I could hear his grin in his voice. "To restore and shore up the topsoil?" "Yep. To maintain the ecology that maintains man. And besides, woods are pleasant." "The rivers would be clear. The factories would dump their wastes in the desert. And the sewage would go through processing plants and then be put back on the land." "Not many factories, anyhow," I said. "No? Why?" "Not nearly so many people, for one thing. People would--people did--cherish each other more when they were scarcer. That's a psychological aspect of overpopulation thus far hardly observed. There are so many of us getting in each other's way and making life tough by merely being that we tend to hate each other just from congestion. Then--the people in the better world wouldn't be so crazed over junk. A tenth of the factories we've got now would probably furnish all the junk they'd want." "Cities, do you think?" "Maybe a few small ones--where people put in a few years before going back to the open country." "Villages? Small towns?" "Sure. Lots of schools and colleges. Everybody would be pretty bright--and pretty anxious to learn. Everybody would be artistic. Everybody would want to do a certain amount of work with his hands." "Why?" "That's the instinct of the critter, isn't it?" "How come they'd all be bright?" "Because the biggest fun we're going to have--when we get that wise, if we ever do--is breeding bright people. Living for the sake of future generations--and having some happiness doing it. Happiness with sex, amongst other things, when it ceases to scare us to pieces." "Maybe," Tom's tone objected, "you might finally convince the folks that knocking themselves off when they got useless was evidence of a great love--an assimilated employment of the death wish. I can even see certain remedial effects in the idea--if that were the common philosophy: people would want to make a bigger effort while they did live, for example. But you can't get dumb babies to knock themselves off." "You could start--though--at the other end. Clamping down on the people who overproduce and are least qualified to do so." "Birth control for the morons? The Jukes and Kallikaks?" "Yeah." "Too difficult. They fornicate when drunk." "Then set your lab wizards to find an easy, lasting system. They ought to work toward stopping the output of predefeated babies--of society-defeating hordes of nitwits--as a compensatory duty for working on longevity and the diseases of old age. Fill the drugstores with something you take a sip of that'll sterilize you for five years straight. Chocolate flavor. And back it with national advertising." "Try to sell that idea! Every church would say it would mean the suicide of the race." "Suicide of church members, maybe! Kidding aside, the more intelligent specimens of mankind, who do use birth control, still do have offspring--on purpose. It's just that they're outnumbered--and the net result is genetic decline." "What else--in the better world?"