I was driven out of the city right after I'd packed up my supplies—two days' food and water in a rude knapsack, a call-radio and some other special devices I didn't think I was going to need. But, I told myself, you never know ... there was even a suicide device, just in case. I packed it away and forgot about it.
The city was an oasis in the middle of jungle, with white clean buildings and static-cleaned streets and walks. It didn't seem to have a park, but, then, it didn't need one. There was plenty of park outside.
The beautiful street became a poor one half a mile out of the city, and degenerated into a rough trail for ground vehicles soon after that. "How many people are there on this planet?" I asked my driver.
He never took his eyes from the road. "Two and a half million, last census," he said, with great respect.
That explained things, of course. As the population grew, the cities would expand and the forests would go under. It had happened on Earth, and on every settled planet. As recently as 1850, for instance, large tracts of New York City, where I make my home, were farm and forest; why, in 1960 the population was only about eight million, and they thought the place had reached its height.
Wohlen had only begun its drive to citify the planet. Give it another hundred and fifty years and the guerrillas couldn't exist, for simple lack of any place to hide and to live independently.
Unfortunately, the Government didn't have a hundred and fifty years. Judging from what I'd seen, the Government didn't have a hundred and fifty days. Rationing was in force at all the markets we'd passed on the way out, and there seemed to be a lot of cops. That's always a bad sign; it means normal processes are beginning to break down and anarchy is creeping in.
I thought about it. Three months was an outside limit. If I couldn't finish the job in three months, it might as well never be finished.
It's always nice to have a deadline, I told myself.
The car stopped at a place in the road that looked like any other place in the road. I got out, adjusted my knapsack and started away from the road, into the jungle that bordered it. The hypno I'd taken had told me there were farms scattered through the jungle, but I didn't know exactly where, and I didn't even want to find out. The knapsack was heavy, but I decided I could stand the weight.