This all pointed to the seriousness — not merely of the problem of overpopulation and insufficient food production — but to the insane, schizoid solutions seriously being considered. The brief World War Three — never officially called that; called instead, a Pacifying Action, just as the Korean War had been a "Police Action" — had taken care of a few millions of people, but — not quite enough. As a solution it had worked to a partial extent; and was, in many influential quarters, viewed exactly as that: as a partial solution. Not as a catastrophe but as a half-answer.
And Horst Bertold had promised the balance of the answer.
Whale's Mouth was it.
"So in my opinion," Matson murmured, to himself mostly, "I've always been suspicious of Whale's Mouth. If I hadn't read Swift and C. Wright Mills and the Herman Kahn Report for Rand Corporation..." He glanced at Freya. "There have," he said, "always been people who would solve the problem that way." And I think, he thought, as he listened to the aud tape of the crowd noises, a tape which pretended to consist of a transcript from the launching, at Whale's Mouth, of the ritualistic, celebration-inspired time capsule back through hyper-space — or in some such ultra high velocity fashion — to Terra, that we have those people and that solution with us again.
We have, in other words, UN Secretary General Horst Bertold and Trails of Hoffman Limited and its economic multi-pseudopodia empire. And dear Dr. Sepp von Einem and his many Telpor outlets, his curiously one-way teleporting machine.
"That land," Matson murmured, vaguely quoting, lord knew who, what sage of the past, "which all of us must visit one day... that land beyond the grave. But no one had returned to report on't. And until they do — "