POPULATION IMPLOSION
ANDREW J. OFFUTT
There's really nothing we can say about the following story other than that it's in­genious. When you've read it, we think you'll agree.
Nobody mentioned it for a while. Not on a large scale, I mean. A couple of years actually passed before it was no­ticed as a definite trend. I'd heard other doctors comment, of course. Merely that they seemed to be losing a lot of old patients all of a sudden, for no particular reason. But physi­cians are so used to death we didn't get excited. It was a hard-working insurance actuary who saw it for what it was.
People were just . . . dying. Old people. Doctors and coroners wouldn't admit to perplexity.
They would put down "heart attack" or "stroke" or "heart failure" or "cardiac arrest," or the like. Mostly cardiac arrest. Good old catchall. Think about it. Means the patient's heart stopped beating. Well, I should smile, it did! Did you ever hear of anyone's being dead and his heart still beating? That's an effect, not a cause. When you're dead your heart stops pumping. But something causes that.
A bullet. A fall. An illness: cancer, or cerebral hemorrhage. Or a plague. That is, a Plague.
The insurance actuary pointed out that the death rate was up—way up—among old people. Everything else was still there, of course; men murdering each other with automo-
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biles and slipping in the bathtub and so on. But old people were dying. The oldest.
Well, there wasn't anything unusual about that, and J remember even I chuckled. Sure, we knew old age was a disease. We called its cause a virus, which meant we didn't know what it was. A filterable virus . . . which means the organism was not filterable. We hadn't found it. And since we hadn't found the cause, we certainly hadn't done much about the effect. We had lengthened the lifespan. We could keep a man alive and we were proud of it. Oh, maybe he was a vegetable, but hurray and so what, we were keeping him alive. The family usually found the money, somehow.
But the actuary was one hundred per cent on the beam. The death rate was up among the oldest people, and it was increasing. Today thirty, tomorrow thirty-one, this day next month forty, this day next year sixty-two. I'm using relative figures, you realize. No need to start spouting precise ones. Just consider that in City A, on May 1st of 1979, twenty people died. In 1985 twenty-six died on that same day. In 1992, thirty-three. All in accord with the population in­crease; no cause for alarm. You have ten people, one dies. You have a hundred, ten die, et cetera.
But then it began curving up.
That actuary was shaken, I'll tell you. He shook the com­pany president, too, and the board of directors. And there's where I came in. I had just been made a director. You know how it goes: you don't mind working, which puts you in a class by yourself. You make money and become pretty well known and make some more money, and all of a sudden you're successful. People think you're pretty smart. They want you to be a director of the United Fund and the school board and a bank and the country club and a hospital and Kiwanis and this and that. Doesn't matter if you're an executive in an aircraft company or a plumbing and heating contractor or a distiller or even an M.D. So I had a chunk of stock and a chunk of permanent life insurance and some­how wound up a director of the Great Coastal Life Insurance Company of America.
No, I didn't attend the meetings. Lord, I knew about as much about the life insurance business as I do about quan­tum mechanics ... I can define "quantum" and I can come close to defining "mechanics"—I think. Anyhow, this actu­ary's report was mentioned in the minutes I received in the
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mail and I read it and chuckled. So he had discovered that old people were dying! Just tell me if they start dying of scarlet fever or botulism or chicken pox, I thought. Or puer­peral fever.
Well, then the article showed up in Newsweek five months later. A lot of people still thought it didn't make sense, but it was the second time I'd seen it and there I was a pro­fessional and . . . well, I called Roger Calkin at Great Coastal and asked him to send that nutty young actuary of his over.
And there it was. The actuary—Ike Hill—had by that time started collecting figures from all over the world. All you had to do was look at them. All deaths were up, natu­rally. Way up. But . . . the increase that reached up and slapped you in the eyeball and squeezed the pit of your stomach was in the over-75 group. It hadn't struck anyone as particularly odd that the Russian Premier, the West Ger­man Chancellor and the Speaker all had died within a few months of each other. But they'd had plenty of company. Those three had all been past eighty, and their group was dying by the score, by the thousand, by the tens of thou­sands. We'd prolonged their lives for them; now they were cashing in one after the other, as if they were crowding each other to prove or disprove their particular faith's be­lief or disbelief in afterlife. As if they were tired of life, or as if they were trying to make us look bad. Sure, I had that thought.
