Now, looking across from one edge, Henry drew a big breath and expelled it with force.
He never could get it through his head that something his living room could easily contain had removed the familiar cityscape, left it as nude as this. And all in a night, consuming in hours what had taken men generations to put there.
Now, in summer, weeds were growing out there. The red-brown nothing was relieved by sprawls of green. And the arid circle was bisected by the river. Its blue water could be seen, darker where the afternoon breeze ruffed it. On Swan Island, there was a tangled mound, a pimple on the earthen face, where the tracks of the roller coaster had been vaporized, leaving, nevertheless, sundry heaps and embankments that had supported other rides and contained the chute-the-chutes pond. That earth had not been boiled away, or wholly Battened.
Near the perimeters, in the river, he could see the rusting, rectilinear tops of collapsed bridges. These hadn’t been pulled clear yet, hadn’t been sent back to the smelters. And everywhere, making a din, sending up dust, machines worked. Like men on Mars, they lumbered in this desert, disinterring and reburying, with mammoth indifference to all meaning. If one watched a particular dozer or earth-mover, one would see the substance of archaeology, the potsherds of recent twentieth-century Americans. A refrigerator would be turned up, or a bathtub, or a kitchen stove or, perhaps, stone foundations, a brick wall. These would be pushed into shallows, crushed Hat, covered again—to make a firm base for the coming metropolis.
It had been going on for a long time.
The fumbling engines had labored there in winter, scarring the snowfalls, making dark tracks and darker scars in the white circle. They had sloshed there during the past spring when heavy rains had turned the area into a land of small lakes and of uncharted streams that backed up, overflowed and ran on until they finally found the route to the river and added their colored muds. Someday the engines would finish. Paving machines would follow, planting machine—the masons, carpenters, roofers, electricians, plumber—all of them.
Someday, where he looked at dusty nothing, a new city would rise.
By and by, no one would remain even to miss the old one.
When all the mourners had died, Henry thought.
Then the Bomb would be no catastrophe at all, but pure benefit. “End of an era,” they would say. “Good thing, too,” they’d add. “Can’t imagine how they stood those old cities,” they’d assert. “Barbaric.” “Positively medieval.”