Free Voyagers III - Star Brothers by Ben Bova

birthrate, they said to the poor, and you will become richer. Balance your male/female ratio. For nearly a century this gospel had been preached to the poor. To little avail. More babies and still more babies—half a million each day—threatened to drown the world in a pool of starving humanity.
    Even with the best of intentions, good-hearted but short-sighted people made the problem worse. Feed the starving poor. Give money to help the famine-stricken people of the Third World. The people of the rich industrialized nations opened their hearts and their pocketbooks, and the starving poor survived long enough to produce a new generation of starving poor, even larger than the last. The cycle seemed endless. Yet what could an honest person do when others were dying for lack of food?
    Hard-headed analysts pointed out that giving food to the starving without forcing them to control their birthrate was only making the problem worse, accelerating the cycle of poverty and starvation that was threatening to drown the world. Force birth control on them, said these experts. Make the poor control themselves. That led to cries of genocide and the angry blind flailings of terrorism, the one weapon that the poor could use against the rich to satisfy their furious seething hatreds, their sense of injustice, the frustrations that made them feel powerless.
    Stoner’s approach was the opposite. Instead of preaching to the poor he worked to make them richer. Instead of demanding that they lower their birthrate, he worked—through Jo, through Vanguard Industries, through the International Investment Agency, Cliff Baker, Nkona, Varahamihara, de Sagres, anyone else he could find—to increase the wealth of the world’s poorest. Raise their standards of living and they will lower their birthrates: that was his gospel.
    And it was working. Slowly, at first, but more and more clearly Stoner saw that it could work, it would work. If he were not stopped first. If he did not run out of time.
    His greatest fear was that some bright young researcher would hit upon the central idea that would extend human lifetimes indefinitely. The technology that the starship had carried could allow humans to live for centuries, perhaps much longer. If that technology were turned loose in the world before people learned how to control their numbers, human population would start soaring out of control. Strangely, perversely, Keith Stoner—a man of science all his life—dreaded the thought that science would discover the real secret of the starship, the hidden knowledge of his star brother.
    At last Jo appeared at his doorway, looking fresh and bright in a sleeveless miniskirted sheath of Mediterranean tangerine. Their fourteen-year-old daughter Cathy stood beside her, a flowered Hawaiian shirt several sizes too big for her slim frame thrown over her bathing suit. She was trying to appear cool and nonchalant, but Stoner could see the excitement bubbling in her.
    “Are you in the mood for some lunch?” Jo asked casually.
    He looked up from the report he had been reading. “Lunch? I’m not really hungry yet.”
    “Come on, Daddy!” Cathy yelped. “Have lunch with us!”
    “Now?” he asked, grinning.
    “Now,” both women said in unison.
    Stoner closed the report and laid it on his desk top, then went with them down the stairs and out to the patio by the swimming pool. Several large round tables had been set out beneath the gently rustling palm trees. He could see no one, but sensed the crowd huddling in the dining room, behind the drapes that were never drawn at this time of the early afternoon.
    “Are we eating out here?” he asked.
    “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” roared out two dozen voices as the glass lanai doors of the dining room slid open.
    They poured out and surrounded Stoner, shook his hand and pounded his back. Stoner laughed and greeted each one of the guests while his ten-year-old son, Richard, took up the official chore of accepting the gifts they had