I remember saying, "Hell, Ike Hill, at this rate there won't be anyone over 75 alive anywhere!"
And I was right. It took less than a year. In the mean­while the world lost seventy or eighty assorted senators, representatives, MP's and what-have-you lawmakers. A king. An even ten presidents, premiers and the like, and one dictator. Several generals. A potful of judges. The Pope. Two-thirds of the Roman Curia. And every Cardinal Arch­bishop in the world but eleven. Oh, it was great for promo­tions, and pageants!
People were taking notice by then, of course. Someone used the word "plague" in a newspaper story one day, and after that it was The Plague. A lot of people did a lot of theorizing. There was religious gabble and atheist gabble and medical gabble and political gabble-gabble. Over a dozen different men announced over a dozen different causes. One even announced a cure.
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They were all wrong.
Then I found it, and I couldn't think of anyone to call save Ike Hill.
II
We got our heads and our figures together. We barely had to glance at them. Of course they weren't completely accu­rate. It's impossible to learn exactly how many people in the world died or were bom last year, or for that matter even twenty years ago. The ladies of Africa and India and China don't publish announcements every time they have a kid, whether they expose it to die or not, and they don't file death certificates, either.
We took the figures over to Ike's office and turned on some lights and fed them into the Iron Brain, and it told us what we already knew, which is about all Iron Brains are good for anyhow.
The death rate matched the birth rate.
In the United States it exceeded the birth rate.
Every time somebody popped a kid on the tail and made him suck up that first highly addictive drag of air, someone, somewhere, gasped his last one. And whatever the cause, it didn't know anything about fair play or national boundaries. The birthrate was highest in Asia. You know which country had the longest life expectancy, don't you? The largest per­centage of old people? Uh-huh. The U.S. of A. was rapidly running out of the euphemism I've always hated: "Senior Citizens." (I don't like any euphemism that indicates I'm junior.) Even then an extraneous thought went creeping across my mind like a guilty cat: something or somebody-capitalize that if you want—was solving the Medicare prob­lem. In a few years, maybe months, I wouldn't be filling out so many of those government forms for aged patients any more. The AHA wouldn't be hollering about all the paper­work involved in Medicare admissions. And my sons wouldn't have the 21% social security tax I was paying!
Frankly, Ike Hill and yours truly M.D. didn't know what the hell to do. We just stared at each other and the machine and then went out and found a quiet, dark place to talk. I forgot to call my answering service for the first time in five years. First time I'd got drunk in fifteen years, since I was a freshman in pre-med.
Whom do you tell? For maybe three years a plague had
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been raging across the world, a plague which obligingly passed over people who had lives to live and knocked on the doors of those who'd lived a fair-sized one already. Whom do you tell? No one else knew there was no one, not one single person, anywhere in the world, older than 75—maybe 74 by then. No one knew that every time an OB checked in at Admittance some oldster checked out of the world. And ... if it went on . . . then by this time next year, there wouldn't be anyone over 73, or 72, depending upon the in­ternational birthrate and the number of people in that age group. Or maybe 71, or 70. And the next year . . . whom do you tell? Call Washington and say "Mister President, this is Thomas Jefferson McCabe, M.D., in Atlanta, and pretty soon our country is going to be out of business, populationwise, and by the way you're 69, aren't you? Have you arranged disposal of your papers?"
Ike Hill and I didn't know. So we drank too many gimlets and had to be poured into a couple of taxis and sent home to ununderstanding wives.
In the morning I prescribed the usual ineffectual old wives' tales for myself and held my head carefully as I called A. T. Griffin, M.D., Chief at Good Samaritan Hospi­tal. And I called Michael Rosen, M.D., head of the U of G Med School and I managed to get them together in Doctor Griff's office at Good Sam. And I took poor Ike Hill with me and I told them. We told them. Then we showed them. It meant a lot more to them than to us, I assure you . . . Doc­tor Griff was sixty-four and Doctor Mike admitted to sixty-seven. And they bought it. They had to. Oh, we thought, and we postulated, and we opined, and we theorized and hoped out loud. But we had the answer.
