The Third World War to Save Civilization had ended (with the help of the improved atom bomb) in the virtual extinction of the human race. The only visible survivors, a mother and daughter, were huddled near a rubble heap in the middle of Manhattan, which, blasted and fused by the bombs, elsewhere lay between its rivers as narrow, smooth and shiny as a coffin lid.
The women were the celebrated international liberal, Angela Katz, author of Everyone Sleeps in One Big Bed—A Plea for the Internationalization of the Atom Bomb, and her daughter, Carrie Chapman Katz, named for the famed U.S. feminist. At the moment when civilization was whiffed out, they had been working in the stacks of the New York Public Library on Author Katz's new book, Down with Work—The Nuclear Physics of Economic Democracy, and perhaps owed their freak escape from the blast to the deadening effect of so many books.
Now Author Katz sat rocking back & forth with the pendulum regularity so often seen among psychoneurotics as 20th-century civilization reached its brilliant apogee. Her grimed, lined face suggested that of a ravaged Nefertiti,-and she gazed upon the general obliteration with the self-conscious superiority of the implacable progressive. At her feet, sprawled on her stomach, Carrie Chapman Katz was devouring a book and the gristle on an uncooked thighbone. Both women were completely bald—the result of radioactivity. They were also in the last stages of hysterical fatigue, for day & night they had to fight off assault waves of rats, whose fecundity seemed to be increased by atomic action. If both women should nod at once, even for a moment, the revolting masses would be on them, and the rats, with their ingenious minds and uninhibited pragmatism, would be the heirs of the lost-atomic world.
Suddenly Author Katz glanced at the unparalleled scene around her and cried: 'If I do not have a book to read, I shall jo mad. Is it good?" she asked, glancing at her daughter's book.
"Mmmm, yes, delicious," said the girl, brandishing the thighbone without glanc-ng up. "At least as a change from rat. Where did you get it?"
"Don't think so much about food," said icr mother. "Remember, we are all that is .eft of civilization. I meant is your book good reading."
"Oh, that. Well, it's the only book that's survived, except three copies of Gone With the Wind."
"What is it?"
"It's called The Liberal Tradition—A Study of the Social and Spiritual Conditions of Freedom."
"The Liberal Tradition," said the older woman, "the Liberal Tradition. What a quaint sound it has now—almost like Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe. Who wrote it?"
"Professor William Aylott Orton. It was published on the foundation established in memory of Oliver Baty Cunningham of the class of 1917, Yale College."