Do Unto Others Part 1

Do Unto Others.

by Mark Clifton.

_Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.... And the natives of Capella IV, philosophers at heart, were not ones to ignore the Golden Rule...._

My Aunt Mattie, Matthewa H. Tombs, is President of the Daughters of Terra. I am her nephew, the one who didn't turn out well. Christened Hapland Graves, after Earth President Hapland, a cousin by marriage, the fellows at school naturally called me Happy Graves.

"Haphazard Graves, it should be," Aunt Mattie commented acidly the first time she heard it. It was her not very subtle way of reminding me of the way I lived my life and did things, or didn't do them. She shuddered at anything disorderly, which of course included me, and it was her beholden duty to right anything which to her appeared wrong.

"There won't be any evil to march on after you get through, Aunt Mattie," I once said when I was a child. I like now to think that even at the age of six I must have mastered the straight face, but I'm afraid I was so awed by her that I was sincere.

"That will do, Hapland!" she said sternly. But I think she knew I meant it--then--and I think that was the day I became her favorite nephew. For some reason, never quite clear to me, she was my favorite aunt. I think she liked me most because I was the cross she had to bear. I liked her most, I'm sure, because it was such a comfortable ride.

A few billions spent around the house can make things quite comfortable.

She had need of her billions to carry out her hobbies, or, as she called it, her "life's work." Aunt Mattie always spoke in cliches because people could understand what you meant. One of these hobbies was her collection of flora of the universe. It was begun by her maternal grandfather, one of the wealthier Plots, and increased as the family fortunes were increased by her father, one of the more ruthless Tombs, but it was under Aunt Mattie's supervision that it came, so to speak, into full flower.

"Love," she would say, "means more to a flower than all the scientific knowledge in the world." Apparently she felt that the small army of gardeners, each a graduate specialist in duplicating the right planetary conditions, hardly mattered.

The collection covered some two hundred acres in our grounds at the west side of the house. Small, perhaps, as some of the more vulgar displays by others go, but very, very choice.

The other hobby, which she combines with the first, is equally expensive. She and her club members, the Daughters of Terra (D.T.s for short), often find it necessary to take junkets on the family s.p.a.ce yacht out to some distant planet--to straighten out reprehensible conditions which have come to her attention. I usually went along to take care of--symbolically, at least--the bags and (their) baggage.

My psychiatrist would say that expressing it in this way shows I have never outgrown my juvenile att.i.tudes. He says I am simply a case of arrested development, mental, caused through too much over-shadowing by the rest of the family. He says that, like the rest of them, I have inherited the family compulsion to make the universe over to my own liking so I can pa.s.s it on to posterity with a clear conscience, and my negative att.i.tude toward this is simply a defense mechanism because I haven't had a chance to do it. He says I really hate my aunt's flora collection because I see it as a rival for her affection. I tell him if I have any resentments toward it at all it is for the long hours spent in getting the latinized names of things drilled into me. I ask him why gardeners always insist on forcing long meaningless names upon non-gardeners who simply don't care. He ignores that, and says that subconsciously I hate my Aunt Mattie because I secretly recognize that she is a challenge too great for me to overcome. I ask him why, if I subconsciously hate Aunt Mattie, why I would care about how much affection she gives to her flora collection. He says, ahah! We are making progress.

He says he can't cure me--of what, I'm never clear--until I find the means to cut down and destroy my Aunt Mattie.

This is all patent nonsense because Aunt Mattie is the rock, the firm foundation in a universe of shifting values. Even her cliches are precious to me because they are unchanging. On her, I can depend.

He tells Aunt Mattie his diagnoses and conclusions, too. Unethical?

Well now! Between a mere psychiatrist and my Aunt Mattie is there any doubt about who shall say what is ethical?

After one of their long conferences about me she calls me into her study, looks at me wordlessly, sadly, shakes her head, sighs--then squares her shoulders until the shelf of her broad, although maiden, bosom becomes huge enough to carry any burden, even the burden of my alleged hate. This she bears bravely, even gratefully. I might resent this needless pain the psychiatrist gives her, except that it really seems to make her happier in some obscure way.

Perhaps she has some kind of guilt complex, and I am her deserved punishment? Aunt Mattie with a guilt complex? Never! Aunt Mattie knows she is right, and goes ahead.

So all his nonsense is completely ridiculous. I love my Aunt Mattie. I adore my Aunt Mattie. I would never do anything to hurt my Aunt Mattie.

Or, well, I didn't mean to hurt her, anyway. All I did was wink. I only meant....

We were met at the s.p.a.ce port of Capella IV by the planet administrator, himself, one John J. McCabe.

It was no particular coincidence that I knew him. My school was progressive. It admitted not only the scions of the established families but those of the ambitious families as well. Its graduates, naturally, went into the significant careers. Johnny McCabe was one of the ambitious ones. We hadn't been anything like bosom pals at school; but he'd been tolerant of me, and I'd admired him, and fitfully told myself I should be more like him. Perhaps this was the reason Aunt Mattie had insisted on this particular school, the hope that some of the ambition would rub off on me.

Capella IV wasn't much of a post, not even for the early stages in a young man's career, although, socially, it was perhaps the best beginning Johnny's family could have expected. It was a small planet, entirely covered by salt. Even inside the port bubble with its duplication of Earth atmosphere, the salt lay like a permanent snow scene. Actually it was little more than a way station along the s.p.a.ce route out in that direction, and Johnny's problems were little more than the problems of a professional host at some obscure resort. But no doubt his dad spoke pridefully of "My son, a planet administrator,"

and when I called on the family to tell them I'd visited their son, I wouldn't be one to snitch.

