Editing Farnham's Freehold (section)

==Plot==
Hugh Farnham, a white middle-aged man, holds a bridge club party for his alcoholic wife Grace, law-graduate son Duke, college-student daughter Karen, and Karen's friend Barbara. During the [[Contract bridge|bridge game]], Duke berates Hugh for frightening Grace by preparing for a possible [[Soviet Union|Soviet]] nuclear attack. When the attack actually occurs the group, along with Joe, the family's black servant, retreat to the fallout shelter beneath the house.

After several distant nuclear explosions rock the shelter, Hugh and Barbara become sexually intimate, after which the largest explosion of all hits the shelter. With only minor injuries, but with their bottled oxygen running low, the group decides to ensure that they will be able to leave the shelter when necessary. After exiting through an emergency tunnel, they find themselves in a completely undamaged, semi-tropical region apparently uninhabited by humans or other sentient creatures. Several of the group speculate that the final explosion somehow forced them into an [[Multiverse|alternate dimension]].

The group struggles to stay alive by reverting to the ways of the [[American pioneer]]s, with Hugh as the leader—despite friction between Hugh and Duke. Karen announces that she is pregnant and had returned home the night of the attack to tell her parents. Barbara also announces that she is pregnant, but without mentioning that her pregnancy resulted from her sexual encounter with Hugh during the attack. Karen eventually dies during her labor, due to complications, along with her infant daughter the next day.

Grace, whose sanity has been challenged by all these events, demands that Barbara be forced from the group or she will leave. Duke convinces Hugh that he will go with Grace to ensure her safety, but before they can leave, a large aircraft appears overhead. The group is taken captive by blacks, but is spared execution when Joe intervenes by conversation with their captors' leader in [[French language|French]].

The group finds that it has not been transported to another world, but instead is in the [[Future history|distant future]] of their own world. A decadent but technologically advanced black culture keeps either uneducated or [[castration|castrated]] white people as slaves. [[Sexual slavery]] and [[human cannibalism|cannibalism]] are widespread and generally accepted. Adolescent girls are sexually exploited as "bedwarmers" by their owners. Other children are bred on ranches for consumption and slaughtered during puberty (when their flesh is considered particularly tasty) or sometimes earlier.<ref>Chapters 13, 18, 20, 22.</ref>

Each of the characters adapts to the sudden change in black/white roles in different ways. In the end, Hugh and Barbara reject the new era of slavery; they attempt to escape, but are captured. Rather than execute them, Ponse, "Lord Protector" of the house to which they have been enslaved, asks them to volunteer for a [[Time travel|time-travel]] experiment that will send them back to their own time.

They return just prior to the original nuclear attack, and flee in Barbara's car. As they drive they realize that while Barbara had driven a car with an [[automatic transmission]], this car—the same car in every other respect—has a [[manual transmission]], and Farnham deduces that the time-travel experiment worked but sent them into an [[Parallel universes in fiction|alternate universe]].

They gather supplies and flee into the hills, surviving the attack, and live out the rest of their lives.