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.From upper floors,where many automobiles had been stored against the tide, cars were reaching the street.One drove in thesplash before Tony and Eve and stopped.The driver turned it over to them; and Tony took the wheelwith Eve beside him.They went with all possible speed, no longer encountering the tide itself, but lurching throughvast puddles left by the retreating water.Debris from offices, shops and tenements swept by the tidesbestrewed the street.A few people appeared; a couple of motorcycle police, not in the least concerned with cars, weremaking some last inspection of the city.Bodies lay in the street; and now on the right a haze of smoke drifted from an area that hadburned down during the night.The morning, though the sun had not yet risen, felt sticky.The passage of water over Manhattanhad laden the air with moisture so that driving between the forsaken skyscrapers was like journeying in astrange, gaunt jungle.Tony noticed many things mechanically, with Eve at his side, traversing the re-echoing streets;the rows of smashed windows along Fifth Avenue--tipped-over dummies, wrecked displays; piles ofuseless goods on the sidewalks, the result of looting; the Empire State Building standing proudly againstthe blue sky, ignorant of its destiny, still lord of man's creation.The East River, when they reached it, was a torrent low in its channel being sucked dry towardthe sea.Wreckage strewed the strangely exposed bottom.The bridge; a few miles more of flood debrisin steaming streets.Then towns and villages which also had been overswept.Now the country with its higher hills whereon Tony and Eve marked in the first sunlight, the lineleft by the water at its height.They dipped through empty villages and rose to hamlets whose inhabitantsstill lingered, staring in a dulled wonderment at the speeding car.The effect of the vast desolation beatinto the soul; derelict, helpless people, occasional burning houses, a loose horse or a wandering sheep--emptiness, silence.They dipped into a hollow which was a pool not drained but which could be traversed; theyclimbed a slope with a sharp turn which was blocked; and there two men sprang at them.Tony jerked out his pistol; but to-day-and though he was on his way to his mother who wasmurdered--he could not pull the trigger on these men.He beat down one with the butt, instead, and withthe barrel cowed the other.He got the car clear and with Eve drove on, realizing they would have killed him and taken Evewith them.Why had he left them alive? Ah--here was the road home! Home! His home, where he had been born and where he was alittle boy.Home, the home that had been his father's and his grandfather's and before that for fourgenerations.Down this road from his home, some man named Drake had gone to fight in the Great War,the War of the Rebellion, in 1812, and to join the army of Washington.Tony recalled how his earliest remembrances were of strangers coming to peer about the housewhich they called "historic," and how they raved about the things they called "old." The house was highon a hillside, and as he drove along the winding road, he rode over the mark where the water had risenthe night before, and thought what a mere moment in geologic time the things "old" and "historic" hererepresented.He tried not to think about his mother yet.Eve, beside him, placed her hand over his which held the steering-wheel."You'll let me stay close beside you, Tony," she appealed."Yes.We're almost there."Familiar landmarks bobbed up on both sides, everywhere: a log cabin he had built as a boy; herewas the way to the old well--the "revolutionary well."A thousand million years, at least, life had been developing upon this earth; a thousand millionyears like them had been required for the process which must have preceded the first molding of thebricks which built the cities on Bronson Beta--which, some countless eons ago, had come to an end
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