an exploratory team of New Zealand rediscovery scientists (New Zealand was spared from direct nuclear attack because it was "of no strategic importance") travel to California. Meanwhile, a strange society has emerged from the radiation and three of its men capture one of the scientists (Dr. Poole). Dr. Poole is introduced to an illiterate society which survives by "mining" graves for clothes, burning library books as fuel, and killing off newborns deformed by radiation (that is, newborns with over three pairs of nipples and more than seven toes or fingers) to preserve genetic purity. The society has also taken to worshipping Satan, whom they refer to as "Belial", and limiting reproduction to an annual two-week orgy which begins on "Belial's Day Eve" after the deformed babies are "purified by blood". The story climaxes during the purification ceremonies of Belial's Day Eve with an intellectual confrontation between Dr. Poole and the arch-vicar, the head of the Church of Belial. During the conversation the arch-vicar reveals that there is a minority of "hots" who do not express an interest in the post-World War III style of reproduction, but they are severely punished to keep them in line. In exchange for his life, Dr. Poole agrees to do what he can as a botanist to help increase their crops yields, but about a year later he escapes with Loola in search of the community of "hots" that is rumoured to exist north of the desert. The script—and the novel—end with Dr. Poole and Loola in the desert north of Los Angeles, breaking their trek by a tombstone which bears the author's name of Tallis, the dates 1882–1948, and three lines from the antepenultimate verse of Percy Bysshe Shelley's elegy on the death of John Keats. Lest Loola find it sad, Dr. Poole, happily possessed of a duodecimo Shelley, reads her the poem's penultimate verse: That Light whose smile kindles the Universe That Beauty in which all things work and move That Benediction, which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love, Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. Vignettes The story in the script is punctuated by a series of vignettes centring on