It was with strange feelings they once more approached the scene of their battle against such frightful odds with the Horde. Stern was especially curious to note the effect of his Pulverite, not only on the building itself but on the square.
This effect exceeded his expectations. Less than two hundred feet of the tower now stood and the whole western facade was but a mass of cracked and gaping ruin.
Out on the Square the huge elms and pines had been uprooted and flung in titanic confusion, like a game of giants' jack-straws. And vast conical excavations showed, here and there, where vials of the explosive had struck the earth. Gravel and rocks had even been thrown over the Metropolitan Building itself into the woodland glades of Madison Avenue. And, worse, bits of bone--a leg-bone, a shoulder-blade, a broken skull with flesh still adhering--here or there met the eye.
“Mighty good thing the vultures have been busy here,” commented Stern. “If they hadn't, the place wouldn't be even approachable. Gad! I thank my stars what we've got to do won't take more than an hour. If we had to stay here after dark I'd surely have the creeps, in spite of all my scientific materialism! Well, no use being retrospective. We're living in the present and future now; not the past. Got the plaited cords Beatrice? We'll need them before long to make up our bundle with.”
Thus talking, Stern kept the girl from seeing too much or brooding over what she saw. He engaged her actively on the work in hand. Until he had assured himself there was no danger from falling fragments in the shattered halls and stairways that led up to the gaping ruin at the truncated top of the tower he would not let her enter the building, but set her to fashioning a kind of puckered bag with a huge skin taken from the furrier's shop in the Arcade, while he explored.
He returned after a while, and together they climbed over the débris and ruins to the upper rooms which had been their home during the first few days after the awakening.
The silence of death that lay over the place was appalling--that and the relics of the frightful battle. But they had their work to do; they had to face the facts.
“We're not children, Beta,” said the man. “Here we are for a purpose. The quicker we get our work done the better. Come on, let's get busy!”
Stifling the homesick feeling that tried to win upon them they set to work. All the valuables they could recover they collected--canned supplies, tools, instruments, weapons, ammunition and a hundred and one miscellaneous articles they had formerly used.
This flotsam of a former civilization they carried down and piled in the skin bag at the broken doorway. And darkness began to fall ere the task was done.