Swell. What to do with it? I felt relieved—I'd shared it. I'd transferred the weight and the responsibility of the knowledge onto the shoulders of the best two medical father-images I had. I was out of it!
Well, I took my first plane ride to Washington. Doctor Mike's doctor said he shouldn't travel—you think we don't have doctors? Physician, heal thyself!—or try. And Doctor Griff just wouidn't-couldn't. So Mister Ike Hill, B.S., M.S., and T. J. McCabe, M.D., flew up to the big town with in­troductions from those two Big Men—Doctor Griff was also president of the Georgia Medical Association and a director
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of the AMA—and papers and graphs and reports and analyses and a few inches of computer tape.
We got in amazingly fast. My medical friends had done a good job, working personally and through senators and what not. I think it was the President's secretary got us in; he was a Georgian. It's pretty hard for mere people to get an audi­ence with the President of, by, and for the people.
Sorry. Getting old, as things go now. Ill be forty-five next month.
Naturally we wound up with the Surgeon General (first time he'd had anything to do in years!) and some fellow from Bethesda and a couple of hotrods from Johns H. and somebody else I later found out was a psychiatrist. Watching us! Ike and me!
They had to buy it, too. It's tough to buy truth you don't like. But it's tougher to turn your back on it, and not too smart, either, as Galileo, among others, proved.
You can't imagine how they looked. How we felt. What to do? There was the evidence. Now they were in the same leaky dinghy I'd been hand-paddling the past several days. What to do?—and how? I was relieved, I can tell you that. I'd unshouldered the burden. I had gently laid it at the feet of the boss, the proverbial Authorities, and now I was out from under.
And that's how Ike Hill and I got put in charge of Project Methuselah. That's how I got to be one of the Jaycee's Ten Most that year. I think it would have—and should have-been Ike, but there was a choice, and I was a member.
Funny thing about the Government Mind. You tell them you know where there's a problem, they right away treat you with respect—especially if you're in the American Magi­cian's Association and have the initials after your name. The schools translate them Medical Doctor. I've always figured they stand for Me Dunno. But everybody else automatically assumes Magic Dispenser.
Back to that government mind. It assumes that if you've been smart enough to point out a problem, obviously you're the man to tackle it. Tell the Feds you've found something wrong and they say fine, work on a cure, here's some money (we have lots and lots) and some papers to order some more and a title and some blank progress reports for you to file in triplicate, triweekly. I did have enough sense at least
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to get a commitment from the President, and get it in writ­ing, my way.
Then . . . funny thing about the human mind (as op­posed to the one just mentioned). Somebody gives you a problem, and you right away do one of three things. Punch the nearest panic button. Fake it. Or find that your mind is hurtling off in ten directions to Get the Job Done. That's what happened to me. Oh, obviously I had no solution. But I had thought of Step One, how to study the problem.
We got ourselves ten volunteers, Controls, seven male and three female human beings, aged 74. We put 'em in a hos­pital, third floor of Good Sam, and cleared the rest of the floor. In reverse order; I was careful with those people. My Personal Responsibilities. Sure, there were a lot more women of that age, but the reason I wound up with seven men was the men we interviewed weren't as touchy about giving their birthdates. We recorded them. I felt a monster, grisly, ghoul­ish, as I put them down, one under the other, in order: earliest birthdate at the top.
Then I did everything. Ran tests. X-rays, EKG's. EEG's. Taps. Smears. Basal Metabolisms. Those ten people were delighted. Free room service, lots of attention and no cost. And furthermore they could enjoy it; they weren't sick! I'd deliberately picked them in good health (as well as could be expected, considering, as we're fond of saying). I super­vised their diets as if they were the first septuplets and I had a movie contract riding on them. Decuplets, I guess, under the circumstances—perish the thought. They lived in near-sterile conditions. Daily checks. Blood pressure. Sistolics. Reactions. Put-out-your-tongue-and-say-ah. All of it.
They died. Very neatly, from the top of the list. And I felt ghoulish and grisly, crossing off their names, one by one, from the top, with ugly satisfaction that they were proving me right. Cause of death: cardiac arrest.
