Henry surveyed his assistants. They were working efficiently. Things, at the moment, were comparatively quiet. He said, “All right,” and carried his plate and his sandwich into the corridor as he went.
From an opposite, unshielded window, he could see. Between this top-floor vantage point and the fire storm, nothing remained that stood higher.
The single flame of the burning city-heart could not be followed to its summit. It disappeared in smoke, in smoke so thick and dark, so folded and contoured it looked like a range of hills in the sky, upside down, illuminated by fire. The flame itself was yellow-white and solid, a curving wall that slanted in toward the center and could be followed for a thousand feet or more to the place where smoke screened it. Silhouetted against it, for a mile and a half, were the intervening buildings and homes, many burning with separate fires.
The city roared like a volcano and the night shook.
Henry stood still. He stopped eating. It was his city, his life, his boyhood and manhood and it had died and this was its funeral pyre—this tremendous thing.
The heart and significance of the city was gone. Only its people, the majority of its human contents, could be saved. But they had raised it up.
The city, he thought, transfixed by the magnificence of its dying, was the people. It was an extension of their bodies.
When they had been primitive men, they had added the hides of beasts to their own insufficient body hair and the protection of caves to that, and then huts, and now a city. The railroads and all the cars and the motors and engines had been added to their muscles. To their ears, telephones, radios, communications. To their eyes, TV. The very pavement of the streets and the traffic it bore were extensions of the bare feet of men.
It was all, Henry thought, just a big human body—all that city of his and the city beyond it. All part of man. If his blood did not actually flow through it, his mind did. If his cells did not actually develop the intricacies of it, his brain cells had contrived every bit. It moved and had life and function and meaning and purpose only when, and only because, the nerves of man moved first, commanding his giant self-extension, his city.
It was dying, Henry thought, the huge superbody of man. But not man.