by the sheer
automatism of instinct. A spasm of horrible fright shot through him.
He thought, in awe and stupefaction:

"A bomb!"

He thought about death and maiming and blood. The relations between
him and those everyday males aloft in the sky seemed to be appallingly
close. After the explosion perfect silence--no screams, no noise of
crumbling--perfect silence, and yet the explosion seemed still to
dominate the air! Ears ached and sang. Something must be done. All
theories of safety had been smashed to atoms in the explosion. G.J.
dragged Christine along the street, he knew not why. The street was
unharmed. Not the slightest trace in it, so far as G.J. could tell in
the gloom, of destruction! But where the explosion had been, whether
east, west, south or north, he could not guess. Except for the
disturbance in his ears the explosion might have been a hallucination.

Suddenly he saw at the end of the street a wide thoroughfare, and he
could not be sure what thoroughfare it was. Two motor-buses passed
the end of the street at mad speed; then two taxis; then a number of
people, men and women, running hard. Useless and silly to risk the
perils of that wide thoroughfare! He turned back with Christine. He
got her to run. In the thick gloom he looked for an open door or a
porch, but there was none. The houses were like the houses of the
dead. He made more than one right angle turn. Christine gave a sign
that she could go no farther. He ceased trying to drag her. He was
recovering himself. Once more he heard the guns--childishly feeble
after the explosion of the bomb. After all, one spot was as safe as
another.

The outline of a building seemed familiar. It was an abandoned chapel;
he knew he was in St. Martin's Street. He was about to pull Christine
into the shelter of the front of the chapel, when something happened
for which he could not find a name. True, it was an explosion. But the
previous event had been an explosion, and this one was a thousandfold
more intimidating. The earth swayed up and down. The sound alone of
the immeasurable cataclysm annihilated the universe. The sound and the
concussion transcended what had been conceivable. Both the sound
and the concussion seemed to last for a long time. Then, like an
afterthought, succeeded the awful noise of falling masses and the
innumerable crystal tinkling of shattered glass. This noise ceased and
began again....

G.J. was now in a strange condition of mild won