It was enough to give me back the religion I'd outgrown in med school when I first realized there's no justice in nature. Really. I felt like putting down "God" after Cause of Death. I didn't. But I didn't write cardiac arrest or natural causes or any of that rot, either. I put "PLAGUE," in block letters. And plague it was, The Plague. The one we couldn't cure, because it didn't make anyone sick or have any symptoms whatever, and we haven't found a cure for death yet.
None of these old people had any symptoms. They just died, peacefully and quietly. Patient Rested Comfortably
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To The End. We had permission, and we autopsied to shame all previous autopsies. We examined those cadavers more carefully than Leonardo had. Nothing. No bugs. No... well, just nothing. I'd have welcomed a little note: "I de­cided his time had come and there's nothing you can do about it so go on back to prescribing the Pill and delivering the ones who don't use it and Wednesday-afternoon golf. Yours very truly, (signed) Prime Mover."
And about that time I had the insane thought. The an­swer. The only one. Crazy.
The aforementioned Pill.
Ill
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than you and I will ever dope out, so let's start by talking about something we do know. At the beginning of the Christian Era there were about 250,000,000 people in the world. By the middle of the 17th Century there were a half-billion; it took some 1650 years to double. By the 1800s there were a billion. By 1960 the world's population had doubled again, to two billion, and indications were that there would be six billion by AD 2000. Momentum. Snowball effect. Like com­pound interest.
People didn't have enough sense to stop breeding in the face of overpopulation. It wasn't personal enough. So who's Julian Huxley? Yes, well, how about if it's good and per­sonal? Or bad and personal.
Look: every time a baby's born, someone dies.
No population explosion, no problem of food and water and lebensraum, or liebensraum either. We could've saved a lot of worry and palaver over that one. Somebody—go ahead, capitalize that: Somebody had decided the world was full enough. So he—I mean big h, He had either to stop the income or accelerate the outgo. He chose the second. I had to admit: it was the first time I'd witnessed justice in nature. Population implosion.
Oh Lord. The announcement. You remember it. It was . . . it was awful. Uncle Charlie died yesterday ... my God, I'm responsible! ... the baby . . . Uh-huh. Granddad began to look at his expectant daughter as if she were some sort of monster. She wasn't a monster, not really. No. But she was killing him. Or working on it. Just as soon as she went into the delivery room.
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That's personal. It was horrible.
It was elsewhere, too. Oh, everybody corroborated, all over the world. It was simple enough. All the evidence was there, it was just that Ike and I collated it first. I published the results of Control Group 1 and saw that copies were sent to the USSR and everywhere else. By that time I was into Control Group 3: 73-and-a-half-year-olds, and I was advertising for a long-term observation: 70-year-olds. I tried to think ahead.
Take China. The leaders were delighted (until they re­membered how old they were). They didn't have to worry about us any more. Not when The Plague would solve their problem. Simple matter of numbers. Mathematics. And there weren't a lot of old people over there to start with (a lot of those pictures you saw of Asian women who looked about 90 were women with infants, remember?). But . . . Communist or not, those people hadn't got completely over venerating the old. For the first time in history Chinese women had a good reason to practice a little conception-control, stopping pregnancies, rather than using the time-honored method of family-size control: merely exposing the infants to die. Getting oneself enceinte was murdering one's venerable grandfather.
Same thing in Japan, of course, and Thainambodia and the rest.
But we had the worst problem. The Land of Opportunity. We were strong . . . but outnumbered by all sorts of coun­tries. Mostly enemies. Russia (which really hadn't been an active enemy since the fifties, but . . . they were always ready) and China. Chou said about mid-century that after World War III there would remain ten million Americans and fifteen million Russians and 300 million Chinese. Nice mind Chou had! But now he didn't need WW III. All he had to do was reproduce us right out of business. He had more children to have more babies, and the old Asian Long View. (Not Chou; he was long dead. I'm talking about Huing, of course.)
