But he didn't.
Consequently, by the time of his death conditions were no longer quite perfect. A great many were badly housed.
On the whole, Snodgrass was pleased, for all these things could surely take care of themselves. With a healthy world population, the increase of numbers would be a mere spur to research. Boundless nature, once its ways were studied, would surely provide for any number of human beings.
Indeed it did. Steam engines on the Newcomen design were lifting water to irrigate fields to grow food long before his death. The Nile was dammed at Aswan in the year 55. Battery-powered streetcars replaced oxcarts in Rome and Alexandria before a.d. 75, and the galley slaves were freed by huge, clumsy diesel outboards that drove the food ships across the Mediterranean a few years later.
In the year a.d. 200 the world had now something over twenty billion souls, and technology was running neck-and-neck with expansion. Nuclear-driven ploughs had cleared the Teutoburg Wald, where Varus's bones were still mouldering, and fertilizer made from ion-exchange mining of the sea produced fantastic crops of hybrid grains. In a.d. 300 the world population stood at a quarter of a trillion. Hydrogen fusion produced fabulous quantities of energy from the sea; atomic transmutation converted any matter into food. This was necessary, because there was no longer any room for farms. The Earth was getting crowded. By the middle of the sixth century the 60,000,000 square miles of land surface on the Earth was so well covered that no human being standing anywhere on dry land could stretch out his arms in any direction without touching another human being standing beside him.
But everyone was healthy, and science marched on. The seas were drained, which immediately tripled the available land area. (In 50 years the sea bottoms were also full.) Energy which had come from the fusion of marine hydrogen now came by the tapping of the full energy output of the Sun, through gigantic "mirrors" composed of pure force. The other planets froze, of course; but this no longer mattered, since in the decades that followed they were disintegrated for the sake of the energy at their cores. So was the Sun. Maintaining life on Earth on such artificial standards was prodigal of energy consumption; in time every star in the Galaxy was transmitting its total power output to the Earth, and plans were afoot to tap Andromeda, which would care for all necessary expansion for—30 years.
At this point a calculation was made.
Taking the weight of the average man at about a hundred and thirty pounds—in round numbers, 6 x 104 grammes—and allowing for a continued doubling of population every 30 years (although there was no such thing as a "year" anymore, since the Sun had been disintegrated; now a lonely Earth floated aimlessly towards Vega), it was discovered that by the year 1970 the total mass of human flesh, bone, and blood would be 6 x 1027 grammes.
This presented a problem. The total mass of the Earth itself was only 5.98 x 1027 grammes. Already humanity lived in burrows penetrating crust and basalt and quarrying into the congealed nickel-iron core; by 1970 all the core itself would have been transmuted into living men and women, and their galleries would have to be tunnelled through masses of their own bodies, a writhing, squeezed ball of living corpses drifting through space.
Moreover, simple arithmetic showed that this was not the end. In finite time the mass of human beings would equal the total mass of the Galaxy; and in some further time it would equal and exceed the total mass of all galaxies everywhere.
This state of affairs could no longer be tolerated, and so a project was launched.
With some difficulty resources were diverted to permit the construction of a small but important device. It was a time machine. With one volunteer aboard (selected from the 900 trillion who applied) it went back to the year 1. Its cargo was only a hunting rifle with one cartridge, and with that cartridge the volunteer assassinated Snodgrass as he trudged up the Palatine.
To the great (if only potential) joy of some quintillions of never-to-be-born persons, Darkness blessedly fell.
Golden Ages Gone Away
This us a sort of reminiscence of what the world of science fiction has been like over the last 30 or 40 years — or at least, that part of it that 1 inhabited. We are all being encouraged to write our autobiographies these days — it is part of the "age of respectability" — and some of us are proving very easy to persuade. By publishing this short sketch here, I hope to postpone my own succumbing by at least, oh, umm, maybe a month.
When the Apollo 15 astronauts landed on the moon they named craters after characters and scenes in stories by Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Heinlein, Verne, Frank Herbert, and E. E. Smith. University libraries beg the privilege of collecting the papers of science-fiction writers. Routinely we get called on to keynote a scientific gathering or advise large corporations on how to run their affairs. We are very Establishment, these days. So much so that when I teach my college course in science fiction and divide the history of sf into four eras, the name I use for the present stage is the Age of Respectability.
It was not always thus. Time was when science fiction was one pulp category out of a dozen, no more respectable than sports or horror, nowhere near as financially successful as the detectives and the westerns. The magazines typically had names like Thrilling Wonder Stories or Super Science Stories. The covers matched the titles. A typical scene would be a fire-eyed monster covered with green scales, crashing through the window of a spaceship intent on the rape of a terror-stricken blonde in a stainless-steel bra. How did we get from there to here?
It was not a straight line. It was a couple of quantum jumps that really didn't seem like much at the time to us who lived through them (is a germ in an astronaut's bloodstream aware that he has gone to the moon and back?), but have come since to be looked on as golden ages in science fiction. For the world in general these golden ages were gritty, troublesome times; one coincided with the buildup and first disastrous years of the second World War, the other with the sullen McCarthy period in the United States; there was little joy in either, for most people. But for science fiction they were yeasty times ...
As far as I am concerned, the first golden age began around 1937. Probably the dating is personal to me; it happens that 1937 was when I first made a professional appearance, with a poem in Amazing Stories. But that's close enough, and all the dates are a little fuzzy. (Even that date, because as it happens I wrote the poem in 1935, and it was accepted in 1936, and published in 1937—and paid for in 1938, because that was how things went in those days.) It was around that time, at any rate, that John Campbell took over Astounding Stories from F. Orlin Tremaine; the Thrilling Group's editorial collective of Leo Margulies, Mort Weisinger, and others had replaced father figure Hugo Gemsback himself on Wonder Stories; Raymond A. Palmer was about to acquire Amazing Stories from white-bearded T. O'Conor Sloane, Ph.D. And then or in the next couple of years, writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and a dozen others, better known or less, were about to make their debuts.