It was. But it had changed since he saw it last. The high buildings were brought low, and the low buildings were mounds, shells covered with brush and fox-grape, and trees grew in the public streets and through the broken windows. The river, vast and placid, was empty except for a floating log. Obstructions along the shores might once have been docks, but were so no longer. And there was a great stillness.
For one wild moment Price thought, The bomb did it last night, the new-type bomb with energies they didn't even dream about. Then he realized that that was hardly possible. You can destroy a city with an H-bomb in a matter of seconds, but you can't grow an oak tree sixty feet high in the rubble of the City Hall in much under a century.
Time had passed since last night.
This was too much to take in all at once. Price didn't even try. He looked for a place to land, but there wasn't any, so he kept on flying, eastward across the river.
Time had passed, and he had passed with it. Slowly it began to come to Price, the dreadful and incredible truth of what had happened. The wrenching, tearing shock he had felt in the eye of the blast was not physical but temporal. The uncomprehended powers of the bomb had been mightier than anyone had guessed. They warped the ordered fabric of the space-time continuum itself, and acting on the matter of himself and his plane at the "eye" of the explosion, had warped them too—into the future.
The Beechcraft went droning through the empty sky. Price looked down on desolation, green and peaceful and as unproductive as it had been before men ever came with axe and plow to tame it.
How far in the future?
He did not know.
Were there still men, surviving somewhere in this wilderness? Or had humanity destroyed itself in a final act of atomic madness? Were all the cities dead and dust?
He did not know that either.