At this point, most of the city’s residents were still at work, or at lunch, and their children were still in school. But that was about to change, and it would do so like the moment of arrival in a sci-fi movie, or in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds: people stopped in their tracks, heads turned to the sky, beholding something whose size and import they could neither limn nor scale. It wasn’t Martians, or Godzilla, but it was a monster and they knew it.
