"L. Ron Hubbard - Ole Doc Methuselah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hubbard L. Ron)

Ole Doc Methuselah
by L.Ron Hubbard
Version 1.0
A #BW Release

Ole Doc Methuselah

Ole Doc Methuselah wasn't thinking what he was doing or
he never would have landed on Spico that tempestuous
afternoon. He had been working out some new formulas
for cellular radiation—in his head as usual, he never could
find his log tables—and the act of also navigating his
rocket ship must have been too much for him. He saw the
asteroid planet, de-translated his speed and landed.

He sat there for some time at the controls, gazing out
into the pleasant meadow and at the brook which wan-
dered so invitingly upon it, and finishing up his tabulations.
When he had written down the answer on his gauntlet
cuff—his filing system was full of torn scraps of cuff—he
felt very pleased with himself. He had mostly forgotten
where he had been going, but he was going to pour the
pile to her when his eye focused upon the brook. Ole Doc
took his finger off the booster switch and grinned.

"That sure is green grass," he said with a pleased sigh.
And then he looked up over the control panels where he
hung his fishing rod.

Who knows what would have happened to Junction City
if Ole Doc hadn't decided to go fishing that day.

Seated on the lower step of the port ladder, Hippoc-
rates 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 metabolism and why he dieted
solely on gypsum, but that had been thirty years ago and
Hippocrates had been an easy habit to acquire. Unpig-
mented, 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-record-wise, 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.