She tried the door, it was locked...
They walked down the corridor, trying doors. Here and there a man ran past them. From the street below sounded a vague rumbling, rushing noise. It was so like the roar of traffic that neither one paid any attention to it for a while.
They finally found an open office. The place was deserted. The girl went to the telephone, tried it, muttered an exclamation.
“The line’s dead,” she explained.
Through the windows the sound of the roar became louder. There was a shrill note underlying it, a wailing ululation of sound that was like a composite scream.
“Let’s look out,” she said. “It sounds like traffic has resumed. I can get a cab.”
She walked to one of the front windows of the deserted office, peered out, gave a little scream and jumped back, hand to her throat.
“What is it? You’re not hurt?” said Phil Bregg.
She motioned toward the window.
“Look!”
He pressed his face to the glass, looked down.
The buildings formed a concrete canon, irregular in its skyline, broken here and there by much lower buildings. Phil, unaccustomed to these canons of steel and concrete, could see nothing wrong for a second or two until his eyes focused through the dampened surface of the window upon the street below, a threadlike thoroughfare along which black objects were moving.
At first he thought traffic had started again. Then he saw it was sweeping in one direction, and in one direction alone. Next he observed that traffic wasn’t moving of its own accord. A sullen, roaring stream of water was rushing in a black torrent through the street, sweeping automobiles along, sending black specks which were people swirling and spinning, sweeping them onward.
Here and there a man was swimming, trying vainly to stem the tide. A man clutched at an open window in one of the buildings as he was swept by, tried to crawl in. He was painfully slow and deliberate about it. He seemed to be hardly moving. Phil wanted to shout at him to wake up.
Then he saw that it was the power of the current which was pulling the man back into the stream. The muscles fought against the grip of the torrent, and the man dragged himself in the window.
Another man caught the side of the same window, tried to pull himself in. The water dragged him back, broke loose his handhold, sucked him into the current once more and whisked him off.
Phil located the source of the roaring sound. The water was rushing against the corners of the buildings, piling up in frothy masses of tumbled foam, just as water rushes over a submerged rock in a mountain torrent.
Phil turned back to the girl, grinned.
“Well,” he said, “it’s a long ways below us. Let’s walk up to the top floor and look over the city. Maybe we can see where the water’s coming from.”
“It’s fifteen stories up,” said the girl.
Phil grinned.
“It’ll be good exercise. Let’s try it.”
She nodded, white-faced, tense. They started climbing. Somewhere, in the big office building, a girl was having hysterics, and the sound of her screams echoed from the mahogany doors and the marble facings of the hall. Every once in a while some one would run down a corridor shouting.
They stopped twice to rest, then dragged themselves up to the last floor.
“There’s a tower,” said the girl. “Let’s see if it’s open.”
They found a winding staircase, continued to climb, came to a door that was open. Rain was whipping through the oblong of the opening, and water was trickling down the stairs, forming in little pools.
“Looks like somebody’s left the door open,” grinned Phil. “Raised in a barn, maybe.”
He took her elbow, and they fought their way through the doorway. As they did so, the big skyscraper shivered a little, as though a restless tremor had run through the steel framework. The tower seemed to swing slightly, oscillate.
“Must be moving in the wind,” said Phil.
They pushed against the wind to the edge of the building. The rain stung their faces, then, as the wind let up for a moment, ceased to beat against them.
They looked down.
The water was hissing along the street now. There were no more automobiles being swept along on the crest of the tide. Phil had an idea the stream was now too deep for automobiles.
But there were innumerable black dots that were being swirled past, and those black dots were screaming, shouting, twisting, turning, vanishing from sight. The street corner was a vast whirlpool into the vortex of which men were being drawn like straws.
The rain ceased abruptly.
Drifting cloud scud overhead broke for an instant, and there was just a glimpse of sunshine.
“It’s clearing up!” called Phil.
And the rain seemed to have ceased over some considerable area. The patch of blue sky widened. The warm rays of the sun shone reassuringly.
A man came rushing from a little penthouse on the top of the building. In his hand he carried an instrument that looked like a ship captain’s sextant. He stood at the side of the building, raised the instrument to his eyes.
For a moment he stood so, the sunshine gilding him, a morsel of a man standing outlined against the rim of the lofty building. Then he lowered the instrument, took the magnifying glass on the reading arm to his eye, whipped a watch from his pocket, and apparently saw Phil and the girl standing there for the first time.
He stared at them with eyes that were wide, seemed a little glassy.
“Over five degrees out of the proper position in the plane of the ecliptic!” he shouted. “Do you hear me? Over five degrees!”
Phil Bregg glanced at the woman, then stepped forward, interposing his bulk between her and the man.
“That’s all right, brother,” he said in a soothing tone. “There’s been a dam broke somewhere, and the water’s coming up, but it’ll go down in a little while.”
The man made an impatient gesture.
“Fools!” he said. “Don’t you see what’s happening? The water won’t go down. It’ll come up and up. It’s the destruction of a race!”
And he turned on his heel, strode rapidly toward the penthouse.
“I’ve seen ’em get the same way when there’s been a stampede,” said Phil, smiling reassuringly at the girl. “It’s clearing up now. The water’ll be going down in a few minutes. These busted dams make the water come up fast, but it goes down just as fast.”
Yet there was a vague disquiet in his soul which manifested itself in his voice.
The girl nodded bravely, but there was a pallor about her lips.
“Let’s go talk to that bird,” said Phil, suddenly. “I’m wondering what he was staring at the sun for with that sextant. I was on a hunting trip with a chap once that could look at the sun every noon and point out right where we were on the map, and he’d never been anywheres near the country we were hunting in before.”
“Yes,” said the girl. “Sea captains use those instruments to check there... Oh, oh, look! Look! Look!”
Chapter 2
Beginning of the End
Far down the street the towers of one of the great skyscrapers loomed, topped by a central dominant tower, the whole structure dotted with windows which showed as regular black oblongs, small and dark, contrasting with the white of the building.
That tower which dominated the very sky itself was leaning over at a sharp angle. As the girl pointed the tower tilted again, checked itself, swayed, and then started to fall.
It was slow, majestic in its fall, like the descent of a mighty giant of the forest under the ax of the woodsman. The building swung over, moving faster and faster, yet seeming to take an eternity in its collapse.