The ship had been there, probably, a year. It had ended its life from heavy explosive and had been skewered through and through by five charges.
Ole Doc burned through a jammed door, going forward to get to the control room. He stumbled over some litters of boxes and his playing light showed up their mildewed lettering:
Department of Agriculture.
Perishable.
Keep under Preservative Rays.
Horses.
Ole Doc frowned and picked his way through this decaying litter. In the control room he found what seepage and bacteria had left of the log. The ship was the Wanderho out of Boston, a tramp under charter to the government, delivering perishables, supplies and mail to Department of Agriculture Experimental Stations.
With sudden decision Ole Doc blew his way out through the bow and walked on logs back to the Morgue. He had headed for the only opening he had seen in the jungle wall ahead and that opening had been made by a killed ship.
He came back up through the air lock and opened all the switches on the battle panel except the screens.
“We can go now, master,” said Hippocrates brightly. “Scanner shows nothing to stop us.”
“Shut that off and fix me a biological kit,” said Ole Doc.
“You’re not going?” gaped Hippocrates.
“According to article something-or-other, when the majority of a human population on a planet is threatened a Soldier has to stay on the job.”
“But I said that,” said Hippocrates.
“When?” said Ole Doc.
Hippocrates retreated hurriedly into the operating room and began to throw together the hundred and seventy-two items which made up a biological kit, and when he had them in cases on his back he shot after Ole Doc who was already a quarter of the way back to the compound.
Ole Doc walked up the steps of O’Hara’s bungalow, thrust open the office door and walked in. O’Hara looked up and gaped.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” snapped Ole Doc.
“You have an accident with some animal?” said O’Hara. “I heard some shots but I knew you were armed. I thought—”
“About this jettisoned cargo!” said Ole Doc impatiently.
“What about it?” said O’Hara. “They just stacked it up and left.”
“You saw them leave?”
“Well, no. The captain was in here telling me he was having trouble with his ship and when I saw they were gone in the morning I went over to see if he’d left our supplies in good shape and I found his cargo. It’d rained and the labels—”
“Was it scattered around?” demanded Ole Doc.
“Why would he scatter it around?” said O’Hara.
“What was the name of that ship?”
“The Wanderho,” said O’Hara. “Same old tub. The only one which ever comes. Undependable. She’s about a month overdue now—”
“O’Hara, you won’t ever see that ship again. She’s lying over there in the jungle shot full of holes and her crew dead inside. You didn’t hear a takeoff a year ago. You heard a ship being shot to pieces.”
O’Hara looked a little white. “But the cargo! It was all stacked up in a neat pile—”
“Precisely.”
“You mean— I don’t follow this!”
“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 side arm. 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 fishing in the pile of equipment for a portable ultraelectron microscope 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 skeptical 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 vanishing 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 Hippocrates, all four arms deep in research assistance. “In Tales of the Early Space Pioneers—”
“Condemn the early space pioneers,” said Ole Doc, his eyes aching and his back cricked with weeks of constant peering. “Give me another phial.”
They had made some progress along one line. Ole Doc had taken time off to make sure he could communicate with the enfants terribles 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 spacia, except he was teaching English. Asleep and awake, the horde of precocious “babies” were confronted by projected pictures and dinned with explanation. The projectors had to be very carefully protected and even then blastproof shields 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 willy-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 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 passed 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 different ways but almost in the same instant.
Ole Doc didn’t hear them. He turned to the racks of paraphernalia and started to drag down several bottles which he began to treat with pharmaceutical ray rods.
“You maybe poison the whole batch?” said Hi
ppocrates 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 “babies.”
“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 ray rods 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.”
“Uh-huh,” 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 bell jar 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 satisfaction and tipped the mass into a huge graduate. He stuffed a ray rod into the middle of the mass 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 ray rod was aimed at it. Then, like its relative, it went under the bell jar, became jellylike, turned into a translucent mass and got dumped into another graduate.
Five chickens later there were seven graduates full of cells, each with a different kind of ray rod 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 bell jar and knocking it into a shapeless nothingness. But at that instant a howl sounded from the pens and O’Hara was happy to assist the now returned Hippocrates in slapping the vigorous infant on the face of the operating table.
O’Hara expected to see the bell jar come down and a ray rod 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 pass with a glowing button and then plunged the needle into the baby’s spine. He withdrew it and made a second pass with the button. 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 pass with the button 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.
“Next one,” said Ole Doc.
“There isn’t going to be a next one,” said a cool voice behind them.
They whirled to find a leathery-faced, short-statured character in leather garb who stood indolently leaning against a porch post with an undoubtedly lethal weapon aimed in their general direction.
“And who are you?” said Ole Doc.
“The name is Smalley. Not that you’ll be very interested for long. All done playing with the kids? Well, stand away so you’re not in line with those cages and we’ll get this over with.”
