"Lord!" he exclaimed, blinking. "It's good to get out of that mob, and the smallpox out of hand again. Why d'you know, when I was Mayor twenty years ago, this town had only twenty-eight million people. It must be twice that now." Justin, wondering what prompted the visit, said: "And it was built for only eight." "Really? Hmm. You ever been to India?" "Oh, yes." "Worse'n here?" "Much worse," said Justin. "Though I judge we're about where they were eighty or ninety years ago." "I was in London last week, gov'ment trip. This Hindu diplomat was blamin' us for their troubles." Justin guessed what was coming and smiled. Hackett went on: "He said we went over there a century or so ago with our bloody doctors and our bloody anti-biotics and our bloody surplus food and cured their diseases and filled their tummies. We cut down their death rate and now, where they'd had at least a place to lie down, there's hardly room to stand. He claimed it wasn't moral." "I suppose," murmured Justin, "we should have let them keep on dying like flies." "That's what I told him, but he said we coulda educated 'em first and maybe they'da turned to family planning." Justin was grinning. "Education on an empty stomach? Like which comes first, the chick or the egg? Rats! Education wasn't the answer. We had more schools than anywhere, but it happened here. We had two hundred million people back in 1975 and today we've got a billion. Which just proves that old Tom Malthus was right: the population outruns the food supply every time if you don't keep it down with war, famine, disease or sexual discipline." "And I guess," grunted Hackett, "we can't put a cop in every bedroom." He colored. "Sorry, Doris." "It's perfectly all right," Doris said. "It might be a very good idea." Her uncle slapped his knee with delight and Justin chuckled. "Y'know," said Hackett, "there's people in Europe still think we shoulda used our nuclear bombs those last two wars. Maybe they're right, it woulda cut down the population." "No," said Justin, "but say we had. There were four billion in the world in 1980. How many could the bombs kill before knocking both sides out? A billion? All Europe, Russia and North America? So you'd put the clock back only twenty years to 1960 when there were only three billion, and delayed the crisis by only that much. But you'd still have it. No, it was better not and we hadn't the blood on our hands." He winked. "Besides, it saved our nuclear power for the Great Adventure." Hackett missed the malicious irony. "But you can't tell 'em that. They blame us for everything. They're poor. God, they're poor. And because we're a mite better off, and by some miracle still have free elections, they hate our guts." "They always did," said Justin. "The legend of Uncle Shylock dies hard." "They hate us," Hackett repeated. "And yet, it's just pitiful the way they look to us for the answer." And now Justin suspected why Hackett had called. "Space?"