“Why don’t we human beings bring ours down?”

Ivo thought about that a moment and elected not to answer.

“I had a dream the other night,” Brad said, still wearing the helmet and goggles though he obviously did not need to supervise the continuing image. It made him resemble some futuristic visitor from space, in contrast to his words. “I was standing on the top of a mountain, admiring the miracles my people had wrought upon the face of the Earth and on the structure of neighboring space, and I saw a live prob. It was a male proboscoid, very old and large and ugly, and it stood there upon a tremendous mountain of garbage and slag and bones and looked at me. Then it flopped down into the sludge of refuse and splashed it in my direction so that I flinched, and lifted its trunk and laughed. It laughed through its nose with the sound of a mellow horn, multiphonically, so that the melody seemed to come at me from all directions.

“At first I thought it was amused at my upright, stout-legged stance that we have always assumed was necessary for any truly competent creature. Then it seemed that the mirth was directed at my entire species, my world itself. The peals of it went on and on, and I realized that it was saying to me, in effect, ‘We’ve been this route and now we’re gone. It is your turn — and you are too foolish even to learn by our example, that we spread out so plainly for you!’ And I tried to answer it, to refute it, to stand up for my people, but its humor overwhelmed me and I saw that it was already too late.”

“Too late?”

“Look at the statistics, Ivo. There may have been a quarter of a billion people in the world at the time of the birth of Christ. Today there are that many in the United States alone, and it is sparsely populated compared to some. The population of the world is increasing at a record rate, and so are its concurrent ills: hunger, frustration, crime. If our projections are accurate — and they are probably conservative — we have barely one more generation to go before it starts. That means that you and I will be on hand for it — and at a vulnerable age.”

“Before what starts? What will we be on hand for, apart from the affluence of the twenty-first century?”

“The inevitable. You saw it with the probs. And a few glimpses at the ghettos of the world — and some entire nations are ghettos — through the macroscope… I tell you, Ivo, things are going on right now that are horrifying. Remember Swift’s A Modest Proposal?”

“Look. Brad, I’m not a professor. I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Ivo, I’m not trying to tease you with my erudition. Some statements just aren’t comfortable to make too baldly. Jonathan Swift wrote, facetiously, of a plan to use the surplus babies of Ireland for food. The irony was, he made a pretty good case for it — if you took him literally, as a certain type of person might. He suggested that ‘a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled…’ He attributed the information to an American, incidentally, and perhaps his tongue wasn’t so firmly in his cheek as he would have us believe. He commented that such consumption would lessen the population — Ireland being severely crowded at the time — and give the poor tenants something of value to sell while lessening the expense of maintaining their families.”

Ivo developed that unpleasantly familiar tingle in limbs and stomach. “Exactly what have you seen?”

“There is already a going business in the ghettos of certain populous countries. A bounty is paid on each head, depending on the size and health of the item. Certain organs are sold black market to hospitals — heart, kidneys, lungs and so on — who don’t dare inquire too closely into the source. The blood is drained entirely and preserved for competitive bidding by institutions in need. The flesh is ground up as hamburger to conceal its origin, along with much of the—”

“Babies?”

“Human babies. Older bodies are more dangerous to procure, and suffer from too many deficiencies, though there is some limited traffic in merchandise of all ages. Most are stolen, but some actually are sold by desperate parents. It is cheaper than abortion. The going rate varies from a hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on the area. It really does seem to be a better thing for some families than trying to feed another mouth; their lives are such that existence is no blessing. But of course they get nothing when their children are stolen.”

“I can’t believe that, Brad. Not cannibalism.”

“I have seen it, Ivo. On the macroscope. There was nothing I could do, since no government on Earth will admit the problem, and an accusation of this nature would backlash to suppress the use of the scope itself. People demand their right for self-delusion, particularly when the truth is ugly. But as I was saying, in another generation it will become a legal institution, as it did with the probs. A proposal no longer so modest.”

Ivo kept his eyes on the screen. “I don’t see that what happened to the probs has to happen to us. The danger exists, sure, okay, but inevitable? Just because they came to it?”

Brad’s fingers moved over the controls. Ivo saw that the section for the macroscope-picture was comparatively simple; most of the massed equipment was probably for unrelated adjustments. The scene shifted.

“You’re being subjective,” Brad said. “Compare these.”

And the screen showed an angelic humanoid face, feminine and altogether lovely. The eyes were great and golden, the mouth small and sweet. Above the still features flowed a coiffure of down, neither hair nor feathers, greenish but softly harmonious. Below the face a silken robe covered a slender body, but Ivo could tell from its configuration that the gentle curves of the torso were not precisely mammalian. It was as though a human woman had evolved into a more sublime personage, freed from the less esthetic biological functions.

It was a painting; as Brad decreased the magnification the frame came into view, then the columns and arches of an elegant setting. A museum, clean and somber, styled by a master architect.

“Intelligent, civilized, beautiful,” Ivo murmured. “But where are the living ones?”

“There are no living creatures on Planet Mbsleuti. This is a royal tomb, as nearly as we can ascertain — one of the few to be buried deeply enough to endure.”

“Endure what?”

Suddenly the scene was a heaving sea of sludge, breaking against a barren beach. Ivo could almost smell the contamination of the smoky atmosphere.

“Total pollution,” Brad said. “Earth, air, water. We have analyzed the content and determined that all of it is artificial. They became dependent on their machines for their existence, and could not control the chemical and atomic waste products. Want to bet where they got their fresh meat, just before the end? But it only hastened their extinction as a species.”

The picture of the royal woman was back, mercifully, but Ivo still saw her devastated world. “Because they overextended their resources?” he asked, requiring no answer. “Would not limit themselves until Nature had to do it for them?” He shook his head. “How long ago?”

“Fifteen thousand years.”

“All right,” Ivo said defensively. “That’s two. Any other technological species on tap?”

“One more.” Brad adjusted again, and a landscape of ruins came into view. After a time a grotesque four-legged creature shambled along a pathway between two overgrown mounds of rubble. Matted hair concealed its sensory organs, and it walked with its toes curled under — like a gorilla, Ivo thought. It looked sick and hungry.

“As we make it, civilization collapsed here less than five hundred years before this picture,” Brad said. “Population reduced from about ten billion individuals to no more than a million, and is declining. There still isn’t enough to eat, you see, and naturally no medicine. Most surviving plants are diseased themselves…”