Bliss sighed. He said, "The last four spaceships on Earth were sent to Mars at two-year intervals during the last perihelions. Not one of them came back. That was more than a half century ago. Since I accepted this office, I have had some of our ablest remaining scientific brains working on the problem of building a new ship. They have not been successful." He laid his gloved hands, palms upward, on the desk, added, "It appears that we have lost the knack for such projects."
When they were gone, he walked to the broad window and looked out over the World Capital buildings at the verdant Sahara that stretched hundreds of miles to the foot of the faintly purple Atlas Mountains on the northwestern horizon. A blanket of brilliant green, covering what had once been the greatest of all Earthly deserts—but a poisonous blanket of strange plant mutations, some of them poisonous beyond belief.
Truly, Bliss thought, he belonged to a remarkable species. Man had conquered his environment, he had even, within the limits of the Solar System, conquered space. He had planted, and successfully, his own kind on a neighboring planet and made it grow. But man had never, at least on his home planet, conquered himself.
Overpopulation had long since ceased to be a problem—the atomic wars had seen to that. But, thanks to the miracles of science—atomics and automation—man had quickly rebuilt the world into a Garden of Eden with up-to-date plumbing. He might have won two planets, but he had turned his Eden into an arbor of deadly nightshade.
Oddly, it had not been the dreadful detonations of thermo-nuclear bombs that had poisoned his paradise—though, of course, they had helped. It had been the constant spillage of atomic waste into the upper atmosphere that had spelled ruin. Now, where four billion people had once lived in war and want, forty million lived in poisoned plenty. He was chancellor of a planet whose ruling species could not longer breed without disaster.
His was the last generation. It should have been a peaceful generation. But it was not.
For, as population decreased, so did the habitable areas of Earth. The formerly overpopulated temperate regions were now ghastly jungles of self-choking mutant plant growth. Only what had been the waste areas—Antarctica, the Gobi, Australia, Patagonia and the Sahara-Arabia districts—could still support even the strange sorts of human life that remained.
And the forty millions still alive were restless, frightened, paranoiac. Each believed his own group was being systematically exterminated in favor of some other. None had yet faced the fact that humanity, for all practical purposes, was already dead on Earth.
He sensed another presence in the room. It was Myra, his secretary, bearing a sheaf of messages in one hand, a sheaf of correspondence for him to sign in the other. She said, "You look beat, chancellor. Sit down."
Bliss sat down. Myra, as his faithful and efficient amanuensis for more than fifteen years, had her rights. One of them was taking care of him during working hours. She was still rather pretty, he noted with surprise. An Afro-Asian with skin like dark honey and smooth, pleasant, rather flat features. It was, he thought, a pity she had that third eye in her forehead.