“I wish I could find my way through it all,” I said. “But anyway I see your point. What you wanted was to let me know which was sand and which was rock to build on, wasn’t it? You were afraid I was mistaking it all for solid ground?” “That’s about it. Remember, with decent luck you ought to have a clean slate to start with. Most of our old troubles have solved themselves, or will solve themselves in the course of the next few months. There’s no idle class in the Nitrogen Area; money’s only a convenient fiction and now they know it by experience; there’s no Parliament, no gabble about Democracy, no laws that a man can’t understand. I’ve made a clean sweep of most of the old system; and the rest will go down before we’re done.” “I know that, but to tell the truth I don’t know where to begin building. It seems an impossible business; the more I look at it the less confidence I have in myself.” “Don’t worry so much about that. You’ll see that it will solve itself step by step. It’s not so much cut-and-dried plans you need as a flexible mind combined with general principles. It’s the principles that will worry you.” “I suppose you are right,” I said. “It’s obvious if you look at it. Your first stages will be the getting of these five million people into two sets: one on the land to cultivate it; the other still working on nitrogen. That’s evident. The whole of that part of the thing is a matter of statistics and calculation; there’s nothing in it, so far as thinking goes. After that, you have to arrange to get the best out of the people mentally and morally; and I think Elsa will be a help to you there. By the way, she refuses to leave me.” “Then how am I going to get her help?” “Oh, I’ve arranged that she is to have lighter work and she’ll have the evenings free; so you and she can consult then, if you will.” This seemed to be enough to go on with. “There’s another thing, Jack,” he continued, “I’ve got good news for you. It appears from the work that the bacteriologists are doing that _B. diazotans_ is a short-lived creature. According to their results, the whole lot will die out in less than three months from now, as far as this part of the country is concerned. Apparently it combined tremendous reproductive power with a very short existence; and it’s now reaching the end of its tether. So in three months we ought to be able to get the nitrogenous stuff on to the fields without any fear of having it decomposed. That was what always frightened me; for if _B. diazotans_ had been a permanent thing, the whole scheme would have collapsed. I foresaw that, but we just had to take the chance; and I always hoped that if the worst came to the worst we might hit on some anti-agent which would destroy the brutes. You know that in some places it hasn’t produced any effect at all; the local conditions seem against it, somehow.” * * * * *