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.
