ightmareridden days, dreaming through twitching nights of an escape
geographically nonexistent. Dismembered corpses in the streets, arenas
packed with dead bodies, fallow fields newly fertilized with human blood
added their stench to that of an unwashed, disease riddled continent. A
rumor was circulated that there were still Jews alive and those who but
yesterday had sought each other in mortal combat now happily united to
hunt down a common prey. And sure enough, in miserable caverns and
cellars hitherto overlooked, shunning daylight, a few men in skullcaps
and prayingshawls were found, dragged out into the disinterested
sunlight with their families and exterminated. It was at this time the
Grass crossed the Urals and leaped the Atlantic into Iceland.

In England, George Bernard Shaw, whose reported death some years before
had been mourned by those who had never read a word of his, rose
apparently from the grave to deliver himself of a last message:

"If any who wept over my senile and useless carcass had taken the
trouble to read _Back to Methuselah_, they could have reassured
themselves regarding my premature demise. If ever there was to be a
Longliver, that Longliver would have to be me. This was determined
by the Life Force in the middle of the XIX Century. That Life Force
could not afford to rob a squinting world of a man of perfect
vision.

"Like Haslam (I forget his first name--see my complete works if
you're interested) I gave myself out as dead in order to avoid the
gawking of a curious and idle multitude. I was recuperating from the
labors of my first century in order to throw myself into the more
arduous ones of the second.

"But as I have pointed out so many times, the race was between
maturity and the petulant self-destruction of protracted
adolescence. Mankind had either to take thought or to perish, and it
has chosen (perhaps sensibly after all) to perish. I am too old now
to protest against selfindulgence.

"Is it too late? Is it still possible to survive? The ship is now
indeed upon the rocks and the skipper in his bunk below drinking
bottled ditchwater. But perhaps a Captain Shotover, drunk on the
milk of human kindness rather than rum, will emerge upon the
quarterdeck and, blowing his whistle, call all hands on deck before
the last rending crash. In that unlikely event, one of those
emerging from the