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"Blind Alley" is a 10,000-word story by Isaac Asimov, about an alien race that has been conquered by humans. The story was first published in the March, 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

As humans expand into the galaxy, they find only one intelligent, alien race—a species which they relocate to the planet Cepheus 18. But the bureaucrats looking over the aliens notice that the aliens are not breeding. One of the aliens explains that their own science was directed towards biology, not physics. When they began running out of resources on their homeworld, they shifted their emphasis to physics, and began to dream of star travel. But then the humans came, and they realized that the galaxy was already the province of humans; there was no place for them to go. They stopped breeding to remove themselves as a burden to humans. But a bureaucrat in charge of the aliens manipulates the bureaucracy is subtle ways to teach the aliens how to use human spaceships. He then arranges for a large fleet to come to Cepheus. The aliens steal the ships and head off to the Megallanic Clouds to settle there, out of the reach of humans.

Additional Notes

This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 7 (1945). Asimov writes in that book that the inspiration for this story, which is presented as a series of bureaucratic memos, came while he was working at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia during World War II: “I remember once writing a specification in bureaucratese which I deliberately made as complicated and intricate as possible while adhering strictly to all the rules. I have formidable abilities in this respect and I ended up with something that I feared would get me court-martialed and it was only my sense of humor that prodded me into sending it up through the chain of command. I wasn’t court-martialed. In fact, I was commended and praised for a sterling piece of work and I think it was that which gave the idea for Blind Alley.”