Ottinger suspects that Kalki will create a worldwide nuclear chain reaction which will annihilate every living thing and leave the planet uninhabitable.

Kelly decides to save the human race through an elaborate religious hoax, declaring himself to be Kalki and announcing the end of the world.

They would become the Adam and Eve to a new human race by giving birth to three sons and six daughters over the next twelve years, who would then intermarry; in approximately two centuries the world would be fairly well populated again.

In addition to himself and his wife, Kalki decides to bring along three more people to his new world, teachers called Perfect Masters, chosen for their knowledge and the fact that they are all sterile.

"[2] Time critic R. Z. Sheppard took a more favorable view, finding the novel "an amusing, brittle tissue of truths culled largely from the journalistic sources Vidal enjoys satirizing."

"[3] Orson Scott Card, writing expressly from a genre perspective, faulted Vidal's narrator as "intensely boring," but praised the apocalyptic conclusion: "Kalki left me with the haunting feeling that there was something grateful about four billion people leaving life suddenly, without panic, without a chance to soil their last moments with repentance or greed.