Page:Astounding Science Fiction (1950-01).djvu/95

 "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 sidearm. 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 this 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 "infants terrible" 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 OLE MOTHER METHUSELAH