The Project Gutenberg EBook of Do Unto Others, by Mark Clifton

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Title: Do Unto Others

Author: Mark Clifton

Illustrator: Ed Emsh

Release Date: April 29, 2010 [EBook #32181]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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_

[Illustration:]

_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 h