Consider Her Ways
 The story is mostly a first-person narrative. It begins with a woman who has no memory of her past waking up and discovering that she is a mother of some description, in a bloated body that is not her own. After some confusing experiences her memory gradually returns and she recalls that she was part of an experiment using a drug to see if it enabled people to have out-of-body experiences. It seems that the drug has worked far better than anyone could have anticipated: she has been cast into the future. She also realizes that she is in a society consisting entirely of women, organized into a strict system of castes. Her initial contacts have never even heard of men. When it becomes clear to doctors who attend her that something strange has happened, they arrange for her to be taken to meet a historian. It seems that the narrator is in a society somewhat more than a century after her own time. The historian relates that not long after the narrator's own time a Dr Perrigan carried out scientific experiments that unintentionally created a virus that killed all the men in the world, leaving only women. After a very difficult period of famine and breakdown the small number of educated women, found mainly in the medical profession, took control and embarked on an urgent programme of research to enable women to reproduce without males. The women also decided to follow the advice of the Bible: "Go to the ant thou sluggard, consider her ways", and created a caste-based society, in which the narrator has become a member of the Mother caste. Distressed at the prospect of spending her life as a bloated producer of babies, expected to be unable to read, write or reason, the narrator requests that she be administered an identical dose of the same drug in the hope that she might return to her own time. It works, and she then decides to stop Dr Perrigan at all costs. The story has an ambiguous ending, which may suggest that it is the narrator's own actions that will lead to the catastrophe she hopes to prevent.