Part I, American Revolt: By 2090 almost half of the now immense American population is on welfare. Brilliant, talking computers have stolen most service and middle management jobs, while exploding populations in the southern hemisphere monopolize dumb factory work. And aquifers dry, world wide, causing food shortages.

Ben Bjorn, a blond, young Welfie of the merged San Diego and Los Angeles ghetto, escapes a life of squalor by entering the Marine Corps. Well educated by his uncle, he vows to somehow fix the worlds present ugliness. The U.S. invades Mexico with the object of building a death strip along the border that will keep back desperate migrants. Bjorn excels in the resulting combat that involves underwater fleets, personal armor, flechette weapons, and invisible vehicles. We see him grow from a nave, lusty youth to a self-disciplined warrior.

The administration cuts Welfie rations while exporting wheat. In the disorder that follows, Bjorn helps his people, is given command of a self-defense Welfie battalion. Fights escalate to a civil war in which Bjorn is the military fist of a Welfie triumvirate. As Part I ends, the Welfies win, rations are equalized, and fertility depressant is dumped into all water supplies.

Part II, The Crescent Strikes: As 2100 dawns, Chinese agents kidnap Bjorn and require, as ransom, the shipment of American wheat to their starving people. After our hero escapes by cleverly killing his captors, Europe pleads for military help against the Turkish-led Moslems who threaten invasion from across the Bosphorus. As if those two threats werent enough, American Achievers, the educated and employed class, seek their old power and perquisites. Rebellion simmers below the feet of the Welfie government. After Bjorn survives a Turkish assassination attempt, he flies one hundred and fifty thousand high technology troops to Romania and assumes command of European forces. Estranged from his wife, he also acquires a gorgeous German mistress.

In early spring, the Moslems cross the Bosphorus into Europe and throw back part of Bjorns army. He builds defenses behind the Danube Canal. While retreating to that line, Bjorn wins the loyalty of European Achiever officers and raw Balkan units. Moslem armies strike Bjorns line. Defenders respond with fuel-air explosives, smart missiles, flechette rifles, stealth tanks, and microwave weapons that shut down electrical systems. Bjorns mistress, a tool of Achiever conspirators, tries to murder him. He encircles and defeats the Moslems. Bjorn then crushes an Achiever-led rebellion in Western Europe and establishes personal control.

News that Chinese armies threaten Siberia convinces Bjorn that the survival of civilization requires he continue his conquests. A world empire is the only cure for humanitys ills.

Part III, Imperial Power: In early spring of 2102, Bjorn is thirty years old. He boards his ramjet transport for Irkutsk, in Siberia, while the Chinese gather overwhelming forces nearby in Mongolia. Near his destination, anti-aircraft missiles hunt his aircraft but a brilliant pilot--an Anne Scowcraft--pancakes the aircraft on a swamp in the Siberian taiga. His small party ambushes the killers sent by the Achiever commander of the Russian defenses and finally reaches safety with the German Corps Bjorn has sent as reinforcements to the Slavs. Bjorn manages a Russian command change and a retreat. A romance with Anne grows while Bjorn prepares a defense on the Ob River and establishes a blocking force on the Old Silk Road into Kazakastan. These are the two major land invasion routes to and from China. He sets in motion the conquest of Turkey and Iran, and appoints his ex-wife chief of a world-wide fertility depressant campaign. He announces a World Federation and asks Latin America and Asia to