And finally that great day in the United Nations, when the alien had appeared before the delegates and when he, himself, had been introduced—and at last the great London man arising to suggest that the project could be called nothing else but Kelly.
A proud moment, he told himself—and he tried to call up the pride again, but it wasn’t there, not the whole of it. Never in his life again would he know that kind of pride.
And here he sat, a simple country doctor once again, in his study late at night, trying to catch up with reading he never seemed to get the time to do.
Although that was no longer strictly true. Now he had all the time there was.
He reached out and pulled the journal underneath the lamp and settled down to read.
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.
Paradise
Unusual for the stories in the City cycle, “Paradise” is a direct sequel to the classic “Desertion,” and the reader will gain a lot by reading that story first.
Cliff Simak wrote this story late in 1945, and it is clear that although the meanings of the cycle may have been somewhat fuzzy in its beginning, by the time “Paradise” came to be written, those meanings were coming clear in the author’s mind. John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, bought the story (Cliff received $131.25), and it appeared in the June 1946 issue.
After this story, with its grave implications for the survival of humanity, two tracks of Cliff’s “future history” diverged; alas, the City stories explored one of those tracks, and Cliff never explored the second track …
The dome was a squatted, alien shape that did not belong beneath the purple mist of Jupiter, a huddled, frightened structure that seemed to cower against the massive planet.
The creature that had been Kent Fowler stood spraddling on his thick-set legs.
An alien thing, he thought. That’s how far I’ve left the human race. For it’s not alien at all. Not alien to me. It is the place I lived in, dreamed in, planned in. It is the place I left—afraid. And it is the place I come back to—driven and afraid.
Driven by the memory of the people who were like me before I became the thing I am, before I knew the liveness and the fitness and the pleasure that is possible if one is not a human being.
Towser stirred beside him and Fowler sensed the bumbling friendliness of the one-time dog, the expressed friendliness and comradeship and love that had existed all the time, perhaps, but was never known so long as they were dog and man.
The dog’s thoughts seeped into his brain. “You can’t do it, pal,” said Towser.
Fowler’s answer was almost a wail. “But I have to, Towser. That’s what I went out for. To find what Jupiter really is like. And now I can tell them, now I can bring them word.”
You should have done it long ago, said a voice deep inside of him, a faint, far-off human voice that struggled up through his Jovian self. But you were a coward and you put it off—and put it off. You ran away because you were afraid to go back. Afraid to be turned into a man again.
“I’ll be lonesome,” said Towser, and yet he did not say it. At least there were no words—rather a feeling of loneliness, a heart-wrench cry at parting. As if, for the moment, Fowler had moved over and shared Towser’s mind.
Fowler stood silent, revulsion growing in him. Revulsion at the thought of being turned back into a man—into the inadequacy that was the human body and the human mind.
“I’d come with you,” Towser told him, “but I couldn’t stand it. I might die before I could get back. I was darn near done for, you remember. I was old and full of fleas. My teeth were wore right down to nubbins and my digestion was all shot. And I had terrible dreams. Used to chase rabbits when I was a pup, but toward the last it was the rabbits that were chasing me.”