He finished his drink and his wife half finished hers and gave it to the children to argue over, inch by compared inch. The old man stood silent, embarrassed by the thing he may have stirred up among them.

«Well, if you're ever out this way, drop in,» he said. Clarence Travers reached for his wallet.

«No, no!» said the old man. «It's on the house.»

«Thank you, thank you very much.»

«A pleasure.»

They climbed back into their car.

«If you want to get to the freeway,» said the old man, peering through the front window into the cooked-upholstery smell of the car, «just take your old dirt road back. Don't rush, or you'll break an axle.»

Clarence Travers looked straight ahead at the radiator fixture on the car front and started the motor.

«Good-bye,» said the old man.

«Good-bye,» the children yelled, and waved. The car moved away through the town.

«Did you hear what the old man said?» asked the wife.

«What?»

«Did you hear him say which way to the freeway?»

«I heard.»

He drove through the cool, shady town, staring at the porches and the windows with the colored glass fringing them. If you looked from the inside of those windows out, people had different-colored faces for each pane you looked through. They were Chinese if you looked through one, Indian through another, pink, green, violet, burgundy, wine, chartreuse, the candy colors, the lemon-lime cool colors, the water colors of the windows looking out on lawns and trees and this car slowly driving past.

«Yes, I heard him,» said Clarence Travers.

They left the town behind and took the dirt road to the freeway. They waited their chance, saw an interval between floods of cars hurtling by, swerved out into the stream, and, at fifty miles an hour, were soon hurtling toward the city.

«That's better,» said Cecelia Travers brightly. She did not look over at her husband. «Now I know where we are.»

Billboards flashed by; a mortuary, a pie crust, a cereal, a garage, a hotel. A hotel in the tar pits of the city, where one day is the pitiless glare of the noon sun, thought Mr. Travers, all of the great Erector-set buildings, like prehistoric dinosaurs, will sink down into the bubbling tar-lava and be encased, bone by bone, for future civilizations. And in the stomachs of the electric lizards, inside the iron dinosaurs, the probing scientists of A.D. One Million will find the little ivory bones, the thinly articulated skeletons of advertising executives and clubwomen and children. Mr. Travers felt his eyes flinch, watering. And the scientists will say, so this is what the iron cities fed on, is it? and give the bones a kick. So this is what kept the iron stomachs full, eh? Poor things, they never had a chance. Probably kept by the iron monsters who needed them in order to survive, who needed them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Aphids, in a way, aphids, kept in a great metal cage.

«Look, Daddy, look, look, before it's too late!»

The children pointed, yelling. Cecelia Travers did not look. Only the children saw it.

The old highway, two hundred yards away, at their left, sprang back into sight for an instant, wandered aimlessly through field, meadow, and stream, gentle and cool and quiet.

Mr. Travers swung his head sharply to see, but in that instant it was gone. Billboards, trees, hills rushed it away. A thousand cars, honking, shrieking, shouldered them, and bore Clarence and Cecelia Travers and their captive children stunned and silent down the concourse, onward ever onward into a city that had not seen them leave and did not look to see them return

«Let's see if this car will do sixty or sixty-five,» said Clarence Travers.

It could and did.