There was doubt in my mind that even Johnny's ambition could make the planet into anything more than it was already. It had nothing we wanted, or at least was worth the s.p.a.ce freight it would cost to ship it. The natives had never given us any trouble, and, up until now, we hadn't given them any. So Earth's brand upon it was simply a small bubble enclosing a landing field, a hangar for checkup and repair of ships requiring an emergency landing, some barracks for the men and women of the port personnel, a small hotel to house stranded s.p.a.ce pa.s.sengers while repairs were made to their ship, or stray V.I.P.'s.

A small administration building flying Federated Earth flag, and a warehouse to contain supplies, which had to be shipped in, completed the installation. The planet furnished man nothing but water pumped from deep in the rock strata beneath the salt, and even that had to be treated to remove enough of the saline content to make it usable. At the time, I didn't know what the natives, outside our bubble, lived on. The decision to come had been a sudden one, and I hadn't had more than enough time to call the State Department to find out who the planet administrator might be.

I was first out of the yacht and down the landing steps to the salt covered ground. Aunt Mattie was still busy giving her ship captain his instructions, and possibly inspecting the crew's teeth to see if they'd brushed them this morning. The two members of her special committee of the D.T.'s who'd come along, a Miss Point and a Mrs.

Waddle, naturally would be standing at her sides, and a half pace to the rear, to be of a.s.sistance should she need them in dealing with males.

There was a certain stiff formality in the way McCabe, flanked by his own two selected subordinates, approached the ship--until I turned around at the foot of the steps and he recognized me.

"Hap!" he yelled, then. "Happy Graves, you old son of a gun!" He broke into a run, dignity forgotten, and when he got to me he grabbed both my shoulders in his powerful hands to shake me as if he were some sort of terrier--and I a rat. His joy seemed all out of proportion until I remembered he probably hadn't seen anybody from school for a long time; and until I further remembered that he would have been alerted by the State Department to Aunt Mattie's visit and would have been looking forward to it with dread and misgivings.

To realize he had a friend at court must really have overjoyed him.

"Johnny," I said. "Long time." It had been. Five-six years anyway. I held out my hand in the old school gesture. He let loose my shoulders and grabbed it in the traditional manner. We went through the ritual, which my psychiatrist would have called juvenile, and then he looked at me pointedly.

"You remember what it means," he said, a little anxiously I thought, and looked significantly at my hand. "That we will always stand by each other, through thick and thin." His eyes were pulled upward to the open door of the yacht.

"You can expect it to be both thick and thin," I said drily. "If you know my Aunt Mattie."

"She's your aunt?" he asked, his eyes widening. "Matthewa H. Tombs is _your_ aunt. I never knew. To think, all those years at school, and I never knew. Why, Hap, Happy, old boy, this is wonderful. Man, have I been worried!"

"Don't stop on my account," I said, maybe a little dolefully.

"Somebody reported to the Daughters of Terra that you let the natives run around out here stark naked, and if Aunt Mattie says she's going to put mother hubbards on them, then that's exactly what she's going to do. You can depend on that, old man."

"Mother Hub...." he gasped. He looked at me strangely. "It's a joke,"

he said. "Somebody's pulled a practical joke on the D.T.'s. Have you ever seen our natives? Pictures of them? Didn't anybody check up on what they're like before you came out here? It's a joke. A practical joke on the D.T.'s. It has to be."

"I wouldn't know," I said. "But if they're naked they won't be for long, I can tell you that. Aunt Mattie...."

His eyes left my face and darted up to the door of the ship which was no longer a black oval. The unexplained bewilderment of his expression was not diminished as Aunt Mattie came through the door, out on the loading platform, and started down the steps. He grew a little white around the mouth, licked his lips, and forgot all his joy at meeting an old school mate. His two subordinates who had remained standing just out of earshot, as if recognizing a crisis now, stepped briskly up to his sides.

Aunt Mattie's two committee women, as if to match phalanx with phalanx, came through the door and started down the steps behind her.

I stepped to one side as the two forces met face to face on the crunching salt that covered the ground. It might look like a Christmas scene, but under Capella's rays it was blazing hot, and I found myself in sympathy with the men's open necked shirts and brief shorts. Still, they should have known better than to dress like that. Somebody in the State Department had goofed.

Aunt Mattie and her two committee women were dressed conservatively in something that might have resembled an English Colonel's wife's idea of the correct tweeds to wear on a cold, foggy night. If they were already sweltering beneath these coverings, as I was beginning to in my lighter suit, they were too ladylike to show it. Their acid glance at the men's attire showed what they thought of the informality of dress in which they'd been received. But they were too ladylike to comment. After that first pointed look at bare knees, they had no need of it.

"This is the official attire prescribed for us by the State Department," Johnny said, a little anxiously, I thought. It was hardly the formal speech of welcome he, as planet administrator, must have prepared.

"I have no doubt of it," Aunt Mattie said, and her tone told them what she thought of the State Department under the present administration.

"You would hardly have met ladies in such--ah--otherwise." I could see that she was making a mental note to speak to the State Department about it.

"Make a note," she said and turned to Miss Point. "I will speak to the State Department. How can one expect natives to ... if our own representatives don't ... etc., etc."

"May I show you to your quarters, ma'am?" Johnny asked humbly. "No doubt you will wish to freshen up, or...."