It became patriotic not to have babies. People damn near stopped. Little Debbie and Jeff—everybody born in the fifties and sixties was named Debbie and Kevin and Jeffrey—mar­ried and bit their lips and didn't have babies, for poor old Grandpop's sake. Pill business boomed as Geritol sales began to dwindle. But poor old Grandpop hit the magic age and his heart stopped just the same. Debbie and Jeff got mad. It
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was all very well for us to support the world; to ship wheat to Russia whilst she called us the same old names; to support the UN almost single-handedly; to send all those goodies to our enemies; to steal Jeff's money to put into Grandpop's pocket—or rather his physician's pocket. But not having babies was personal. And when it didn't do any good any­how . . . well, I used to think we were due for a revolution around 1970, until I grew up and realized people wanted socialism. But we darned near had one in Year One of The Plague, and not over socialism, either.
Over making babies!
There wasn't any way to cover up. Somebody, somewhere, wasn't holding up his end. When oldsters continued to die, when age 72 became the barrier, everybody knew we were being conned. We weren't having babies. But somebody was. And as soon as Grandpop died—heck with 'em. Debbie and Jeffrey couldn't be worried about the Grandpop next door. There was a, as the clicheists say, hue and cry. Mean­ing one hell of a lot of loud noise. Oh, the noises in the UNI The accusations I Here we'd just grown up enough to admit we'd been covering our pride for an old mistake all these decades, we'd just let China in . . . and bang! Right off the bat we're jumping all over them in the UN! Mister Krish-napur swore his country was cooperating. Mister Vorlonishev said quietly and smugly that his country hadn't begun cheat­ing now. But Mister Li said the same thing.
Somebody was lying. A few African ladies here and there who hadn't got the word couldn't be affecting things the way they were being affected.
We had a celebration in the hospital the night of Henry Clark's 72nd birthday. Tea and cake in his room. Booze in dixicups in the resident's lounge later. Henry Clark didn't wake up the next morning.
The story got itself put together later, but here's how it happened, in sequence: The Russians had been shook. Really shook. Trigger fingers had never been so itchy before. They were scared we didn't believe them. So for the first time in Lord knows when they invited us—secretly—to come in and have a look. They were on the level. Our observers confirmed that the Soviet government had proclaimed re­production a crime against one's fellow man and, ergo9 the State. What was more important, our spies confirmed the observers.
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Meanwhile Stephen Levee had got out of China, some­how, and brought back photographs and stories.
The Chinese were breeding like crazy. Practically at gun­point. Told that the Americans were doing so. Patriotism: breed, that China may realize her destiny in the world. That sort of thing and threats were stamping out the oldster-veneration which had moved over to the U.S. sometime around 1930.
We didn't even announce it to the UN.
For the first time since World War Two, Washington and Moscow joined hands and said let's get together and do it together. Secretly, China has been a common threat for years; now it's far worse. Some people just can't be got on with. For the first time since . . . 1941, I guess, the United States announced honestly that it was embarking on a war of aggression. Oh, it was self-defense, of course, and therefore a Holy War. All wars are Holy Wars, to somebody. This one was for Grandad and Grandma and Uncle Elmer. Ex­cept it wasn't even a war.
Stephen Levee came out of China on April 11th. On the 16th the President announced that on May 1 he would make a major speech, and all the Lippmans and Huntley-Brinkleys wondered aloud and in print what he would have to say. Of course they pointed out that he had chosen to speak on the biggest day in the Communist World. What he did was to review the problem, the pleas, the agreements. The UN brawl. Then he displayed Stephen Levee's films and read his reports, word for word, and introduced Levee and Mister Vorlonishev and talked awhile and then announced that the governments of the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had declared war on the People's Gov­ernment of China.
Retroactively: the buttons had been pushed and the planes had swung Chinaward before his speech began.
IV
The Chinese were busily celebrating May Day. Peking was full of aircraft and missiles and troops and tanks, parading under the eyes of Huing and hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom had of course gathered spontaneously; one assumed the Red Guards were directing traffic. Just as spontaneously they went to join their revered ancestors be­fore Huing even heard about the President's speech. Peking
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wasn't hit with one bomb. The Chinese missile bases weren't hit with one bomb each. The missiles • came from half-a-dozen different directions and the bombs came from aircraft whose white stars and red stars had been effaced and re­placed with big UN insignia. The whole operation was un­believably successful, mainly because China had always known we'd never do it.
