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Old Doc had his hands full. The attendant had made a mistake, it seemed—raising human embryos in lion-embryo serums produced the most inhuman bratlings!

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 SHIP ANY UMS SHIP ANY DOCTOR ANYONE EMERG EMERG EMERG PLEASE CONTACT PLEASE CONTACT UNITED STATES EXPERIMENTAL STATION THREE THOUSAND AND TWO PLANET GORGON BETA URSUS MAJOR. RELAY 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 coffeemaker. 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 Hippocrates was not 80