The birthrate is dropping.
The experts say it's a natural swing from the abnormally high rates of the forties and fifties, but match the percentage of Passaic girls in Neosho against the falling birthrate, and I bet it would fit like Tracy's bathing suit."
"That's stupid!" Marv objected.
"A business can't wipe out its own market."
"It can," Jess said, "if that's its business."
"The Reds?" By tried on himself.
"Nahhh!
We haven't had any trouble with them in a coon's age.
They've got their own problems."
"One of which," Doc said grimly, "is the same one we've gotthe falling birthrate."
"Besides," I said, trying to cool off everybody's imaginations, "anything we could figure out here, the F.B.I. would have uncovered years ago."
"Exactly," Jess said.
"What do you mean by that?" Marv complained.
"He means," Doc said slowly, "maybe it's a scheme by our own government to cut the birthrate."
Jess shook his head. "Too drastic.
Looks to me like this is for keeps.
I bet there hasn't been anyone but a Passaic girl married in Neosho in twenty years.
And I don't think there's been a child born here in five yearsyou know, to the McDaniels, and she was almost forty."
By looked hard at Jess. "You're really serious about this, aren't you?"
Jess rubbed his sweaty hands on a balled-up handkerchief.
"I'm scared."
You could tell from his voicehe really was.
Marv said in a thin, nervous voice,
"Well, you're scaring us, too.
Go on. You can't stop now.
I ain't gonna sleep anyhow."
Jess swallowed hard and said,
"Seems to me somebody is eliminating - people."
"How'd they do that?" Marv complained querulously.
Doc answered instead of Jess. "Ever hear of the screw-worm?" We all shook our heads. "Of course not. They're all gone. But they used to be a serious warm-country cattle pest. The adult females - ordinary looking flies - laid eggs on wounds or scratches in the hide of cattle. When the larvae hatched out, they burrowed into the flesh, sometimes eating the poor beasts alive." "What's a dead screw-worm got to do with this?" Marv asked impatiently. Jess held up his hand for time, like he held it up to a jury just as a witness was about to make the point that would swing the case. Then he nodded at Doc. Doc went on. "Science wiped out the screw-worm. The female, it seems, mated only once. So entomologists raised flocks of males, sterilized them with gamma rays, and let them loose. The females laid infertile eggs for the rest of their lives, and the screw-worm was extinct." "I don't see" Marv began. Jess cut him off.
"Instead of sterile males, somebody is making sterile females, and making them so good that nobody wants to marry anything else.
Look at it this way--the paternal instinct is an acquired reflex.
It's practically non-existent before marriage.
To a bachelor, somebody's kid is just a pest.
Then he gets married.
If he wants kids, it's just because he thinks it's the thing to do.
Not because he needs them." Doc nodded reluctantly. So did the rest of us.
Jess spread his hands wide.
"So? We're being eliminated." "By who?" I asked.
"About sixty years ago," Jess said, "in the fifties, lots of people swore they saw flying saucers in the air.
In the last twenty years there hasn't been much of that.
My guess is that somebodycall them Martians, or maybe Venusians would be better, although they're probably from outside this solar system entirelysomebody built that factory in Passaic. And maybe another in Leningrad, one in Nanking, and so forth.
And now they're letting us commit suicide."
"Why would anybodyanything," By corrected, "want to do that?"
Jess said. "Earth is a pretty choice piece of real estate in the galactic neighborhood - running water, a good breeze, central heating.
So the Venusians built their factories - letting the victims subsidize them to keep the places growing - and waited for time to do their work for them.
In a century or less, they can come back and take possession; the former tenants will be gone for good.
Simple, effective, and cheap.
Nothing messy like armed invasion."
"If we're being conquered," Marv argued, "why doesn't the government do something about it?"