Ole Doc Methuselah Part 38

"What is all this, master?"

Ole Doc ranged his puffy eyes over the equipment.

"Busted experiment," he said.

"What experiment, master?"

"That condemned cuff note!" said Ole Doc, a little peevish. "It sounded so good when I was working on it fifty or sixty years ago. If you could just calculate the harmonic of memory retention, you could listen to what- ever a dead man had been told. But," he added with a sigh, "it doesn't work."

"But what's this record then."

"Fake. Bait to get Lebel to the door."

"You want this junk?"

"Let it lie," said Ole Doc. "There's a silly girl around here we'll have to gather up and we've got a lot of

psychotherapy to attend to where we can find anyone left alive and I've got a dispatch to send Center to tell them the state of this endowment. We've got to get busy."

"What about this?" said Hippocrates, touching Lebel with a toe.

"That?" said Ole Doc. "Well, I really don't know yet. I think I'll try him for the next couple months from time to time and then sentence him to death and then reprieve him."

"Reprieve?" gaped Hippocrates.

"So that the survivors can try him," said Ole Doc.

"Then I'll pardon him and send him to Hub City to be tried."

"Drive him mad," said Hippocrates practically.

Ole Doc swished his cloak over his shoulder. "Let's get out and get busy."

Hippocrates bounced to the door and cleared it impor- tantly.

But Ole Doc didn't pa.s.s on through. "Hippocrates, why on earth did you burn up those cuffs?"

"They didn't seem very important to me when I read,"

said Hippocrates, hang-dog instantly.

Ole Doc gaped. "When you read ... you mean you read all of them?"

"Yes, master."

Ole Doc laughed suddenly and laughed loudly. "If you read them, you remember them, then!"

"Yes, Master!"

"But why didn't you say so?"

"I thought you just mad because I not file right. You didn't ask me."

Ole Doc laughed again. "Well, no loss at all then. Some of the notes may work despite this fiasco today. Hippoc- rates, when I bought you at that auction a few hundred years back, I think I made the soundest investment of my life. Let's go."

Hippocrates stared. He almost staggered. And then he grew at least another half meter in height. He went out into the corridor, breasting a pleading, hopeful, begging throng, carving a wide swathe through them and crying out in a voice which cracked chips from the pillars in the place, "Make way! Make way for Ole Doc Methuselah, Soldier of Light, knight of the U.M.S. and benefactor of mankind! Make way! Make way!"

Ole Mother Methuselah

Bucketing along at a hundred and fifty light-years, just entering the Earth Galaxy, the Morgue, decrepit pride of the Universal Medical Society, was targeted with a strange appeal.

ANY UMS s.h.i.+P ANY UMS s.h.i.+P ANY DOCTOR.

ANYONE EMERG EMERG EMERG PLEASE CON-.

TACT PLEASE CONTACT UNITED STATES EX-.

PERIMENTAL STATION THREE THOUSAND AND.

TWO PLANET GORGON BETA URSUS MAJOR. RE-.

LAY RELAY EMERG.

Ole Doc was in his salon, boots on a gold-embroidered chair, head reclined against a panel depicting the Muses crowning a satyr, musing upon the sad and depleted state of his wine "cellar" which jingled and rattled, all two bottles of it, on a shelf above the coffee-maker. He heard the tape clicking but he had heard tapes click before. He heard it clicking the distinctive three dots of an emergency call but he had heard that before also.

"Hippocrates!" he bellowed. And after a silence of two days the loudness and suddenness of this yell brought the little slave out of his galley as though shot from a gun.

Four-armed, antennaed and indestructible, little Hippoc- rates was not easily dismayed. But now he was certain that they were hard upon a dead star-nay, already struck.

"Master?"

"Hippocrates," said Ole Doc, "we've only got two bot- tles of wine left!"

Hippocrates saw that the s.h.i.+p was running along on all drives, that the instrument panel, which he could see from where he stood in the pa.s.sage, half a s.h.i.+p length forward from the salon, was burning green on all registers, that they were on standard speed and that, in short, all was

well. He wiped a slight smear of mustard and gypsum from his mouth with a guilty hand-for his own supplies of delicacy were so low that he had stolen some of Ole Doc's plaster for casts.

"The formula for making wine," began Hippocrates with his phonograph-record-wise mind, "consists of pro- curing grapes. The grapes are then smashed to relieve them of juice and the juice is strained and set aside to ferment. At the end of-"

"We don't have any grapes," said Ole Doc. "We don't have any fuel. We have no food beyond ham and pow- dered eggs. All my s.h.i.+rts are in ribbons-"

"If you would stop writing on the cuffs," said Hippoc- rates, "I might-"

"-and I have not been fis.h.i.+ng for a year. See what's on that tape. If it's good fis.h.i.+ng and if they grow grapes, we'll land."

Hippocrates knew something had been bothering bun. It was the triple click of the recording receiver. Paper was coming out of it in a steady stream. Click, click, click.

Emerg. Emerg. Emerg!

Ole Doc looked musingly at the Muses and slowly began to relax. That was a good satyr Joccini had done, even if it was uncomfortably like-

"United States Experimental Station on Gorgon Beta Ursus Major," said Hippocrates. "Direct call to UMS, master." He looked abstractedly at the dark port beyond which the stars flew by. Through his mind was running the "Star Pilot for Ursus Major." He never forgot anything, Hippocrates, and the eighteen thousand close-packed pages whirred by, stopped, turned back a leaf and then appeared in his mind. "It's jungle and rivers. Wild game. Swamps."

And he brightened. "No women."

"What?" said Ole Doc incuriously.

"Gorgon of Beta Ursus Major. Lots of fish. Lots of them. And wine. Lots of fish and wine."

Ole Doc got up, stretched and went forward. He punched a pneumatic navigator and after divers whirs and hisses a light flashed on a screen giving him a new course departing from a point two light-years in advance of the reading. He could not turn any sooner. He settled himself under the familiar controls, disconnected the robot and yawned.