And the world opened up and a mushroom from Hell sprouted over Manhattan, and the buildings rocked and tottered and crashed to earth. The sky went black and the great white-yellow cloud, perimetered with blood-scarlet, arose against it; the universe shook and shattered and then came together and righted itself and sailed on. The Empire State was the last of the tall structures to hit ground. Clear at the northern tip of Central Park they felt that final smashing, a postscript to a letter from Lucifer. From Fulton Street to 53rd, from the North River to Stuyvesant Town, nothing lived. In that terrible instant of fission, caught where ever they were, whatever they were doing, working at desks, peering from windows, running down deserted alleys or pushing madly against the press of maniac crowds on Broadway and Fifth and Madison, score upon score of thousands of men and women died; died screaming or weeping or fighting for breath, praying to their gods or cursing or dumb with dismay. They died in subways, never having known that the silver ships of the enemy were sailing above their great town. They died asleep in their hotel rooms, lifting forkfuls of breakfast eggs to their mouths, typing words on paper, making love, staring at the sky. Very few of them wanted to die. Some of them expected to live for many years. Some of them did not really expect to die at all. Many of them could accept the fact that death would come for every man in the world some day ... except themselves; that was incredible and not to be thought of at all. But they all died. It came so quick, so quick; and even those who believed the golden egg to be a bomb never knew when it struck and smashed out at them and obliterated them, for the quickness was that of death, the swiftest thing that walks the universe. Beyond the huge area of instant perfect destruction, many others died. Tall buildings collapsed on them, or they fell into the splits and great fissures that opened in the earth; they were hurled to the pavements and their brains spilled out, or the noise and the fearful rush of air got into their heads and tore their cerebra to tatters. Some of them could not bear the appalling horror of the bomb, and slit their own throats or put guns into their mouths and pulled the triggers. Some went so totally mad that their life forces disintegrated and they died where they stood, of madness and panic and the terrible knowledge of their impotence. Men lived, too: lived blind and wounded and lamed and torn asunder, lived without minds and minds strangely contorted and warped. No one who had been in Manhattan that day survived without scars of body and brain left by the death of the city. The golden egg had hatched its chick of death at eight-fifty-three of a Friday morning in June of 1970. * * * * *