_Half a loaf is better than none. Or, to put it another way, how many jelly beans can you get in ..._ A JAR OF JELLY BEANS By FRANKLIN GREGORY ILLUSTRATED by SUMMERS [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It seemed somehow appropriate to Justin that it was a little child who would finally save the world; since, broadly speaking, it was the little brats who caused the mess in the first place. "Not," Justin hastened to assure Doris with a tenderly approving glance at her expanded umbilical region, "that it's all their fault. There's just so damn many of them." Doris, supine like a pampered queen on the day bed, corrected him gently. "Us," she said. "Really, Justin--" "Yes, yes," Justin agreed. "With a name like mine. I ought to be more fair. Us, it is, of course, all ten damn billion of us. And it was really our Great Granddads to blame. If they'd listened to Huxley and the rest of the population-controllers, we'd not be in this box. We mightn't even be, period." "What a frightening thing to think of!" "I only meant," Justin pursued, "that since we were all kids, too, once, it does rather keep going back to that. The more kids, the more there are to grow up to beget more kids, ad infinitum till something gives. But with this lousy election coming on, maybe I'm not thinking so straight any more." "You're a very straight thinker," Doris told him, and she smiled proudly at the Nobel scroll on the wall. "Everybody at N. Y. U. insists you're an absolute genius, one of the last." Justin tried, and as usual failed, to contain his sarcasm. "Everybody? You mean all twenty-six morons on the faculty, or that mob of half-literate bums they call a student body?" "Now you're being difficult," Doris said. But Justin, genius-like, had stopped listening. Instead, he was thinking how silly his colleagues would look when he finally announced his answer. It was the obvious the clunkheads never saw; which, when you came down to it, was why clunkheads never won Nobel Prizes. Nobody denied that in this year of Our Lord, 2060, a new frontier was needed to relieve the horrible overcrowding. So where else, they asked, would you find it except in Outer Space? You couldn't make the world stretch, could you? Of course not. But it was like saying a jar would hold only so many jelly beans. That was true, too, but only in a sense. It was the other sense the clunkheads didn't see. * * * * * Doris stirred and murmured. Justin stiffened with concern. Doris said: "It didn't really hurt. It was the surprise. I can't get used to the little monster bumping around inside me. You don't mind me calling it a little monster, do you?"