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"You don't need to go on," said the older woman. "I see the rest of the argument. One of the curious things about the end of civilization (for of course the bomb was only the coup de grace) was that so many people knew what was wrong, but nobody could really do anything about it. Whatever words William Orton may use to charm the dense skepticism of his century, he is merely saying that liberalism divorced from religion becomes (in philosophy) a sterile materialism, in politics tyranny. He is explaining the genesis of a type that was common in pre-atomic civilization—the liberal who had become a revolutionist without realizing that he had ceased to be a liberal. He is explaining how one great category of liberal minds—the scientists—came to make the atom bomb and how liberal mankind came to permit them to. He is explaining how you and I come to be here in this vast emptiness with night falling. But he can only explain. He cannot offer a counterpart, in the language and feeling of the atomic age, of the words of the Psalmist:
When I consider Thy heavens, the "work of Thy fingers;
The moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained;
What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?"
She glanced up at the dust-thickened sky through which no moon or stars could penetrate.
"Mother," cried her daughter. "Now it is you who are forgetting that we are all that is left of civilization. You are beginning to talk religion!"
The older woman blushed. "I have a confession to make. I have begun to doubt. . . ."
"Not those most awful doubts. . . ."
"Yes. I am no longer certain that materialism is enough. Perhaps liberal science, which invented the atom bomb, is not the way, the truth and the light."
"Hush, mother," cried her daughter. "Someone may hear you! Besides, I think the rats are going to attack again." In tense silence the two women waited. In silence, millions of rats, heads erect, whiskers vibrant, beady eyes alert, waited for that mass impulse, unreasoned but irresistible, which would be the signal for their hordes to remove these last human obstructions to the rat world.
-A queen of Egypt's XVIII Dynasty, who for some 1 7 years while the country slowly fell apart helped impose liberalism unique in Egyptian his tory on Egypt and her husband, Akhenaton, who, like his wife, was a devotee of atomic energy.