stood at ground level, but the ground was not there any more.
The road was now nothing more than a long, irregular trough formed by
the spreading roots of the pines on either side. Shuddering, Herman
stowed his gear in the trunk and got in behind the wheel.

When he put the motor into gear, the sedan moved sedately and normally
forward. But the motor raced madly, and there was no feeling that it
was taking hold. With screaming engine, Herman drove homeward over a
nonexistent road. Inwardly and silently, he gibbered.

Six miles down the mountain, he pulled up beside a white-painted fence
enclosing a neat yard and a fussy little blue-shuttered house. On the
opposite side of the fence stood a middle-aged woman with a floppy hat
awry on her head and a gardening trowel in one of her gloved hands.
She looked up with an air of vague dismay when he got out of the car.

"Some more eggs today, Dr. Raye?" she asked, and smiled. The smile was
like painted china. Her eyes, lost in her fleshy face, were clearly
trying not to look downward.

"Not today, Mrs. Richards," Herman said. "I just stopped to say
good-by. I'm on my way home."

"Isn't that a shame?" she said mechanically. "Well, come again next
year."

Herman wanted to say, "Next year I'll probably be in a strait-jacket."
He tried to say it. He stuttered, "N-n-n-n--" and ended, glancing at
the ground at her feet, "Transplanting some petunias?"

The woman's mouth worked. She said, "Yes. I thought I might's well put
them along here, where they'd get more sun. Aren't they pretty?"

"Very pretty," said Herman helplessly.

The petunias, roots as naked as if they had been scrubbed, were
nesting in a bed of stars. Mrs. Richards' gloves and trowel were
spotlessly clean.

* * * * *

On Fourth Avenue, below Fourteenth Street, Herman met two frightful
little men.

He had expected the city to be better, but it was worse; it was a
nightmare. The avenues between the buildings were bottomless troughs
of darkness. The bedrock was gone; the concrete was gone; the asphalt
was gone.

The buildings themselves were hardly recognizable unless you knew what
they were. New York had been a city of stone--built on stone, built of
stone, as cold as stone.

Uptown, the city looked half-built, but insanely occupied, a forest of
orange-painted girders. In the Village the old brick houses were
worse. No brick; no mortar; nothing but the grotesque shells of roo