World Without Children

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Paradise on Earth would be a life without war or death or want. Agreed! But what if the price for individual survival means—no posterity allowed?

THE last diapers were in museums, along with teething rings, layettes, formula bottles, perambulators, rattles and teddy bears. Swings and trapezes, slides and jungle gyms had been broken up for scrap. The books, most of them, had been junked: Baby and Child Care, Black Beauty, Obstetrics for the Millions, Tom Swift and his Rocket Glider, What Every Boy Should Know, What Every Girl Should Know, Diseases of Childhood, The Book of Knowledge, Manners for Teeners, One Hundred Things a Boy Can Make.

The last recorded birth had been two hundred years ago.

That child—who had also been the last to wear a snowsuit, the last to cut his finger playing with knives, and the last to learn about women—had now reached the physiological age of twenty-five years, and looked even younger owing to his excellent condition. His name was George Miller; he had been a great curiosity in his day and a good many people still referred to him as The Child.

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