Astounding British Edition, Vol. 6, No. 8 — page 36: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE GREAT AIR MONOPOLY. By RENE LAFAYETTE | A neat racket the boys had—you had to buy the privi- lege of breathing the air of the planet! And enforc- ing that tax law was quite a trick. Effective, fo OLE Doc sat in the cool sunlight of Arphon and pulled at a fragrant pipe. The Morgue, his ship-laboratory, sat in lush grass up to its belly beside the sparkling lake and from its side came out an awning to make a stately pavilion for the master. Sun!? was thirty degrees high and Arphon’s autumn sucked hungrily at the warmth, even as Ole Doc sucked at the pipe. He was getting away with something with that pipe. His little super-gravitic slave Hip- pocrates was bustling around, all four hands busy, now and then coming to a full stop to lower his antennae at Ole Doc in dis- approval. It was not of his master that he disapproved, it was the pipe. “What if it is his birthday?” growled Hippocrates. “He shouldn’t. He said he wouldn’t. He promised me. Nicotine, ugh! and three whole days until ‘he takes his treatment. Nicotine on his fingers, poisoning him; nicotine in his lungs. Poison, that’s what it is. In the pharmacopoeia ... !!” And he rattled off a long, gruesome list of poisons for, once going, his phonograph- recordwise mind went on into Nilophine, Novocaine and Nymphodryl. Suddenly he realized where all this was heading and in anger at himself now as well as Ole Doc, got back to work with his birthday party preparations. They were very intricate pre- parations. After all, there had to be nine hundred and five candles on that cake. Ole Doc paid his little slave no heed. He sat in the sunlight and puffed his pipe *U.M.S.—Universal Medical Society—the supreme council of physicians organized in the late Twenty-third Century after the famous Revolt Caduceus which claimed the lives of two billion humanoids of the Earth-Areton Empire through the villainous use of new medical discoveries to wage war and dominate entire countries. George Moulton, M.D., Dr. Hubert _Sands, the physio-chemist, James J. Lufberry, M.D., and Stephen Thomas Met- ridge, M.D., who was later to become as well known as Ole Doc Methuselah, had for nearly a hundred years kept to a laboratory studying far beyond contemporary skills and incidentally extending their work by extending their own lives, came out of-retirement, issued a pro- nunciamento—backed with atomic and du-ray 34 and occasionally made intricate calculations on his gold cuff—his filing case was full of torn cuffs containing solutions which would have rocked even his brothers of the Univer- sal Medical Society,* much less the thousand and five humanoid systems in this one . galaxy. He didn’t hear the clanking chains or the bark of the guards on the march, even though they came closer with every second and would pass hard by the ship. It was nothing to Ole Doc that Arphon was a boiling turmoil” of revolt and murder. In the eight hundred. and eighty years since he had graduated from Johns-Hopkins Medical school in Baltimore, Maryland, First Continental District, Earth, Orbit Three, Sun!, Rim Zone, Galaxy!, Universe —or 1, 316°, 1 m. ly hub!, 264-89, sub-328 which will find it for you on the space charts if you are going there—he had seen everything, done everything, felt everything, tasted everything, been everything including a Messiah, a Dictator, a humanoid animal in a glass dome and a god, and there were few things left to amaze or interest him. He supposed some day he would crack hand weapons and a thousand counter-toxins— which denied to the casual practitioner all specialized medical secrets. Thus peace came to the Empire. Other systems anxiously clamored for similar aid and other great names of medicine quietly joined them. For centuries, as the Universal Medical Society, these men, hiding great names under nicknames, who eventually became a fixed seven hundred in number, maintained a Center and by casual patrol of the Systems kept medicine as well as disease within rational bounds. Saluting no government, collecting no fees, permitting no infringement, the U.M.S. became dreaded and revered as The Soldiers of Light and under the symbo! of the crossed ray rods impinged their will upon the governments of space under a a code of their own more rigorous than any code of laws. For the detailed records and history of the U.M.S., for conditions governing the hundred-year apprenticeship all future members must serve and for the special codes of call and appeal to the U.M.S. in case of plague or disaster, consult L. Ron Hubbard’s “Conquest of Space,” 29th Volume, Chapter XCLHL. René LaFavette. EGomichoo — ( S (SO)