So Henry gazed at the structure where his son worked. Then he faced around, walked to a fence, and drank in the scene opposite.
The rough circularity of the destroyed area could be perceived from where he stood, though a man in the middle of that desolation could see the circle more plainly. Such a man could pivot three hundred and sixty degrees: everywhere the earth would sweep away, bare and comparatively Hat, to standing buildings (or ruins) approximately equidistant from his position.
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.”
It seemed incredible to Henry, for a moment. But he was a shrewd if humble student of his fellow man, so he knew it to be true. Nobody rued a billion buried Egyptians or sorrowed for gone Romans. A few marveled or rejoiced at what they, in their crushed past, had contributed to the present; but not one grieved over the cruelty of time’s heel. Even Pompeii was viewed as an excitement. Henry could not recall one touring neighbor who had brought home from its ashes a sense of melancholy. So it would be here. So it should be.
He felt Chuck’s hand on his shoulder. “A penny,” Chuck said. He didn’t wait for the thought he’d bargained for. “Great day, Dad! Old Minerva Sloan finally accepted our drawings-mine, that is—for the new bank building! May mean a partnership! But, brother! Is that crippled old dame a sourball!”
Henry said, “Peachy!” He held his hand out, gravely.
They walked together to the car.
Henry carried his thought along one more step. Everywhere catastrophe had struck, something other than rank weeds grew in the ash, the crumpled walls: opportunity. Opportunity for young men like his son who were able to dream and able to put the dreams on paper so other men could turn them into substance.
They picked up Pad Towson and Berry Black and, finally, Lenore. The men were just two businessmen coming home from work, tired, looking forward to whatever home meant: a hot soak in a tub, slippers, a highball, a meal.
But Lenore was different. Excited. Privately excited, for she slipped into the front seat between Charles and his father-in-law and silently took her husband’s hand, keeping her eyes on him.
They delivered their passengers before she began to tell; talking to Charles but permitting Henry to hear. “I’ve got news. ”
“I can see that!” Charles smiled and kept back his own “news.”
“Good news. I think it is.”
Henry sensed the tenseness in his son’s voice. “Are you going to tell it?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Henry heard his own faint breath-catch. He slowed down, jostled, as Chuck wrapped his arms around her. “I thought…” Chuck broke off.
After they had kissed, she said, “So did I! So did Dr. Mandy, at first! I got so much radiation! Now we know different! I’m not sterile.”
Charles whispered, “That’s just too wonderful to believe.”
She said, matter-of-factly, being Lenore, “It’s actually only seventy-five per cent wonderful.”
“Which is enough miracle for these days!” Henry butted in, perplexedly. “I don’t get…?” He checked himself. “Oh,” he said.
Lenore turned to him then, and took his arm too, hugged him also. “About a quarter of the babies, Dr. Mandy said, are born dead—or not in their right minds—if their mothers were rayed.”
Chuck murmured, with the extra poignancy of the still-new husband, “That’s a terrible thing to face, I know! But Lenore, dear…!”
She said, “Not too terrible. Just means I might have to have four, for every three we keep.
So what? Can’t you imagine how I feel, to know I can have them? And does this country need babies now!”
Henry let go of the wheel with his right hand. He reached out, touched her dark hair, moved his hand under it, found her neck, squeezed it lightly and went back to driving. He didn’t say anything more than the touch said. But she looked toward him fondly as she snuggled against Charles. It would be, she felt, the finest thing on earth to have a father like Charles. But, certainly, it would be almost as fine to have such a grandfather as Henry Conner would make a boy—or a girl.
At the house, they could see smoke from the fire in the barbecue pit, and the assembled next-door neighbors, along with the Laceys and their children. Two strangers besides.
Henry went around and opened the car trunk. Al had put the keg in at five. It was wet with its own coldness. A whole keg of beer, and a bung-starter with it—beside the tire tools.
“Gimme a hand,” he called.
But Chuck was already streaking through the hedge. ‘What do you think?” he called.
“Lenore’s going to have a baby! I’m going to be the father of a child!”
Mrs. Conner’s eyes blurred with happiness.
Nora Conner’s did not. “That’s nothing!” she said.
“Queenie’s just been the father-of five.”