Far ahead, where the city ended beyond the Staten Island section, a group of Turber ships came up. Coming to attack us! The thought flashed to me. But it was not so. Turber ships—escaping. They sped off to the south, over the Turberite rural district.
I prayed that one of them might be carrying Nanette.
Someone said: "Forty minutes; twenty left!"
Had this all been only forty minutes?
"Pierson! Lower! There it is!"
We dropped nearly down to the roof level. The roof-structure was gone now over a segment of fully a mile. The beam, with Alan oscillating it, bathed the whole shattered area in white light. Indescribable scene of ruin! A vast honeycomb of metal city, shaken into ruins as though by some persistent earthquake; girders of metal piled in a tangled mass like jackstraws. Stone and mortar; plaster; wood—all the innumerable shattered substances strewn in a wreck inconceivable. Fires were starting in a dozen places; lurid glare of red-yellow flames; black smoke rolling up.
And sounds inconceivable—a torrent of crashes—explosions—and, I think, an undertone built with the myriad screams of the dead and dying.
As we descended almost to the level of the hole where a huge slice of the roof was dangling, our light struck into an open area of the city. There was less wreckage here; we could see down to the ground level. It was not very far down—a rise of ground was here; a hill—and it seemed an open parklike space of metal pavement surrounded by high metallic barriers.
They crumbled, these barriers, within a moment as the white beam caught them. There had been a low roof over the park, but it was fallen.