'I was never so scared in my life,' she said. No reply.
'Kalus?'
He turned to her, not seeming to know who she was, then answered with half his attention, perhaps a bit coldly. 'Not even before the giant spider?'
.. 'No. Not really. Then I didn't believe what was happening….. Are you all right?' At last his eyes and mind focused, and he too felt the need.
'I have been better. How many shocks am I supposed to be able to face in one day? I feel I've lived a year in just these few hours.' He released a sigh, almost a groan, laying aside for a time his resolve to keep an emotional distance from her. . .until she decided. 'I'm sorry for what I said about the spider. It was thoughtless.'
'It's all right. You're allowed to be human, you know.'
>From the tone more than her words, Kalus knew that he had stung her, and that she did not quite forgive him. Again he felt that she was holding him responsible for the harshness of his world, as if it were somehow his fault. Again the chasm opened between them, and now he was too tired to fight it. Imperceptibly he shook his head, breathed out, and returned his attention to the shoreline.
*
They were now less than a mile out, and the half-forgotten, ruinous landscape once more absorbed them.
All was flat on a large scale, and crumpled on a small: hard, bitter rock like cubes set on edge, careening madly this way and that. Within its valleys were patches of earth, green with grass and weeds, punctured ever and again by corroded girders and iron masonry-bars, to which clung bits of ornamental stone and naked, crumbling concrete. Trees were scarce and never large, their greatest numbers clustered in isolated patches a short distance from the coast, which seemed to have received the largest deposits of earth.
Sylviana easily saw what she had always known, that the skyline of Manhattan had been built upon solid bedrock. For this reason alone had the Island survived at all, blasted as it must have been by successive nuclear explosions. And with this she realized suddenly where the deposits of earth had come from. Besides the fact that the continental coast had been ravaged….. Long Island was gone! Just GONE. Nothing but ocean stretched eastward as far as the eye could see.