cost me nothing to hurry my pace a bit.
Several weeks later, Dr Carroll knocked on my door on the planet Cocuru. “Please don't tell me you have female company and I am intruding?” Dr Carroll asked me carefully.
“I'm free as a bird and I have plenty of time to go to the hospital. What happened to your new assignment Dr. Carroll?”
“The project leader got a better offer and I wasn't invited,” Dr. Carroll replied. She tried to hide it, but I could hear the hurt in her voice.
“And what happened to Mike?”
“I left Mike in a hospital on the planet of Market. I promised to sexually exhaust him again as soon as he's healthy enough. Mike didn't want to wait, but he was too weak to argue.”
“So how do we start?” I asked her.
“First I give you a physical to make certain you are healthy enough,” Dr. Carroll said with a grin.
I was poked and prodded, run on treadmills, and examined more thoroughly than I had ever been examined before. I understood her caution. Dr Carroll had never sexually exhausted a man into the morgue and didn't want to start now, but what a way to go.
Dr Carroll finally pronounced me sufficiently healthy. We started out with a candlelit dinner on my terrace. Then slow dancing under the stars, followed by the hundred year old brandy that I had been saving for a special occasion. I carried Dr Carroll to the bedroom.
“Remember, I'm in charge. Just follow my lead,” Dr Carroll told me.
“I am so glad your expedition was canceled,” I said with a smile.
“It wasn't canceled. The expedition leader had a chance to go to the planet Lindle 4. I've dreamed of going to Lindle 4 since I was a little girl. The Emperor himself is leading that expedition.”
“I know, they wanted me to go as one of his bodyguards,” I said without thinking.
“You turned them down!”
“Why would I want to go? The planet Lindle 4 has been dead for hundreds of years. No ghoul could possibly still be alive. I would just be wandering around with my hands in my pockets.” This conversation was taking a turn I didn’t like.
“Bob, you would be wandering the streets of Lindle 4. I would kill to have the opportunity to wander the streets of Lindle 4.”
“Dr. Carroll, I feel the mood slipping away here.”
“I suppose it's too late to change your mind?”
“The Elan are keeping a courier craft in orbit,” I said hopelessly. “They told me the offer was open ended.”
“Tell them you'll go if you can bring your personal physician.”
“But Dr Carroll...”
“Bob I'll be your slave for life...please!” In a handful of minutes a very excited doctor/archaeologist and a very horny ghoul hunter were on their way to Lindle 4.
CHAPTER 2
LINDLE 4
The Lindle were a species that had lived on only three planets before their explorers discovered the first gloride worlds. The Lindle scientists found ways to distil gloride ore into a fuel which made travel between the stars practical. They also discovered the metals in the gloride that when combined with other metals made inexpensive spaceships possible on a massive scale. Almost overnight the Lindle settled most of the habitable planets in the galaxy.
Regeneration techniques had given way to an immortality treatment by which any organism maintained itself virtually forever. The Lindle population exploded. With billions of births and no deaths it soon became difficult to find enough habitable planets for the Lindle to live on. The ability to procreate was excised from the race. There was no longer any need for young to care for the old or to replace the lives lost to old age and death.
The Lindle did not fight other Lindle. Accidental deaths still occurred, so if lack of population became a problem, new citizens could always be produced through cloning techniques. With a population of some ninety trillion, lack of population was not seen as a possibility.
Almost two million years went by. The Lindle lived for pleasure. They saw their lives stretching into an endless eternity. Technological progress was almost nonexistent. Without the prod of old age there was no hurry to do anything. Why rush when you have forever. Then something went wrong. Their bodies started to decay. Not the decay of old age, rather the decay of rot from within. Some rotted slowly, most rotted quickly. Trillions died. They could find no cause or cure except that in gloride deposits the decay stopped. Nothing ever rots in a gloride deposit. Gloride deposits are naturally riddled with tunnels and caverns. All the remaining Lindle moved to gloride worlds. They built new cities deep underground in gloride caverns.
The reprieve was only temporary. After a period of about a quarter of a million years, here and there, individuals would simply drop dead. No warning. No symptoms. One moment they were alive, the next moment they were dead. The numbers at first were small, only a few dozen per billion per year, but with Lindle dying and no Lindle being born the effects began to become serious.
The entire emphasis of the newly invigorated Lindle scientific community sprang into action, but to no avail. Ancient cloning techniques were revived in hopes of producing new Lindle so that the species might go on, but Lindle tissue refused to clone.
As Lindle population declined, they would empty a handful of worlds to cluster on one world. Then the clustered worlds began to be depleted and a handful of clustered worlds would be emptied to cluster on one world. The last world, the final clustered world, where all the remaining Lindle went to spend their last days was Lindle 4.
It was called Lindle 4 because it was the fourth Lindle world to be discovered. Lindle 4 was the most impressive of all the Lindle worlds. The other Lindle worlds had been packed up before they had been abandoned. Only Lindle 4 had not been packed up. It was prized beyond all the other Lindle worlds combined.
Lindle 4 had been found when it was part of the Empire of Shonlin the Great. The work to examine the sight was slow and methodical. Gloride deposits are unstable. As the fuel for its radiation becomes depleted, the way the fuel is utilized changes. As a result the deposit reaches a state where the radiation increases a thousand fold, to the point where it became deadly to all living things.
Lindle 4 was the first time a known gloride world became super radioactive. It happened during the Empire/Barony wars when the sight had been temporarily abandoned. Lindle 4 was in the section of the Empire of the Lan-Thu that was ceded to the Baronies of the Sons of Shonlin and at first it was thought the Empire had intentionally made the mine dangerously radioactive to spoil the sight for its new Barony owners.
Eventually the process was understood and other gloride worlds were found that were also super radioactive. Near the end of the gloride deposits life the depleted fuel on the gloride world would cause it to become super radioactive, with brief interludes when it was barely radioactive at all. When the fuel was finally totally depleted the gloride deposit would collapse to perhaps one hundredth of its former size, causing the entire world to collapse to a much smaller sphere.
◊◊◊
The Emperor was overjoyed when he was told that Lindle 4 was to have a 500 hour window of low radiation. This was to be followed by a brief burst of super radiation before the planet's collapse. The Baronies knew that only the Empire of the Lan-Thu had the resources to mount an expedition of sufficient size and scope to truly take advantage of this 500 hour gift. There were those who worried that this was a Barony trap. The Emperor's death would cause chaos and confusion that could be used to split off a piece of the Empire, perhaps conquer the entire Empire to form a new Empire with the Baronies in control. The Empire's own scientists went over the mathematics and did their own tests. It was confirmed. There would be a 500 hour window of low radiation followed by planetary collapse.
No expense was