Dr. Paul Carruthers is frustrated because he thinks his employers, Mary Heath and Henry Morton, have cheated him out of the company's profits. He decides to get revenge by altering bats to grow twice their normal size and training them to attack when they smell a perfume of his own making. He mixes the perfume into a lotion, which he offers as a gift to Mary and Henry. When they turn up dead, a newspaper reporter decides to investigate.
The story of a century: a decades-long second World War leaves plague and anarchy, then a rational state rebuilds civilization and attempts space travel.
In a futuristic city sharply divided between the rich and the poor, the son of the city's mastermind meets a prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.