kindness

Years ago... Heck, the second half of 1975 and the first half of 1976 qualify as years ago, onsidering that many of the people I now work with were in kindergarten, if they were born at all. Anyway, that was not a particularly happy time of my life. But, at the same time, with the discovery of fanzine Requiem that has since then become semi-pro magazine Solaris, I had realized that I wasn't the only SF reader in the province of Quebec even though the fanzine was being published in Montreal, 200 miles west of Quebec City. And I had become (and remained so for a few years) a member of the Science Fiction Book Club, which made untold riches available to me. Like I said earlier, it wasn't a happy time of my life. Which is why I fondly remember one of the first books I purchased from the Club, The Early del Rey, a collection of stories by Lester del Rey. Especially the one titled Kindness.

It's the tale of a man who'd be considered of average intelligence today, except that the setting is a future Earth where everybody is a genius. Everything is a constant reminder to the man that he is, by the standards of his age, a moron, incapable of even understanding the kid-level comic-strips in the newspapers. And there is no escape. Or is there? One day, he comes across clues to lead him to a mothballed spaceship with, in it, the coordinates to an abandonned asteroid habitat. He eventually makes it out there, and is happy for the first time of his life.

The epilog then takes the reader from the man to some of his era's geniuses who had set up the whole thing for him, as an act of kindness.