Studying them, he could see by their expressions, hear by the prayers they muttered, how shocking these revelations were. It was one thing to know what was going on--another for them to see for themselves. It was neither pretty--nor hopeful. When it was over, the rabbi spoke. He said, in deep, slightly guttural, vastly impressive intonations, "What about Mars, honorable sir? Have you reached communication with our brothers and sisters on the red planet?" Bliss shook his head. He glanced at the alma-calendar at his elbow and told them, "Mars continues to maintain silence--as it has for two hundred and thirty-one years. Ever since the final war." They knew it, but they had to hear it from him to accept it even briefly. There was silence, long wretched silence. Then the abbess spoke. She said, "Couldn't we send out a ship to study conditions first hand, honorable sir?" 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.