McDougal in the Twenty-Third Century (excerpt)

Copyright 1983, Starbox Press

The council decided that McDougal should be banished to a planet in a distant galaxy. Xerxes would be allowed to accompany him so that his education about 23rd Century life might continue, however McDougal would no longer be allowed access to modern technology. It would take years to repair the damage done to Earth's capitol city, and even with the Alien Overlords sending in the latest cleanup technology, they still could not guarantee that the area would be free from contamination.

There were many planets to which the Overlords allowed Earthlings to travel that had become quite popular as vacation destinations. The planet that had been chosen for McDougal was not one of these. This was not because the planet was inhospitable. Far from it, in fact. It was remarkably similar to Earth in nearly every respect. It was even inhabited by a race of creatures almost identical to humans. That is, identical in every respect save one.

The human eyeball is a remarkable piece of equipment. The only organ more remarkable is the human brain. The eye, you see, has one potential flaw. Because of the way its lens is constructed, all of the information the eye perceives is broadcast to the brain upside-down. Fortunately for us, our remarkable brains are able to interpret this information so that we think of our feet as being down and the sky being up. The brains of the dominant race of the planet to which McDougal and Xerxes were about to be sent, so humanlike in every other respect, were not able to perform this feat that we take for granted. This biological quirk resulted in these creatures having an extremely pessimistic worldview. Instead of seeing the sky as a realm of limitless possibility soaring above them, they saw it as a frightening void which all living creatures dangled above precariously. Outdoors they walked around staring at their feet, contemplating their tenuous grasp on the planet above them, too terrified to gaze down into the blue abyss. They preferred to spend their time indoors, inside houses with low ceilings, which they found comforting, and few windows. In their entire history they had never constructed a building with a second floor, much less lofty structures such as pyramids or skyscrapers.

This race viewed humans as unbearably cheerful and optimistic creatures. When the aliens arrived to conquer this backwater planet they were surprised that the residents did not put up any sort of resistance, as the Earthlings had. In fact, many seemed almost relieved by the arrival of the aliens. This was because most of the planet's major religions predicted that one day something malevolent would rise up from the void and destroy them. The most religious of these creatures were naturally relieved to find they had been on the right track all of their lives. Once the aliens conquered the planet, however, they had little idea what to do with it. There was nothing in the way of technology to exploit. In their millennia of existence the residents of the planet had accomplished very little. They were mainly a medieval agrarian society, due to the fact that farming was the one occupation that allowed them to spend most of the day gazing up at the dirt. But now, because the planet was completely devoid of modern technology, the Alien Overlords considered it the perfect prison for McDougal.

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