"No, thank you."
Johnny said, his voice thoughtful, "I imagine the real starting point was back about 1957 when the Chinese discovered that a nation's greatest natural resource is its manpower."
She frowned at him. "What in the world are you talking about?"
He ignored her and went on. "Originally, appalled by the job of feeding over half a billion mouths, they had initiated a birth control plan. But after a year or two they saw it was the wrong approach. They were going to succeed, if they succeeded, in their Great Leaps Forward by utilizing the labor of every man, woman and child in the country. And that's what they proceeded to do. The lesson was brought home to the rest of the world in less than ten years, when such other countries as India and Indonesia failed to do the same."
Johnny leaned back in his chair, and his eyes were thoughtful but unseeing. "Even we of the west learned the lesson. The most important factor in our leadership was our wonderful trained labor force. As far back as 1960 we had more than 65 million Americans working daily in industry and distribution. Even the Russkies, with their larger population, didn't begin to equal that number."
"What are you driveling about?" the reporter demanded.
"To sum it up," Johnny said mildly, "the battle for men's minds continues and each of the world's great powers has discovered that it can't afford to limit its population—its greatest resource. So population continues to explode and the world is currently frantically seeking sources of food for its new billions. The Amazon basin is being made into a tropical garden; the Japanese, landless, are devising a hundred methods of farming the sea; Australia is debouching into its long unpopulated interior, doing much the same things we are here in the Sahara. The Chinese are over-flowing into Sinkiang, Mongolia and Tibet; the Russkies into Siberia. We of the west, with the large underdeveloped areas of the western hemisphere have not been so greatly pushed as some others. However, there is always tomorrow."
Derek entered with Captain Mohammed Mohmoud. The latter day Rudolph Valentino had a puzzled expression on his dark face.
"Here's the hired man, Hiram," Derek drawled.