The Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company obstinately refused to take their experts’ word for it. In their long experience with knocking things apart, not once had they come across anything that couldn’t be knocked; and this blasted City Hall wasn’t going to be the exception. Not while the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company was out of the hands of the receivers was this going to be an exception.
They bought some Army surplus flame throwers, hired more men, and went to work spurting flame all over everything. The walls stood there and ignored the whole thing. For three solid days and nights, working their men in eight-hour shifts the clock around, they sprayed the walls with consuming flame. But the flame, unfortunately, didn’t consume a thing. It hadn’t, by the end of these three days, scorched the walls; it hadn’t done a thing to the walls. As far as the walls were concerned, the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company might have been throwing feathers at them instead of flame.
The company gave up and sold the flame throwers to somebody for about a third of what they’d paid for them. Then they sat back, took a deep breath, and looked at those walls with hate in their eyes.
By this time, the affair had hit the wire services and the whole world was watching the process, hands cupped politely over mouths. This one was a scream. An independent motion picture producer tried to get permission to make a documentary movie based on the struggle, using it symbolically — man against the machines he has created. A national beer company tried to get the next onslaught put on coast-to-coast television, with said beer company sponsoring, naturally. Both the City Council and the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company turned all such offers down vituperously and often. They were beginning to feel like peacocks with their tail feathers clipped.
Next, they tried acid. They took the most destructive acids they knew — and a few acids that nobody was sure about yet — and sprayed the walls, drenched the walls, covered the walls with reeking layers of these things; they tried the acids one after the other, and later in combination.
The walls just stood there and shrugged the whole thing off. They didn’t even shrug, really; they just stayed stolidly silent and indestructible. It was enough to give a man an inferiority complex, a persecution mania, and high blood pressure.
That’s the effect violence had on the City Hall of Lewiston, Massachusetts: No effect at all.
The wrecking company was in such a reasonless rage that it went to the extent of suggesting an atomic bomb, but the city fathers clamped down on that idea for the double reason that the resultant radioactivity from an atomic blast would make the whole town uninhabitable for some time — and it probably wouldn’t do any good, anyway.
When the representative of the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company was told this, in no uncertain terms, he became thoroughly incensed. “All right,” he agreed, “no atomic bomb; but how about an ordinary bomb? How about a few sticks of dynamite placed here and there in the building? We’d clear everyone in a three block radius of the building out of the way for a while and just let her rip. If that doesn’t do it, nothing will, and I suggest that you gentlemen might just as well go back to your old City Hall and forget about a new one.” So said the representative of the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company.
The City Council thought about it for a while and finally decided it couldn’t do any harm; it would have the advantage of getting the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company out of everyone’s hair, so they said, all right, go ahead and do it.
It took eight days to gather the paraphernalia and get ready for the last decisive siege. Workmen carrying boxes of dynamite trudged endlessly into the City Hall and returned empty-handed for more. The Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company had affixed its good name to a document, guaranteeing reparation for any and all damage done to any property other than the City Hall proper. Everyone in a three block radius was moved to a safe distance. The wreckers were ready to try the last desperate attempt to destroy the Lewiston City Hall.
Reporters, photographers, newsreel cameramen and tourists crammed the town, pouring huge sums of money into the local coffers and cash registers. The town was very happy about the whole thing and the tourists and the newsmen were happy, too. The only ones who weren’t happy were the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company and the City Council of Lewiston, Massachusetts.
Probably the happiest people of all were the owners of Peabody’s Plastic Products, maker of the fluoryl plastic which formed the City Hall. While other manufacturers had to talk about laboratory tests in their advertising, Peabody’s Plastic Products had simply to point with pride to the resplendently white Lewiston City Hall, standing serene and unscarred after weeks of the most harrowing treatment — treatment that would have reduced any other building to rubble in hours. Peabody’s Plastic Products looked upon the proposed demolition with nonchalance and confidence. They even had a man with a small movie camera recording the occurrence, for future television commercials.
At precisely noon on the fatal day, the president of the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company, a man named Smith, personally pushed the plunger that set off all the dynamite inside the building.
To get an idea of what happened then, consider the jet plane. A force is created in the bowels of the plane, a force that is constricted on all sides but one by sturdy walls of metal. Only to the rear is there a clear course. Oddly enough, force prefers the easiest road; and so it streams roaringly out the tail of the jet plane, pushing it forward.
Something along the same lines happened within the City Hall of Lewiston, Massachusetts. A tremendous amount of force was suddenly born within those indestructible walls and found itself restricted almost everywhere by fluoryl plastic. Only through the windows, whose glass had been long since smashed by frustrated wreckers, could the force find an exit from the place of its birth and a portal to the great world outdoors.
All the force of the explosion, then, went swooshing out the windows; and all the frame houses around the City Hall fell over on their sides with a despairing crump! Brick or stone houses flew apart and took off in thirty different directions all at once. Within a radius of about a block and a half, the skyline was suddenly lowered to basement level.
Not that the rest of the town was spared. Walls suddenly folded inward; doors were torn off their hinges all over the city; people were picked up and carried a few blocks by the blast and cameras flew everywhere.
A survey taken later that day showed that only two windows remained intact in Lewiston; and one of these was subsequently shattered by a small boy who was beginning to develop complexes from seeing that one intact pane of glass surrounded by only the jagged reminders of panes of glass.
The other one was broken a week later by a workman, who was putting a pane of glass in an adjoining window, when he fell off his ladder.
Of course, the explosion cost the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company every cent it could convert its equipment into, and more besides. But the City Hall still stood unscathed, untouched, undamaged and untroubled by the blast that had emanated from itself to flatten the surrounding territory pretty thoroughly, and put the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company into receivership — an unusual example of man bites dog. The last threat to the life of the City Hall of Lewiston, Massachusetts had been foiled.
The City Council, in order to pay for the wasted architect’s fees — and the other miscellaneous expenses of the proposed but never-to-be-completed new City Hall, blocked off the street in which the City Hall stood alone and untarnished; turned the waste land into a parking lot; and charged tourists twenty five cents each to drive in, park and look at the Indestructible Building. For another quarter, the tourist could go inside the City Hall, wander around looking at the walls and so forth and get, absolutely free, a tiny block of fluoryl plastic for a souvenir.