And had faced squarely, as he had promised when cam­paigning for election — it had become, by 1995, an elec­tive office — that he would deal with the colonization problem; he would find a Final Solution to the tor­mented condition that (one) Terra was as overpopulated throughout as Japan had been in 1970 and (two) both the alternate planets of the Sol system and the moonies and the domes et al. had failed wretchedly.

Horst had found, via Dr. von Einem's Telpor telepor­tation construct, a habitable planet in a star system too far from Sol to be reached by the quondam drayage en­terprise of Maury Applebaum. Whale's Mouth, and the Telpor mechanisms at Trails of Hoffman's retail out­lets, were the answer.

To all appearances it was duck soup, feathers, scut included. But —

"See?" Matson said to Freya. "Here's the written transcript of Horst Bertold's speech before he was elected and before von Einem showed up with the Telpor gadget. The promise was made before teleporta­tion to the Fomalhaut system was technologically possi­ble — in fact, before the existence of Fomalhaut was even known to unmanned elderly relay-monitors."

"So?"

Matson said grimly, "So our UN Secretary General had a mandate before he had a solution. And to the German mind that means one thing and one thing only. The cat and rat farm solution." Or, as he now suspected, the dog-food factory solution.

It had been suggested, ironically, in imitation of Swift, by a fiction writer of the 1950s, that the "Negro Question" in the U.S. be solved by the building of giant factories which made Negroes into canned dog food. Satire, of course, like Swift's A Modest Proposal, that the problem of starvation among the Irish be solved by the eating of the children... Swift himself lamenting, as a final irony, that he had no children of his own to of­fer to the market for consumption. Grisly. But —