The quotation by Priestley runs: Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe.
On July 3, 1970, he moved out of his house in West Newton, Massachusetts and took up residence in the Cromwell Hotel in New York City.
On July 27 he visited John W. Campbell, editor of Analog magazine, and told him of Think's rejection of "The Greatest Asset".
He is visited by Jan Marley, a science writer, to whom Adrastus claims to be no more than a clerk whose sole task is to sign the directives produced by the computers.
Marley is invited to witness a meeting between Adrastus and Lou Tansonia, a medical researcher from the Moon colony, whose proposal involving setting up experimental ecologies has been rejected by the computers.