But it was slow going.
He went back and read a paragraph anew.
And that, he told himself, was not the way it should be.
Either he was getting old or his eyes were going bad or he was plain stupid.
And that was the word — that was the key to the thing that it had seemed he should have been able to just reach out and grab.
Stupid!
Probably not actually stupid. Maybe just a little slow. Not really less intelligent, but not so sharp and bright as he had been. Not so quick to catch the hang of things.
Martha Anderson had forgotten how much yeast to use in those famous, prize-winning rolls of hers. And that was something that Martha should never have forgotten.
Con had paid his bill, and on the scale of values that Con had subscribed to all his life, that was plain stupidity. The bright thing, the sharp thing would have been for Con, now that he'd probably never need a doctor, just to forget the obligation. After all, it would not have been hard to do; he'd been forgetful of it up to this very night.
And the alien had said something that, at the time, he'd thought of as a joke.
'Never fear,' the alien had said, 'we'll cure all your ills. Including, more than likely, a few you don't suspect.'
And was intelligence a disease?
It was hard to think of it as such.
And yet, when any race was as obsessed with intelligence as Man was, it might be classed as one.
When it ran rampant as it had during the last half century, when it piled progress on top of progress, technology on top of technology, when it ran so fast that no man caught his breath, then it might be disease.
Not quite so sharp, thought Doc. Not quite so quick to grasp the meaning of a paragraph loaded with medical terminology — being forced to go a little slower to pack it in his mind.
And was that really bad?
Some of the stupidest people he'd ever known, he told himself, had been the happiest.
And while one could not make out of that a brief for planned stupidity, it at least might be a plea for a less harassed humanity.
He pushed the journal to one side and sat staring at the light.
It would be felt in Millville first because Millville had been the pilot project. And six months from tomorrow night it would be felt in all the world.
How far would it go, he wondered — for that, after all, was the vital question.
Only slightly less sharp?
Back to bumbling?
Clear back to the ape?
There was no way one could tell…
And all he had to do to stop it was pick up the phone.
He sat there, frozen with the thought that perhaps Operation Kelly should be stopped — that after all the years of death and pain and misery, Man must buy it back.
But the aliens, he thought — the aliens would not let it go too far. Whoever they might be, he believed they were decent people.
Maybe there had been no basic understanding, no meeting of the minds, and yet there had been a common ground — the very simple ground of compassion for the blind and halt.
But if he were wrong, he wondered — what if the aliens proposed to limit Man's powers of self-destruction even if that meant reducing him to abject stupidity… what was the answer then? And what if the plan was to soften man up before invasion?
Sitting there, he knew.
Knew that no matter what the odds were against his being right, there was nothing he could do.
Realized that as a judge in a matter such as this he was unqualified, that he was filled with bias, and could not change himself.
He'd been a doctor too long to stop Operation Kelly.
All the Traps of Earth
The inventory list was long. On its many pages, in his small and precise script, he had listed furniture, paintings, china, silverware and all the rest of it — all the personal belongings that had been accumulated by the Barringtons through a long family history.
And now that he had reached the end of it, he noted down himself, the last item of them alclass="underline"
One domestic robot, Richard Daniel, antiquated but in good repair.
He laid the pen aside and shuffled all the inventory sheets together and stacked them in good order, putting a paper weight upon them — the little exquisitely carved ivory paper weight that aunt Hortense had picked up that last visit she had made to Peking.
And having done that, his job came to an end.
He shoved back the chair and rose from the desk and slowly walked across the living room, with all its clutter of possessions from the family's past. There, above the mantel, hung the sword that ancient Jonathon had worn in the War Between the States, and below it, on the mantelpiece itself, the cup the Commodore had won with his valiant yacht, and the jar of moon-dust that Tony had brought back from Man's fifth landing on the Moon, and the old chronometer that had come from the long-scrapped family spacecraft that had plied the asteroids.
And all around the room, almost cheek by jowl, hung the family portraits, with the old dead faces staring out into the world that they had helped to fashion.
And not a one of them from the last six hundred years, thought Richard Daniel, staring at them one by one, that he had not known.
There, to the right of the fireplace, old Rufus Andrew Barrington, who had been a judge some two hundred years ago. And to the right of Rufus, Johnson Joseph Barrington, who had headed up that old lost dream of mankind, the Bureau of Paranormal Research. There, beyond the door that led out to the porch, was the scowling pirate face of Danley Barrington, who had first built the family fortune.
And many others — administrator, adventurer, corporation chief. All good men and true.
But this was at an end. The family had run out.
Slowly Richard Daniel began his last tour of the house — the family room with its cluttered living space, the den with its old mementos, the library and its rows of ancient books, the dining hall in which the crystal and the china shone and sparkled, the kitchen gleaming with the copper and aluminum and the stainless steel, and the bedrooms on the second floor, each of them with its landmarks of former occupants. And finally, the bedroom where old Aunt Hortense had finally died, at long last closing out the line of Barringtons.
The empty dwelling held a not-quite-haunted quality, the aura of a house that waited for the old gay life to take up once again. But it was a false aura. All the portraits, all the china and the silverware, everything within the house would be sold at public auction to satisfy the debts. The rooms would be stripped and the possessions would be scattered and, as a last indignity, the house itself be sold.
Even he, himself, Richard Daniel thought, for he was chattel, too. He was there with all the rest of it, the final item on the inventory.
Except that what they planned to do with him was worse than simple sale. For he would be changed before he was offered up for sale. No one would be interested in putting up good money for him as he stood. And, besides, there was the law — the law that said no robot could legally have continuation of a single life greater than a hundred years.
And he had lived in a single life six times a hundred years. He had gone to see a lawyer and the lawyer had been sympathetic, but had held forth no hope.
"Technically," he had told Richard Daniel in his short, clipped lawyer voice, "you are at this moment much in violation of the statute. I completely fail to see how your family got away with it."
"They liked old things," said Richard Daniel. "And, besides, I was very seldom seen. I stayed mostly in the house. I seldom ventured out."
"Even so," the lawyer said, "there are such things as records. There must be a file on you…"
"The family," explained Richard Daniel, "in the past had many influential friends. You must understand, sir, that the Barringtons, before they fell upon hard times, were quite prominent in politics and in many other matters."