody start bringing me phials out of that preservation room. One sample from every box you've got!"

In the many, many weeks which followed there was no wine, there was only work. And over Ole Doc hung two intelligences which made him very sceptical of his chances of getting out of this one alive. First was the fact that something or somebody had now supercharged the planet's ionosphere thoroughly enough to damp every outgoing and incoming message and as Ole Doc's last reported

whereabouts was many a light-year from Gorgon, the chances of any relief were slender to the vanis.h.i.+ng point- for a search party would have to look over at least a hundred planets and a nearly infinite cube of sky. Second was the sporadic presence of a silver dot in the sky, the battle cruiser, out of range, unfriendly, waiting. Waiting for what?

"I guess this is a pretty tight spot," grinned Hippoc- rates, all four arms deep in research a.s.sistance. "In 'Tales of the Early s.p.a.ce Pioneers'-"

"Condemn the early s.p.a.ce pioneers," said Ole Doc, his eyes aching and his back cricked with weeks of this constant peering. "Give me another phial."

They had made some progress along one line. Ole Doc had taken tune off to make sure he could communicate with the "infants terrible" who swarmed now, thirty-eight thousand of them, in the lion and horse pens. He had concocted a series of two thousand slides, based on the methods used for teaching alien intelligences lingua s.p.a.cia, except he was teaching English. Asleep and awake, the horde of precocious "babies" were confronted by project- ed pictures and dinned with explanation. The projectors had to be renewed every few days when some enthusiastic kid bunged a slingshot pebble into it. But they couldn't hurt the screens. Those were simply the concrete walls. So w.i.l.l.y-nilly, they learned "horse" and "cow" and "man" and "I am hungry" and "How far is it to the nearest post office?"

It was not safe to approach the pens now unless one wanted a short trip to eternity. But Ole Doc, with a force screen, managed occasional inspections. And on these he was jeered with singsong English, phrases such as, "Go soak your head. Go soak your head. Go soak your head,"

which, when squalled from a few thousand throats, was apt to give one, if not a soaked head, at least a headache.

On the very first day he had built five gestation vats in the bungalow and had started two females and three males on their way. And all but two of these now born, had been hurriedly taken down to the main herd before they got ideas about mayhem. The remaining pair, a boy and a girl, remained in the iron cages on the porch while Hippocrates took notes on their behavior. The notes were not flattering but they were informative.

When two months had pa.s.sed after the birth of the experimental five from the vats, the three, properly

tagged, in the lion pens and horse pens, had learned to use a small sling. But the two on the porch had not.

Ole Doc's notebook was getting crammed with facts.

And now and then he saw a glimmer of knowledge about them. He had ruled out several things, amongst them the unusual radiations which might be present, but weren't, on Gorgon. Next he had crossed off machinery radiation and fluid activity.

And then, on this afternoon, little Hippocrates saw him squint, stand up and thoughtfully snap a slide into small bits.

"Maybe solution?" said Hippocrates and O'Hara in dif- ferent ways but almost in the same instant.

Ole Doc didn't hear them. He turned to the racks of paraphernalia and began to drag down several bottles which he began to treat with pharmaceutical rayrods.

"You maybe poison the whole batch?" said Hippocrates hopefully.

Ole Doc didn't pay him any heed. He ordered up several flasks and put his weird stew into them and then he drew a sketch.

"Make a catapult like this," said Ole Doc. "One on every corner of the pens. That's eight. With eight flasks, one for each. Trigger them with a magnet against this remote condenser so that when it is pushed, off they go into the compounds."

"And everybody dies?" said Hippocrates expectantly, thoughtful of the bruises he had had wrestling these "ba- bies."

"Rig them up," said Ole Doc. "Because the rest of this is going to take another day or two."

"What's the sudden rush?" said O'Hara.

Ole Doc jerked a thumb at the sky. "They were about a hundred miles lower today."

"They were?" said O'Hara anxiously. "I didn't see them."

"You missed a lot of things," said Ole Doc dryly. And he picked up a bundle of rayrods and began to sort them.

He took a look into the yard and saw a chicken contentedly pecking at the dirt.

"Bring me that," he said. "By the way, where's Mookah?"

O'Hara looked around as though expecting the overseer to be right behind him. Then, suddenly, "Say, he hasn't been around for three days. He's supposed to make his

report at two o'clock every afternoon and that's an hour ago."

"Uhuh," said Ole Doc.

"Golly, no wonder you guys live so long," said O'Hara.

He climbed off the porch and came back with the chicken.

Ole Doc took the bird, pointed a rod at it and the chicken flopped over on its side, dead. Presently it was under a belljar with more rays playing on it. And then before the astonished gaze of O'Hara the chicken began to change form. The feathers vanished, the shape vanished and within ten minutes there was nothing under the jar but a blob of cellular matter. Ole Doc grunted in satisfac- tion and tipped the ma.s.s into a huge graduate. He stuffed a rayrod into the middle of the ma.s.s and left it.

"Another chicken," he said.

O'Hara closed his mouth and ran into the yard to scoop up another one. It squawked and beat its wings until a rayrod was aimed at it. Then, like its relative, it went under the belljar, became jellylike, turned into a translu- cent ma.s.s and got dumped into another graduate.

Five chickens later there were seven graduates full of cells, each with a different kind of rayrod sticking out.

"Now," said Ole Doc, "we take that first baby. The boy."

O'Hara repressed a shudder. He knew that medicine could not make scruples when emergency was present, but there was something about putting a baby, a live, cooing little baby-if a trifle energetic-under a belljar and knocking it into a shapeless nothingness. But at that in- stant a howl sounded from the pens and O'Hara was happy to a.s.sist the now returned Hippocrates in slapping the vigorous infant on the face of the operating table.

O'Hara expected to see the belljar come down and a rayrod go to work. He was somewhat astonished when Ole Doc began to strap the baby to the board and he began to fear that it was going to be a knife job.

But Ole Doc didn't reach for a scalpel. He picked up a big hypo syringe, fitted an antisepticizing needle to it and took two or three cells out of the first graduate. He checked it and then turned to the child.

He made a pa.s.s with a glowing b.u.t.ton and then plunged the needle into the baby's spine. He withdrew it and made a second pa.s.s with the b.u.t.ton. Rapidly, in six separate places, he injected cells into the infant anatomy. And then

O'Hara's eyes bulged and he went a little sick. For the seventh shot was rammed straight into the child's eye and deep into its brain.

Ole Doc pulled out the needle, made a pa.s.s with the b.u.t.ton again, and stood back. O'Hara expected a dead baby. After all it had had needles stuck in the back of its head, its spine, its heart and its brain. But the baby cooed and went to sleep.