were apprehensive because they could not be sure that their leader and other people would wake up.
"Stop or we shoot!" barked their squad leader.
Ole Doc negligently fingered his first cloak button. It hummed a little. He kept on walking.
"Stop!" cried the squad leader. "Stop and go back until I'm sure they're going to recover or we'll kill you!"
Ole Doc stopped. He looked sadly at the five on the wall above him. And then he suddenly dived to the right and drew in a blur which flamed before it could be seen. He fired rapidly.
Three shots came at him. Three shots ricocheted off his portable force screen. Five guards went down in charred heaps where the ashes lay amid glowing bits of metal.
Ole Doc looked alertly across the Savannah, glanced back to make sure the screen had protected Hippocrates and then struck off for the Morgue.
There was no guard there now since that guard had been changed from the ship. Ole Doc swung in, indicated a couch where O'Hara was to be tossed and walked through the vessel to check her for ascent. But she had not been harmed and in a few' minutes he could sink with confidence behind his controls and buckle his belts.
He rang for take-off and got Hippocrates' cheery O.K. back. And then the Morgue hurtled upwards to an altitude of three miles.
It looked so peaceful down below. The dark green of the jungle bounding the silver of the lakes was pretty to his appreciative eye. And then he dived and put five big, solid charges into the battle cruiser and left her a curling, smoking mass of wreckage. And he dived again at another place to the south and slammed two shots into a mountainous stockpile of structural materials and munitions and saw how prettily their black smoke rose, interspersed red with exploding shells.
That gave him a great deal of satisfaction.
He skipped upwards then through the atmosphere and out into the black comfort of absolute zero and set his course and speed for home.
"Calling Center," he said into his mike. "Calling Center. Methuselah. Methuselah. Calling Center—"
"Come in! Hey! Come in!" said Center, a tenth of a galaxy away.
"Methuselah with a report."
"Methuselah is enough!" said Ole Doc Cautery at Center. "We have had five navies and the marines looking for you for months. We've had six empires scared 'til they can't spit. WHERE have you been?"
"Got a report," said Ole Doc. "Turn this on confidential."
"Circuits on. Begin report."
Ole Doc spoke into the five wave scramble which had defied cryptographers since the UMS had adopted it two hundred years before. "Alien extragalactic race attempted foothold for jump-off attacks on Earth. First independent space flight originators
