Chairs they had none, nor even so much as a broom to clean the floor
with. But Stern, first-off, had wrenched a marble slab from the
stairway.

And with this plank of stone still strong enough to serve, he had
scraped all one corner of the office floor free of rubbish. This gave
them a preliminary camping-place wherein to take their bearings and
discuss what must be done.

"So then," the engineer was saying as the dusk grew deeper, "so then,
we'll apparently have to make this building our headquarters for a
while.

"As nearly as I can figure, this is about what must have happened.
Some sudden, deadly, numbing plague or cataclysm must have struck the
earth, long, long ago.

"It may have been an almost instantaneous onset of some new and highly
fatal micro-organism, propagating with such marvelous rapidity that it
swept the world clean in a day--doing its work before any resistance
could be organized or thought of.

"Again, some poisonous gas may have developed, either from a fissure
in the earth's crust, or otherwise. Other hypotheses are possible, but
of what practical value are they now?

"We only know that here, in this uppermost office of the Tower, you
and I have somehow escaped with only a long period of completely
suspended animation. How long? God alone knows! That's a query I can't
even guess the answer to as yet."