Free Ole Doc Methuselah by L. Ron Hubbard

feeling
that for a century or more after space travel and colonization had begun,
people had left Algol alone, not even informing themselves if she had planets.
    The
wise knew she was a dark star rotating around a bright one, which accounted for
her being a variable, but when an expedition crashed on one of her planets,
when the first colony vanished, when a transgalactic flier burned in the
system, people began to recall her original reputation and shun her. That, of
course, made her an excellent pirate base and all six of her variously
inhabitable planets were soon messed about with blood and broken loot.
    â€œAs
is natural in such evolutions, she ultimately gave birth”—it said in the United
Planets Vacugraphic Office Star Pilot which Ole Doc was reading on his
knees (still holding the buttons down on his creature Hippocrates)—“to a strong
ruler who ate up the lesser ones and for the past three hundred and nineteen
years has been getting along as a monarchy of six planetic states governed from
Dorcon.” It said in the book that “there are spaceship ways and limited repair
facilities, fuel and supplies to be had at Ringo, Dorcon’s chief city.”
Certainly they would have so small a thing as a pile there.
    Ole
Doc started to open the switch to tell Hippocrates where they were going but
received a flood instead:
    â€œâ€˜The
manual circuits must be supplied by auxiliary hanbits of torque-compensated
valadium. Five erg seconds of injected . . .”’
    Plainly
Hippocrates was not pleased. Ole Doc laughed uncomfortably. He had picked the
weird little creature up at an auction a century back, meaning to examine his
metabolism, which was gypsum, but the gnome had been so
willing and his brain was so accurately gauged to remembering that somehow Ole
Doc had never thought again about examinations but had succumbed to these
deluges of being informed.
    A
gong rang. A whistle blew. A big plate before him began to flick-flick-flick as it displayed likely landing spots one after another. A metal finger jutted
suddenly from the gravity meter and touched off the proximity coil. The ship
went on to chemical brakes. The cockpit turned at right angles to ease the
deceleration of the last few hundred miles and then there was a slight bump.
The Morgue had sat down. There was a clang inside as her safety doors
slid open again, a tinkle of ladders dropping and a click-click-click as
instruments dusted themselves and put themselves out of sight in the bulkheads.
    Ole
Doc unbuckled his crash helmet and stood up, stretching. The port guards were sliding
open of themselves, displaying a green expanse of field, a surrounding regiment
of trees and the plastic towers of a city beyond.
    But
the instruments were not yet through. The analyzer came out, a square massed
solid in red and green bulbs which recorded the presence of anything harmful,
unnatural or hostile. And while it said green to atmosphere, gravity,
vegetation, food, habitations, the weather, storms, the surface temperature,
the subsurface temperature, radioactive presences and a thousand others, it
said red-red-red to soldiers, weapons, dead men, women and hostility.
The strip at the bottom of the board read “Relatively unsafe. Recommend
takeoff.”
    Ole
Doc owed his continued presence in the flesh to a certain superstition about
instruments. If they were there they should be observed, and if they gave
advice it should be taken. And he was about to take off on chemical and go
elsewhere nearby when Hippocrates thrust his outraged antennae into the
compartment.
    â€œâ€˜.
. . momentary inattention to fissure temperatures may result in ionization of
farundium particles and consequent . . .”’
    â€œSTOP
IT!” said Ole Doc.
    Hippocrates
stopped it. But not because he was told. He was reading “Relatively unsafe.
Recommend takeoff.” This gave him an impasse and while his dissertation
struggled fiercely with this