Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction 11th Part 17

The night was quiet, for the children finally had gone in, giving up their play. And he was tired. Finally, he thought, he could admit that he was tired. There was now, after many years, no treason in saying he was tired.

Inside the house he heard the m.u.f.fled purring of the phone and the sound of it broke the rhythm of his rocking, brought him forward to the chair's edge.

Janet's feet made soft sounds as they moved toward the phone and he thrilled to the gentleness of her voice as she answered it.

Now, in just a minute, she would call him and he'd get up and go inside.

But she didn't call him. Her voice went on talking. He settled back into the chair. He'd forgotten once again.

The phone no longer was an enemy. It no longer haunted him.

For Millville had been the first. The fear had already been lifted here.

Millville had been the guinea pig, the pilot project.

Martha Anderson had been the first of them and after her Ted Carson, whose lung had been suspicious, and after him the Jurgens' baby when it came down with pneumonia. And a couple of dozen others until all the pads were gone. And the alien had come back.

And the alien had said-what was it he had said? "Don't think of us as benefactors nor as supermen. We are neither one. Think of me if you will, as the man across the street."

And it had been, Doc told himself, a reaching by the alien for an understanding, an attempt to translate this thing that they were doing into a common idiom.

And had there been any understanding-any depth of understanding? Doc doubted that there had been.

Although, he recalled, the aliens had been basically very much like humans.

They could even joke.

There had been one joking thing the original alien had said that had stuck inside his mind. And it had been a sort of silly thing, silly on the face of it, but it had bothered him. The screen door banged behind Janet as she came out on the porch. She sat down on the glider. "That was Martha Anderson,"

she said.

Doc chuckled to himself. Martha lived just five doors up the street and sheand Janet saw one another a dozen times a day and yet Martha had to phone.

"What did Martha want?" he asked, Janet laughed. "She wanted help with rolls."

"You mean her famous rolls?"

"Yes. She couldn't remember for the life of her, how much yeast she used."

Doc chortled softly. "And those are the Ones, I suppose, she wins all the prizes on at the county fair."

Janet said, crisply: "It's not so funny as you make it, Jason. It's easy to forget a thing like that. She does a lot of baking."

"Yes, I suppose you're right," said Doc.

He should be getting in, he told himself, and start reading in the journal.

And yet he didn't want to. It was so pleasant sitting here-just sitting. It had been a long time since he could do much sitting.

And it was all right with him, of course, because he was getting old and close to worn out, but it wouldn't be all right with a younger doctor, one who still owed for his edu-cation and was just starting out. There was talk in the United Nations of urging all the legislative bodies to consider medi-cal subsidies to keep the doctors going. For there still was need of them. Even with all diseases vanished, there was still need of them. It wouldn't do to let their ranks thin out, for there would be time and time again when they would be badly needed.

He'd been listening to the footsteps for quite a while, com-ing down the street, and now all at once they were turning in the gate.

He sat up straighter in his chair. Maybe it was a patient, knowing he'd be home, coming in to see him.

"Why," said Janet, considerably surprised, "it is Mr. Gil-bert."

It was Con Gilbert, sure enough.

"Good evening, Doc," said Con. "Good evening, Miz Kelly."

"Good evening," Janet said, getting up to go.

"No use of you to leave," Con said to her.

"I have some things to do," she told him. "I was just getting ready to go in."

Con came up the steps and sat down on the glider. "Nice evening," he declared."It is all of that," said Doc.

"Nicest spring I've ever seen," said Con, working his way around to what he had to say.

"I was thinking that," said Doc. "It seems to me the lilacs never smelled so good before."

"Doc," said Con, "I figure I owe you quite a bit of money."

"You owe me some," said Doc.

"You got an idea how much it might be?"

"Not the faintest," Doc told him. "I never bothered to keep track of it."

"Figured it was a waste of time," said Con. "Figured I would never pay it."

"Something like that," Doc agreed.

"Been doctoring with you for a right long time," said Con.

"That's right, Con."

"I got three hundred here. You figure that might do it?"

"Let's put it this way, Con," said Doc. "I'd settle for a whole lot less."

"I guess then, that sort of makes us even. Seems to me three hundred might be close to fair."

"If you say so," said Doc.

Con dug out his billfold, extracted a wad of bills and handed them across.

Doc took them and folded them and stuffed them in his pocket.

"Thank you, Con," he said.

And suddenly he had a funny feeling, as if there were something he should know, as if there were something that he should be able to just reach out and grab.

But he couldn't no matter how he tried, figure what it was. Con got up and shuffled across the porch, heading for the steps.

"Be seeing you around," he said.

Doc jerked himself back to reality.

"Sure, Con. Be seeing you around. And thanks."

He sat in the chair, not rocking, and listened to Con going down the walkand out the gate and then down the street until there was only silence.

And if he ever was going to get at it, he d have to go in now and start reading in the journal.

Although, more than likely, it was all d.a.m.n foolishness. He'd probably never again need to know a thing out of any medic journal.

Doc pushed the journal to one side and sat there, wonder-ing what was wrong with him. He'd been reading for twenty minutes and none of it had registered. He couldn't have told a word that he had read.

Too upset, he thought. Too excited about Operation Kelly, and wasn't that a thing to call it-Operation Kelly!

And he remembered it once again exactly.

How he'd tried it out on Millville, then gone to the county medical a.s.sociation and how the doctors in the county, after some slight amount of scoffing and a good deal of skepti-cism, had become convinced. And from there it had gone to state and the AMA.

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 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 cla.s.sed as one.

When it ran rampant as it had during the last half cen-tury, 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 har-a.s.sed 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 b.u.mbling?

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 Opera-tion 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 meet-ing of the minds, and yet there had been a common ground-the very simple ground of compa.s.sion 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.