Foreword
Among the factors distinguishing our society from others less complex has always been the high proportion of reformers to be found among us. No sooner do we create a system, a machine, an organism, than we must improve it, eliminate its faults, amend it to conform better with the changing structure of its environment. The anarchy of primitive man is replaced by the paternalism of the feudal system; the xenophobia of tribal castes eventually gives way to universal franchise and integration; the abacus develops into the computer; the Tin Lizzie evolves into the Cadillac. But the process itself too often beats within it the seeds of its own destruction: the horticulturist who metamorphoses the wild briar into the hybrid tea rose has to contend with the contrary forces of nature.
The pioneer in this field must forever be looking over his shoulder lest his work be menaced by the mutant among the carefully planned genes, the rogue male in the herd.
Especially is this true of the reformers in our own time, for unlike their predecessors they postulate the broader, rather than the narrower view; the permissive rather than the restrictive and ascetic approach. The chances of "something going wrong" are thus proportionately increased as the spectrum of accepted change widens. And the danger inherent in the syndrome is this: that such destructive elements are self-propagating while those of o more benign temper continually hove to be renewed from without. The old simile of the rotten apple in-the barrel is not inapposite, for the perverting effects of one degenerate in o climate of sexual permissiveness, however timely and well-intentioned its beginnings, could conceivably snowball in such o way that the whole of society would find itself threatened.
We are grateful to Author Grant Roberts for his challenging illustration of this somber theme in this forthright and penetrating novel. With masterly insight, he shows how the young American couple, Robert and Joanna Grant, themselves unaware, their marriage in need of the brooder horizons that only the new freedoms con bring, react when they encounter one such "rotten apple." Len Bonner and his wife Harriet are rich, bored, and degenerate. When their evil talents combine with those of the rascally steward Alfred Maddon aboard the cruise ship Arcadia, the combination is hard to withstand.
The Grants, typical enough of thousands of decent young Americans, are inhibited and immature. Through the Bonners they become aware of -- and come-to terms with -- the deeper sexual drives hidden within them. On o superficial level they are better off. But there is, however, the price to pay: their standards, stuffy perhaps but undeniably "correct," hove become debased to the level of the Bonners. Through the agency of Len Bonner, their futures seem assured, but they hove lost their innocence. Worse, in illustration of our thesis, they are about to spread the disreputable gospel according to Len Bonner. . and there is no guarantee that those whom they contaminate will not themselves disseminate the bad seed on ground more fertile still!
-The Publisher