Good old John shrugged and said, “One editor doesn't necessarily agree with another.”

He read the story and bought it. I hadn't told him about my crazy worry about being unable to write in New York, because I was ashamed of it and John was still the great man before whom I feared to show myself in my role as jackass. Still, by taking that story he had added one more favor to the many, many, he had done for me.

(And in case you're worried, I might as well tell you that my years in New York have so far been even more prolific than the Newton years were. I stayed 57 months in my two-room office and in that period of time published 57 books.)

NOTE: The population of Earth In 1970 Is estimated to be 3.68 billion. The present rate of increase doubles that population every 35 years. If this present rate of Increase can be maintained for 460 years then in the year 2430 A.D. the weight of human flesh and blood will be equal to the total weight of animal life now present on Earth. To that extent, the story above is not fiction.

The Greatest Asset

The Earth was one large park. It had been tamed utterly. Lou Tansonia saw it expand under his eyes as he watched somberly from the Lunar Shuttle. His prominent nose split his lean face into inconsiderable halves and each looked sad always-but this time in accurate reflection of his mood.

He had never been away so long-almost a month-and he anticipated a none-too-pleasant acclimation period once Earth's large gravity made its grip fiercely evident.

But that was for later. That was not the sadness of now as he watched Earth grow larger.

As long as the planet was far enough to be a circle of white spirals, glistening in the sun that shone over the ship's shoulders, it had its primeval beauty. When the occasional patches of pastel browns and greens peeped through the clouds, it might still have been the planet it was at any time since three hundred million years before, when life had first stretched out of the sea arid moved over the dry land to fill the valleys with green.

It was lower, lower-when the ship sank down-that the tameness began to show.

There was no wilderness anywhere. Lou had never seen Earthly wilderness; he had only read of it, or seen it in old films.

The forests stood in rank and file, with each tree carefully ticketed by species and position. The crops grew in their fields in orderly rotation, with intermittent and automated fertilization and weeding. The few domestic animals that still existed were numbered and Lou wryly suspected that the blades of grass were as well.

Animals were so rarely seen as to be a sensation when glimpsed. Even the insects had faded, and none of the large animals existed anywhere outside the slowly dwindling number of zoos.

The very cats had become few in number, for it wasmuch more patriotic to keep a hamster, if one had to have a pet at all.

Correction! Only Earth's nonhuman animal population had diminished. Its mass of animal life was as great as ever, but most of it, about three fourths of its total, was one species only - Homo sapiens. And, despite everything the Terrestrial Bureau of Ecology could do (or said it could do), that fraction very slowly increased from year to year.

Lou thought of that, as he always did, with a towering sense of loss. The human presence was unobtrusive, to be sure. There was no sign of it from where the shuttle made its final orbits about the planet; and, Lou knew, there would be no sign of it even when they sank much lower.

The sprawling cities of the chaotic pre-Planetary days were gone. The old highways could be traced from the air by the imprint they still left on the vegetation, but they were invisible from close quarters. Individual men themselves rarely troubled the surface, but they were there, underground. All mankind was, in all its billions, with the factories, the food-processing plants, the energies, the vacu-tunnels.

The tame world lived on solar energy and was free of strife, and to Lou it was hateful in consequence.

Yet at the moment he could almost forget, for, after months of failure, he was going to see Adrastus, himself. It had meant the pulling of every available string.

Ino Adrastus was the Secretary General of Ecology. It was not an elective office; it was little-known. It was simply the most important post on Earth, for it controlled everything.

Jan Marley said exactly that, as he sat there, with a sleepy look of absent-minded dishevelment that made one I think he would have been fat if the human diet were so I uncontrolled as to allow of fatness.

He said, “For my-money this is the most important post on Earth, and no one seems to know it. I want to write it up.”

Adrastus shrugged. His stocky figure, with its shock of hair, once a light brown and now a brown-flecked gray,his faded blue eyes nested in darkened surrounding tissues, finely wrinkled, had been an unobtrusive part of the administrative scene for a generation. He had been Secretary-General of Ecology ever since the regional ecological councils had been combined into the Terrestrial Bureau. Those who knew of him at all found it impossible to think of ecology without him.

He said, “The truth is I hardly ever make a decision truly my own. The directives I sign aren't mine, really. I sign them because it would be psychologically uncomfortable to have computers sign them. But, you know, it's only the computers that can do the work.

“The Bureau ingests an incredible quantity of data each day; data forwarded to it from every part of the globe and dealing not only with human births, deaths, population shifts, production, and consumption, but with all the tangible changes in the plant and animal population as well, to say nothing of the measured state of the major segments of the environment-air, sea, and soil. The information is taken apart, absorbed, and assimilated into crossfiled memory indices of staggering complexity, and from that memory comes answers to the questions we ask.”

Marley said, with a shrewd, sidelong glance, “Answers to all questions?”

Adrastus smiled. “We learn not to bother to ask questions that have no answer.”

“And the result,” said Marley, “is ecological balance.”

“Right, but a special ecological balance. All through the planet's history, the balance has been maintained, but always at the cost of catastrophe. After temporary imbalance, the balance is restored by famine, epidemic, drastic climatic change. We maintain it now without catastrophe by daily shifts and changes, by never allowing imbalance to accumulate dangerously.”

Marley said, “There's what you once said-'Man's greatest asset is a balanced ecology.'“

“So they tell me I said.”

“It's there on the wall behind you.”

“Only the first three words,” said Adrastus dryly.

There it was on a long Shimmer-plast, the words winking and alive: MAN'S GREATEST ASSET…

“You don't have to complete the statement.”

“What else can I tell you?”

“Can I spend some time with you and watch you at your work?”

“You'll watch a glorified clerk.”

“I don't think so. Do you have appointments at which I may be present?”

“One appointment today; a young fellow named Tansonia; one of our Moon-men. You can sit in.”

“Moon-men? You mean-”

“Yes, from the lunar laboratories. Thank heaven for the moon. Otherwise all their experimentation would take place on Earth, and we have enough trouble containing the ecology as it is.”

“You mean like nuclear experiments and radiational pollution?”

“I mean many things.”

Lou Tansonia's expression was a mixture of barely suppressed excitement and barely suppressed apprehension. “I'm glad to have this chance to see you, Mr. Secretary,” he said breathlessly, puffing against Earth's gravity.