atest 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.

For, as population decreased, so did the habitable areas of Earth. The
formerly overpopulated temperate regions were now ghastly jungles of
self-choking mutant plant growth. Only what had been the waste
areas--Antarctica, the Gobi, Australia, Patagonia and the Sahara-Arabia
districts--could still support even the strange sorts of human life that
remained.

And the forty millions still alive were restless, frightened, paranoiac.
Each believed his own group was being systematically exterminated in
favor of some other. None had yet faced the fact that humanity, for all
practical purposes, was already dead on Earth.

He sensed another presence in the room. It was Myra, his secretary,
bearing a sheaf of messages in one hand, a sheaf of correspondence for
him to sign in the other. She said, "You look beat, chancellor. Sit
down."

Bliss sat down. Myra, as his faithful and efficient amanuensis for more
than fifteen years, had her rights. One of them was taking care of him
during working hours. She was still rather pretty, he noted with
surprise. An Afro-Asian with skin like dark honey and smooth, pleasant,
rather flat features. It was, he thought,