The advance of science along wide frontiers of knowledge has been so rapid during the last few decades that we no longer find it remarkable. Yesterday's miracles are today's commonplace. Scientific discoveries have not only kept pace with science fiction, in several spheres truth has proved stranger than fiction.

The alliance between medicine and electronics has provided ample example. When bio-chemistry completes this formidable triumvirate unlimited scope opens for the human body. The pioneer work of the Twentieth Century had opened up new vistas by the dawn of the Twenty-fifth. Like all new knowledge it was neutral in itself, but its potential, for good or evil, was staggering. A strange new race of modified men had fantastic powers and a kind of immortality. But something... the human touch itself... had been lost, and in consequence a terrible barrier grew between the New Race and the old. It looked as if a cataclysmic war would be inevitable...