Ole Doc Methuselah Read Free

the port ladder, Hippocrates patiently watched his god
toss flies into the water with a deft and expert hand. Hippocrates was a sort
of cross between several things. Ole Doc had picked him up cheap at an auction
on Zeno just after the Trans-System War. At the time he had meant to discover
some things about his purchase, such as his metabolism and why he dieted solely
on gypsum , but that had been thirty years ago and Hippocrates
had been an easy habit to acquire. Unpigmented, four-handed and silent as space
itself, Hippocrates had set himself the scattered task of remembering all the things
Ole Doc always forgot. He sat now, remembering—particularly that Ole Doc had
some of his own medicine to take at thirty-six o’clock—and he might have sat
there that way for hours and hours, phonograph-recordwise, if a radiating
pellet hadn’t come with a sharp zip past his left antenna to land with a
clang on the Morgue ’s thick hull.
    ZIP!
CLANG!
    Page
forty-nine of the Tales of the Early Space Pioneers went smoothly into
operation in Hippocrates’ gifted if unimaginative skull, which page translated
itself into unruffled action.
    He
went inside and threw on Force Field Beta minus the Nine
Hundred and Sixtieth Degree Arc, that being where Ole Doc was. Seeing that his
worshiped master went on fishing, either unwitting or uncaring, Hippocrates
then served out blasters and twenty rounds to himself and went back to sit on
the bottom step of the port ladder.
    The
big spaceship—dented a bit, but lovely—simmered quietly in Procyon ’s
inviting light and the brook rippled and Ole Doc kept casting for whatever
outrageous kind of fish he might find in that stream. This went on for an hour
and then two things happened. Ole Doc, unaware of the force field, cast into it
and got his fly back into his hat and a young woman came stumbling,
panic-stricken, across the meadow toward the Morgue .
    From
amongst the stalks of flowers some forty feet high emerged an Earthman, thick
and dark, wearing the remains of a uniform to which had been added civil space
garb. He rushed forward a dozen meters before he paused in stride at the apparition
of the huge golden ship with its emblazoned crossed ray rods of pharmacy. Then
he saw Ole Doc fishing and the pursuer thrust a helmet up from a contemptuous
grin.
    It
was nearer to Ole Doc than to the ship, and the girl, exhausted and disarrayed,
stumbled toward him. The Earthman swept wide and put Ole Doc exactly between
himself and the ladder before he came in.
    Hippocrates
turned from page forty-nine to page one hundred and fifteen. He leaped nimbly
up to the top of the ship in the hope of shooting the Earthman on an angle
which would miss Ole Doc. But he had no more than arrived and sighted before it
became apparent to him that he would also now shoot the girl. This puzzled him.
Obviously the girl was not an enemy who would harm Ole Doc. But the Earthman
was. Still, it was better to blast girl and Earthman than to see Ole Doc
harmed in any cause. The effort at recalling an exact instance made Hippocrates
tremble and in that tremble Ole Doc also came into his fire field.
    Having
no warnings whatever, Ole Doc had just looked up from disentangling his hook
from first his shirt and then his thumb and beheld two humans cannonading down
upon him.
    The
adrenalized condition of the woman was due to the Earthman, that was clear. The
Earthman was obviously a blast-for-hire from some tough astral slum and he had
recently had a fight, for two knuckles bled. The girl threw herself in a
collapse at Ole Doc’s feet and the Earthman came within a fatal fifteen feet.
    Ole
Doc twitched his wrist and put his big-hooked fly into the upper lip of the
Earthman. This disappointed Ole Doc a little for he had been trying for the
nose. The beggar was less hypothyroid than he had first
estimated.
    Pulling
his game-fish bellowing into the stream, Ole Doc disarmed him and let him have
a ray barrel just