Ole Doc looked at Hippocrates and Hippocrates looked at Ole Doc. It would have taken a very good poker player to have told what passed between them. But Ole Doc knew what he wanted to know. During his chicken treatments his orders had been carried out. He laid his hypo on the table with a histrionic sigh and carelessly thumbed the button on the magnetic release. Very small in the distance, there were slight pinging sounds.
“You know,” said Ole Doc, “I wouldn’t be too much in a hurry, Smalley.”
“And why not?”
“Because I was just giving this kid a treatment to save his life.”
“Yeah. I believe you.”
“Happens to be the truth,” said Ole Doc. “Of course, I didn’t have any idea that their friends would be along so soon, but I just didn’t like to see kids die wholesale. If you’ll call up your medico, I’ll show him what’s to be done—”
“About what?”
“About this illness,” said Ole Doc. “Strange thing. Must be a lion disease or something. Very rare. Affects all the nerve centers.”
“Those two kids look all right to me!” said Smalley, getting alert and peering at the cages on the porch.
“These I’ve practically cured, although the girl there still wants her final treatment. But down at the pens—”
“What about the pens?” demanded Smalley.
“There’s thirty-eight thousand mighty sick babies. And it’s going to take a lot of know-how to heal them. Left untreated, they’ll die. But, as you’re the one who’s interested—”
“Say, how do you know so much?” snarled Smalley.
“I happen to be a doctor,” said Ole Doc.
“He is Ole Doc Methuselah!” said Hippocrates with truculence. “He is a Soldier of Light!”
“What’s that?” said Smalley.
“A doctor,” said Ole Doc. “Now if you’ll bring your medico here—”
“And if I don’t have one?”
“Why, that’s surprising,” said Ole Doc. “How do you expect to keep thirty-eight thousand kids whole without a doctor?”
“We’ll manage! Now get this, Doc. You’re going to unbuckle that blaster belt right where you stand and you’re going to walk ahead of me slow to the pens. And you’d better be telling the truth.”
Ole Doc dropped his belt, made a sign to Hippocrates to gather up the graduates and stepped out toward the pens.
Here, under the slanting yellow rays of the afternoon sun, it became very obvious that there wasn’t an Achnoid in sight. Instead there were various beings in disordered dress who held carefully ordered weapons commanding all avenues of escape.
“Thought you’d land tomorrow,” said Ole Doc.
“How’s that?” snapped Smalley.
“Oh, the way the Achnoids acted. And a detector that’s part of my operating kit which said you’d already come down twice before, last week, to the south of here.”
“Just keep walking,” said Smalley. “You might get past me but you won’t get past the gate or get near your ship. We’ve had that guarded for two months hoping you’d show up.”
“Lucky I didn’t, eh?” said Ole Doc. “Your harvest here would be dead.”
They stood now near the concrete wall of one pen. Smalley, keeping an eye out behind him and walking with caution, mounted up the ramp. But contrary to Hippocrates’ fond expectation, no pellet knocked the top of his head off. He stiffened and stared.
Ole Doc went up beside him and looked down. As far as these pens reached they could see kids lying around, some inert, some twitchin
g, some struggling but all very, very ill. And obvious on the first of them were big red splotches.
Smalley yelled a warning to his guards to stay clear and then faced Ole Doc.
“All right. They’re sick. How they goin’ to get cured?”
“Why, I was all set to cure them right here,” said Ole Doc. “But if you’re so anxious to shoot me—”
“That can wait! Cure them! Cure them, you hear me?”
Ole Doc shrugged. “Have it any way you like, Smalley. But I’ll need the rest of my equipment over here.”
“All right, you’ll get it!”
Ole Doc dropped down into the first pen and Hippocrates handed him equipment. From his cloak pocket Ole Doc took a gun hypo which did not need a needle to penetrate. He fitted a charge in this and shot the first kid. Then he rolled the infant over and got to work with his hypo needle.
Smalley looked suspicious. He kept his place at a distance and kept down the visor of his space helmet. Two of his guards came up and, some distance from him, received further orders and went back to watch from the gate.
The first kid got seven shots and then another charge from the hypo gun. The red splotches began to vanish and the child was asleep.
It was assembly-line work after that with O’Hara and Hippocrates slinging kids into place and holding them and Hippocrates quadridextrously administering the before-and-after gun shots.
Night came and they lighted the pens and the work went on. Ole Doc stopped for food after he reached the thousand mark and came back to where Smalley was watching.
“Give me a hand up,” said Ole Doc.
Smalley had watched child after child go peacefully to sleep and the blotches vanish and despite his air, he was too confused about Ole Doc not to obey the order. Ole Doc gripped the offered hand and came up over the ramp.