No cost was counted. For, as the 20th Century turned into the 21st, the exploding population seemed to make success ever more urgent. Demagogues were swept into office on the mere promise of more Space spending. Their failure but paved the way for successor demagogues with still wilder plans. Yet each new surge of the wasteful effort saw the economy erode, the dollar shrink, and private income shrivel and disappear. Markets for first the luxuries and then the staples contracted and vanished. Non-Space industries closed and scores of millions were thrown on the dole. The simplest law of economics had asserted itself: the frantic expenditure of capital without return could only end in complete bankruptcy. Corporate giants stopped their dividends and defaulted their bonds, trading ceased on the stock exchanges, insurance empires collapsed, banks failed and all the gold in Fort Knox could not make good on the insured deposits. Newspapers folded for lack of advertising; television blacked out, and Government radio remained the sole means of mass communication. Taxes soared--and went unpaid. Schools closed, colleges foundered. Skills, acquired in a thousand years of Western civilization, were lost to posterity. And the great medical discoveries of the 19th and 20th Centuries, so important a factor in the mushrooming population, were all but forgotten by the ever-diminishing ranks of doctors. Diseases, once thought banished forever, reappeared. Ignorance spread. Tensions gripped the nation. The hospitals, prisons and madhouses spilled over, and each night brought new terror from marauding gangs. Life became a nightmare. * * * * * By 2030 the last foundations for any industrial nation collapsed as increasing man--cancer on his own planet, spendthrift and wastrel--exhausted his oil and coal and gas and minerals. By that year the subways had stopped in New York; trains braked to a halt from Coast to Coast; great liners rusted at their docks; planes grounded, and the lights went out in street and home. Nor did power from atom or wind or sun or tide begin to fill the breach. Research, so long channeled into the single paramount objective of celestial pyrotechnics, had neglected to find replacement fuels. This was the chaotic age in which Justin Weatherby reached manhood and Doris was born. * * * * * Charlie Hackett paid one of his rare calls next morning, flushed from climbing the seven backstairs flights. He was Doris' uncle, a former Mayor of New York and still the undisputed political boss with sixty million votes in his pocket if you counted the Upstate graveyards. He was past middle age, plumper than the austere times permitted, and it took him a moment to sit and recover his breath.