2430 A.D.

Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe.

– J.B. Priestly.

“He'll talk to us,” said Alvarez when the other stepped out the door.

“Good,” said Bunting. “Social pressure is bound to get to him eventually. An odd character. How he escaped genetic adjustment I'll never know. -But you do the talking. He irritates me past tact.”

Together they swung down the corridor along the Executive Trail, which was, as always, sparsely occupied. They might have taken the Moving Strips, but there were only two miles to go and Alvarez enjoyed walking, so I Bunting didn't insist. I

Alvarez was tall and rather thin, with the kind of athletic figure one would expect of a person who cherished the muscular activities; who routinely used the stairs and rampways, for instance, almost to the edge of being considered an unsettling character himself. Bunting, softer and rounder, avoided even the sunlamps, and was quite pale.

Bunting said dolefully, “I hope the two of us will be enough.”

“I should think so. We want to keep it in our sector, if we can.”

“Yes! You know, I keep thinking-why does it have to be our sector? Fifty million square miles of seven-hundred-level living space, and it has to be in our apartment bloc.”

“Rather a distinction, in a grisly kind of way,” said Alvarez.

Bunting snorted.

“And a little to our credit,” Alvarez added softly, “if we settle the matter. We reach peak. We reach end. We reach goal. All mankind. And we do it.”

Bunting brightened. He said, “You think they'll look at it that way?”

“Let's see to it that they do.”

Their footsteps were muted against the plastic-knit crushed rock underfoot. They passed crosscorridors and saw the endless crowds on the Moving Strips in the middle distance. There was a fugitive whiff of plankton in its varieties. Once, almost by instinct, they could tell that up above, far above, was one of the giant conduits leading in from the sea. And by symmetry they knew there would be another conduit, just as large, far below, leading out to sea.

Their destination was a dwelling room set well back from the corridor, but one that seemed different from the thousands they had passed. There was about it an intangible and disconcerting note of space, for on either side, for hundreds of feet, the wall was blank. And there was something in the air.

“Smell it?” muttered Bunting.

“I've smelled it before,” said Alvarez. “Inhuman.”

“Literally!” said Bunting. “He won't expect us to look at them, will he?”

“If he does, it's easy enough to refuse.” They signaled, then waited in silence while the hum of infinite life sounded all around them in utterly disregarded manner, for it was always there.

The door opened. Cranwitz was waiting. He looked sullen. He wore the same clothes they all did; light, simple, gray. On him, though, they seemed rumpled. He seemed rumpled, his hair too long, his eyes bloodshot and shifting uneasily.

“May we enter?” asked Alvarez with cold courtesy.

Cranwitz stood to one side.

The odor was stronger inside. Cranwitz closed the doorbehind them and they sat down. Cranwitz remained standing and said nothing.

Alvarez said, “I must ask you, in my capacity as Sector Representative, with Bunting here as Vice-Representative, whether you are now ready to comply with social necessity.”

Cranwitz seemed to be thinking. When he finally spoke his deep voice was choked and he had to clear his throat. “I don't want to,” he said. “I don't have to. There is a contract with the government of long-standing. My family has always had the right-”

“We know all this and there's no question of force involved,” said Bunting irritably. “We're asking you to accede voluntarily.”

Alvarez touched the other's knee lightly. “You understand the situation is not what it was in your father's time; or even, really, what it was last year?”

Cranwitz's long jaw quivered slightly. “I don't see that. The birth rate has dropped this year by the amount computerized, and everything else has changed correspondingly. That goes on from year to year. Why should this I year be different?”

His voice somehow did not carry conviction. Alvarez was sure he did know why this year was different, and he said softly, “This year we've reached the goal. The birth rate now exactly matches the death rate; the population level is now exactly steady; construction is now confined to replacement entirely; and the sea farms are in a steady state. Only you stand between all mankind and perfection…

“Because of a few mice?”

“Because of a few mice. And other creatures. Guinea pigs. Rabbits. Some kinds of birds and lizards. I haven't taken a census-”

“But they're the only ones left in all the world. What harm do they do?”

“What good?” demanded Bunting.

Cranwitz said, “The good of being there to look at. There was once a time when-”

Alvarez had heard that before. He said, with as much sympathy as he could pump into his voice (and, to hissurprise, with a certain amount of real sympathy, too), “I know. There was once a time! Centuries ago! There were vast numbers of life forms like those you care for. And millions of years before that there were dinosaurs. But we have microfilms of everything. No man need go ignorant of them.”

“How can you compare microfilms with the real thing?” asked Cranwitz.

Bunting's lips quirked. “The microfilms don't smell.”

“The zoo was much larger once,” said Cranwitz. “Year by year we've had to get rid of so many. All the large animals. All the carnivores. The trees. There's nothing left but small plants, tiny creatures. Let them be.”

Alvarez said, “What is there to do with them? No one wants to see them. Mankind is against you.”

“Social pressure-”

“We couldn't persuade people against real resistance. People don't want to see these life distortions. They're sickening; they really are. What's there to do with them?” Alvarez's voice was insinuating.

Cranwitz sat down now. A certain feverishness heightened the color in his cheeks. “I've been thinking. Someday we'll reach out. Mankind will colonize other worlds. He'll want animals. He'll want other species in these new, empty worlds. He'll start a new ecology of variety. He'll…”

His words faded under the hostile stare of the other two.

Bunting said, “What other worlds are we going to colonize?”

“We reached the moon in 1969,” said Cranwitz.

“Sure, and we established a colony, and we abandoned it. There's no world in all the solar system capable of supporting human life without prohibitive engineering.”

Cranwitz said, “There are worlds circling other stars. Earthlike worlds by the hundred of millions. There must be.”

Alvarez shook his head. “Out of reach. We have finally exploited Earth and filled it with the human species. We have made our choice, and it is Earth. There is no margin for the kind of effort needed to build a starship capable of crossing light-years of space. -Have you been immersing yourself in twentieth-century history?”

“It wasn’t the last century of the open world,” said Cranwitz.

“So it was,” said Alvarez dryly. “I hope you haven't over-romanticized it. I've studied its madness, too. The world was empty then, only a few billions, and they thought it was crowded-and with 'good reason. They spent more than half their substance on war and preparations of war, ran their economy without forethought, wasted and poisoned at will, let pure chance govern the genetic pool, and tolerated the deviants-from-norm of all descriptions. Of course, they dreaded what they called the population explosion, and dreamed of reaching other worlds as a kind of escape. So would we under those conditions.