“You come with me,” she said. “I’ll take you to your place. On the way I can give you a lining o’ what the world’s like these days.”

“Now, wait,” objected Phil.

“Wait yourself,” she chuckled. “I know you, you ol’ professor. You’d stuff him so full o’ precise information he wouldn’ know his charge from a Dirac hole. What he needs right now is facts, not data.”

“An’ someone to snuggle with,” Sam teased.

She made a face at him. Joe grinned. “What’s the use o’ being the Pres’dent’s daughter, Tom, if she can’ get to know you ahead of all the other girls?” he said. “You’re going to be the most chased bachelor on this planet, in case you hadn’ guessed.”

As a matter of fact, Barlow had guessed, but it was pleasant to have his anticipations borne out.

There was a little more conversation, then he left the room with the young woman. They went through a very ordinary door and down a very ordinary hall to an underground garage. Gray-clad men, shaven-headed, bowed to Amily with extreme deference and wheeled forth a small, brightly colored, teardrop-shaped machine. The seats, within a transparent canopy, were luxurious. She punched controls and leaned back. Under some kind of automatic piloting, the vehicle whirred up a ramp and into the air.

From above, Barlow saw endless miles of buildings. The effect was more like Chicago than any futuristic megalopolis: drab, dirty cubicles, with nearly solid streams of pedestrians moving through the canyons between. Enormous vehicles, freight and passenger, rumbled on elevated ways which sometimes ducked below ground. Only a few private cars were to be seen, flitting like the one which bore him over the city.

“What’s the population?” he asked slowly.

Amily shrugged. “Who knows? For the whole world, maybe fifteen billion.”

He whistled. A fifth of that number had been obscene enough when he departed his own century. However, progress must have been made in food production: algae, ocean farming, and whatnot. He was pleased to note that the air was free of smog. Probably exhaustion of chemical fuels had forced total conversion to atomic-electrical power.

Still, fifteen billion! He asked about other planets, and was a trifle saddened, but not surprised, to hear that they were visited about as often and as significantly as Pago Pago or Antarctica had been in his day.

“What sort of government do you have?” he inquired.

Amily’s laugh was as musical a sound as he had ever heard. “True scientist, you! First you find out ’bout Mars, then ’bout affairs at home! Well, if I ’member my hist’ry right, you had many sep’rate countries in the twentieth century. That was before the Atomic Wars, no? All one country now, the United World Republics. How else could fifteen billion people survive?”

“And I suppose all the races are equal?”

“What? I don’ un’erstan’.”

With some effort, he got across to her the idea that secondary physical characteristics had once been considered important. She was as startled and amused to hear of race riots as he had once been to learn of blood spilled by early Christians over the iota distinguishing homoousian from homoiousian.