Citizen Jell By MICHAEL SHAARA Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The problem with working wonders is they must be worked--even when they're against all common sense! None of his neighbors knew Mr. Jell's great problem. None of his neighbors, in truth, knew Mr. Jell at all. He was only an odd old man who lived alone in a little house on the riverbank. He had the usual little mail box, marked "E. Jell," set on a post in front of his house, but he never got any mail, and it was not long before people began wondering where he got the money he lived on. Not that he lived well, certainly; all he ever seemed to do was just fish, or just sit on the riverbank watching the sky, telling tall stories to small children. And none of that took any money to do. But still, he _was_ a little odd; people sensed that. The stories he told all his young friends, for instance--wild, weird tales about spacemen and other planets--people hardly expected tales like that from such an old man. Tales about cowboys and Indians they might have understood, but spaceships? So he was definitely an odd old man, but just how odd, of course, no one ever really knew. The stories he told the children, stories about space travel, about weird creatures far off in the Galaxy--those stories were all true. Mr. Jell was, in fact, a retired spaceman. Now that was part of Mr. Jell's problem, but it was not all of it. He had very good reasons for not telling anybody the truth about himself--no one except the children--and he had even more excellent reasons for not letting his own people know where he was. The race from which Mr. Jell had sprung did not allow this sort of thing--retirement to Earth. They were a fine, tolerant, extremely advanced people, and they had learned long ago to leave undeveloped races, like the one on Earth, alone. Bitter experience had taught them that more harm than good came out of giving scientific advances to backward races, and often just the knowledge of their existence caused trouble among primitive peoples. No, Mr. Jell's race had for a long while quietly avoided contact with planets like Earth, and if they had known Mr. Jell had violated the law, they would have come swiftly and taken him away--a thing Mr. Jell would have died rather than let happen. * * * * *