Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction June 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
DO UNTO OTHERS
BY MARK CLIFTON
Illustrated by Ed Emsh
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.... Andthe natives of Capella IV, philosophers at heart,were not ones to ignore the Golden Rule....
y Aunt Mattie, Matthewa H. Tombs, is Presidentof the Daughters of Terra. I am her nephew, the onewho didn't turn out well. Christened Hapland Graves, afterEarth President Hapland, a cousin by marriage, the fellowsat school naturally called me Happy Graves.
"Haphazard Graves, it should be," Aunt Mattie commentedacidly the first time she heard it. It was her notvery subtle way of reminding me of the way I lived my lifeand did things, or didn't do them. She shuddered at anythingdisorderly, which of course included me, and it washer beholden duty to right anythingwhich to her appeared wrong.
"There won't be any evil tomarch on after you get through,Aunt Mattie," I once said when Iwas a child. I like now to think thateven at the age of six I must havemastered the straight face, but I'mafraid I was so awed by her that Iwas sincere.
"That will do, Hapland!" shesaid sternly. But I think she knew Imeant it—then—and I think thatwas the day I became her favoritenephew. For some reason, neverquite clear to me, she was my favoriteaunt. I think she liked me mostbecause I was the cross she had tobear. I liked her most, I'm sure, becauseit was such a comfortableride.
A few billions spent around thehouse can make things quite comfortable.
She had need of her billions tocarry out her hobbies, or, as shecalled it, her "life's work." Aunt Mattie always spoke inclichés 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 thewealthier Plots, and increased as the family fortunes wereincreased by her father, one of the more ruthless Tombs, butit was under Aunt Mattie's supervision that it came, so tospeak, into full flower.
"Love," she would say, "means more to a flower than allthe scientific knowledge in theworld." Apparently she felt thatthe small army of gardeners, eacha graduate specialist in duplicatingthe right planetary conditions,hardly mattered.
The collection covered some twohundred acres in our grounds at thewest side of the house. Small, perhaps,as some of the more vulgardisplays by others go, but very, verychoice.
The other hobby, which she combineswith the first, is equally expensive.She and her club members,the Daughters of Terra (D.T.s forshort), often find it necessary totake junkets on the family spaceyacht out to some distant planet—tostraighten out reprehensible conditionswhich have come to her attention.I usually went along to takecare of—symbolically, at least—thebags and (their) baggage.
My psychiatrist would say that