A missile got through and removed Colorado Springs and a tremendous chunk of mountain from our map. Two submarines sent four missiles streaming in toward Washing­ton and New York, and miracle of miracles all that propa­ganda from Denver was on the level; we were able to stop them! Not to mention the submarines.
Rand-McNally started working on new maps; the old ones, showing China, were obsolete. Norad began reorganizing. Re-aiming. The Russians were terribly sorry they'd goofed and sent Formosa down to join Atlantis, but little mistakes will happen, as we used to say when we napalmed our own troops every now and again. There was one hell of a—sorry, here comes the cliche again—hue and cry in the UN. Then there were a lot of very big goggle eyes when Mister Vor-lonishev and Mister Davis and the President stood up and said okay, we attacked them and we damn near destroyed China and what are you going to do about it? There were plenty of warheads and planes and silos left, and the allied nations of USASR were willing to use them if forced.
They weren't forced. The Aussie—funny—was the first to jump up and say he was going to call home and recommend his government broaden the alliance to three. By the time he was through there were so many delegates clamoring for recognition to climb aboard that the Secretary-General had to call for a general motion to save time. He got it. There was amazing unity.
A month later we celebrated William Michael's 71st birth­day, and he woke up the next morning, too.
But everyone seemed to have celebrated the "war" in the same way. Nine months later, on approximately February 1, Granddads started dropping dead again.
And in a few months it was all back again and in a few years life expectancy (certainty!) was below 65, and Senator Martin—age 63—introduced a bill to cut Social Security takeouts by two-thirds. He even managed to smile and say he'd never collect anyway.
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As far as we can see now the population of Planet Earth must remain constant at approximately five billion people or less. The nearest we've come in our figures is 4,998,987,834, and we've gotten that figure three times. Apparently either the Prime Mover didn't share our regard for numbers or he counted differently. Maybe he meant for us to have six fingers.
Somehow everybody just gave up and let it ride. For pos­sibly the first time in history the young got their way. Twice the old managed to get us in war-shape again, and both times the young got together and said nothing doing. We learned pretty quickly that you don't have wars if the sena­tors are invited to go, or if a few million young men, in both nations involved, say no. And when they suggest that if overgrown children insist on settling things by violence, let's try the old method: personal trial-by-combat . . . ! The President and the Prime Minister backed down pretty fast while the rest of us guffawed at the editorial cartoons.
They might as well have gone along. Within a year the Plague had got them both anyhow.
Meanwhile a lot of us were looking for answers. Why?
Okay. There was a rule: another Natural Law; really a restatement of the old one: survival, after all, of the fittest. This law said there shall not be more than approximately 5x10° personnel in existence on Planet Earth at any one time. Fine. Why? I figured once again we had ourselves an effect, not a cause. Effect: the Plague. Causative effect: our having reached such-and-such a population figure. Causa­tive effect: There Shall Not be more than such-and-such many people. But it was an effect, not a cause.
Okay. Why?
Well, here's a theory. If it doesn't happen to agree with your religion, that's tough; make up your own theory. Plenty of people have made up their own religions. This one repre­sents the thinking of a lot of people over a lot of centuries. It's been the basis for a lot of religions both before and since Christianity. There was some truth to the Mystery Religions —certainly Paul respected them highly. There is some, too, in Christianity, in Judaism, Buddhism and Islam. Mostly Buddhism, I guess. It was in Christianity, too, originally; called Gnosticism. The early Christians stamped it out. Too hard to sell. Isn't that just like Man, trying to interpret God? Those first several centuries were mostly salesmanship cen­turies, and the Roman state religion and Mithraism were
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tough foes. Even so the original concepts may have remained if the Empress Theodora hadn't so adamantly stamped them out. And even so the whole new faith might have gone by the board if the Emperor Julian hadn't got himseli kffled in battle just when he was starting to stamp out Christianity. (There's a death Td like to investigate!)
