Some of us, however, still take an occasional crack at keeping alive the memory of what men once were--or fanning the hope of what they may be. Once, for instance, men behaved with compassion toward women; they were even interested in how women feel; what women did was actually important to men--once. It may again be so. But the likelihood is that nobody ever escaped Sodom alive. Lot's wife looked back for a last squint at the new streamlined dish washers--and turned to a pillar of salt. Lot, a moment later, tried to save a charred copy of the financial page--and turned into a pillar of bicarbonate of soda. I got to about that point in my estimates when the doors opened again. Yvonne appeared--flushed and tousled--a drink in one hand and some books in the other. "Lonesome?" she asked. "Far from it," I said. "I was working with the Lord." She laughed. "Join us?" I shook my head. "I thought not. Here! _Amusez-vous!_" She threw the books on my bed and shut the door again. I looked at the books. Three mystery stories in the conventional getup of gaud and grue and one volume without a jacket: Huxley's _Ape and Essence_, which Yvonne had denuded to camouflage another treatise. I passed up the mysteries--the immunizing doses of mayhem, the habit-forming homicide--with which so many of the better people try to allay their critical sensations in this civilization. I took the Huxley back to my living room and read in it here and there. It was unfortunate, I thought, that the bright Aldous had seen fit to show the world that he, too, could write a screenplay. Did he need a studio job, I wondered? But it was only funny that the public and the critics had misjudged the tale. For Huxley's portrait of post-atomic California was not, as most persons assumed, the flight of a delirious brain. It was, by every relevant index, the most likely prediction that an intelligent man could make, these days. It was just what good actuaries and capable business forecasters should anticipate. Six hundred years ago, I reflected, the Great Plague had reduced Western Europe to a similar condition: religion had become corrupt, rogues had seized the government, the expiring feudal system had been finally shattered, and the people had roamed amidst half-empty towns and cities, living by robbery, raping, burning witches, and indulging every horrid superstition, while knowledge vanished and science stood still. This condition had lasted for more than a century. The intervening twenty generations had not been enough to change man a particle. He was the same specious brainist and therefore the same potential dupe of his unaltered instincts. His opposite possibilities were perhaps even stronger--since he had exploited vanity for six more centuries. Atomic bombs, likely, would be worse than Plague and have long-lasting, ancillary effects of the very sort described by Huxley. And there would be new plagues---military diseases.