Reincarnation. The ring of return. You die, but your life-force or soul or whatever you wish to call it keeps coming back. Oh, not as bugs or cattle; your life-force is a mind, and enters only human beings. Without memories, usually, Except people who have funny dreams in full color ... or wind up nuts on some period of history without knowing why. Easy. You were there, once.
Look, just keep your mind on Hamlet's words that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And try to remember that a closed mind is pretty much like a closed door . . . there can't be much traffic, either way.
The idea is we have to try, over and over, no matter how long or how many corporate lives it takes, to be "good enough to retire" (I'm simplifying, naturally). If you com­mit six crimes (let's keep it straight and say "against nature," and I'm not talking about that implied definition of "Crimes against Nature" lurking like rattlesnakes in our lawbooks either. Men pretend to be so horrified by Sodom and Go­morrah they won't even use the words . .. yet nowhere in that old book does it say what the crime of those two cities was! For all we know it may have been over-defoliation or water or air pollution; those are crimes against nature, aren't they?)
Anyhow, if you committed six crimes in life #1 while you were Babble-babble of Memphis in 6,000 BC, you've got to compensate/atone for them somewhere, somewhen else. Your life-force seeks at/one/ment, whether you as Babble-babble do or not. As B-b you died and your life-force (go ahead and use soul if you feel you must) hung around without drawing a new body until 1,000 BC. There weren't many bodies around then, remember; there was a long wait be­tween assignments. You became a Hellenic peasant. You "atoned" for three of the crimes, but committed two new ones before you died. You've moved up one notch. You've got five bad deeds to wipe off the master ledger. But . . . you will have the opportunity; the man said you would be born again, didn't he? You think he meant by being splashed a little?
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As a Pfc. under Titus you held your own. You died. Your ego waited around some more, still with five black marks. Back in Memphis you had killed without mercy and had died of old age as a lot of killers do . . . they do NOT die by the sword ... that time. Sometime. Someplace. As a serf or maybe as a woman accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages you had such a hard time you cut the tally down to two. Surely there are special rules for those murdered in the name of God. Maybe you were lucky enough to be sworded.
You came back as Rudolf Schickner, say chief gas man at Auschwitz. Oops. Back to the end of the line. Next time you came back as . . . well, that's the system, anyhow. And of course you're coming back a lot more frequently now, That's the whole point.
At the beginning, whatever and whenever that "is," all life-forces were made. All the souls. All of them. None has been created/activated since.
Yes. You get the point. There aren't six billion in AD 2000. And there won't be six billion people in the world by 2500, either, or AD 5000. There never will be.
All the souls have been used up.
Don't call me a mystic. Try to open up your mind a little, let the light shine on the cobwebs of preconceptions. And remember I've had no religion save Ad majorem hominis gloriam since I was 23 years old. And, if you don't like that theory, think up another.
So here we are. No more interviews with Mrs. 101-years-old. The wastebaskets at the bank aren't full of unstamped brown envelopes at the first of the month any more. There aren't any old folks sitting around barbershops or on the courthouse steps or post-office steps any more. The old folks' homes with the cute names are closed down. You can buy Geritol stock with nickels and dimes. Companies have to advertise for night watchmen, and some of them don't have gray hair. In another fifty years, maybe, the Social Security Administration will be out of the red. Right now they're sending out a fourth of the checks they were thirteen years ago.
Do? Nothing. I don't think you can. Oh, I may be wrong, but I've got plenty of agreement. Sure, maybe you can find a way out of it. Maybe if a million people leave Earth to colonize another planet we can add a million human beings to the ledger and stop writing PLAGUE on death-certificates
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ANDREW J. OFFUTT
for a while . . . while we get more ships ready. I don't think so. I think we're at five billion, give or take a few, for keeps. Holding, situation no-go. It's up to you. Sure, tbara'JJ be a stop. A temporary one, anyhow. When it reaches the point that parents give birth and both die the instant twins are born, it will be over for a while. And maybe somebody will start acting sensibly. But unless you stop horsing around you're going to have a life expectancy of twenty and then fifteen and then Lord knows what, eventually.
Meanwhile I intend playing a lot of golf and doing a lot more reading. I'll be forty-five next month, and life expec­tancy's down to fifty-seven this month.
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