A short story by the Hungarian émigré Leo Szilard, entitled “Report on ‘Grand Central Terminal,’” written in 1948 and first published in the University of Chicago Magazine in 1952, engages the reader as an interpreter of the meaning of artifacts – against an unusual background. A research team of extraterrestrial scientists investigates Manhattan after a neutron-bomb war has destroyed all human, animal, and plant life on earth (hence all subjects of empathy), but has left buildings intact. The story develops a tension between the conservative narrator and the radical scientist Xram. Their conflicting views come to the fore as they investigate Grand Central Terminal, the New York train station that had been the subject of a 1915 Max Weber oil canvas and of several Berenice Abbott photographs, and that made Louis Adamic’s Slovenian birthplace seem so small. Szilard’s narrator explains: “What its name ‘Grand Central Terminal’ meant we do not know, but there is little doubt as to the general purpose which this building served. It was part of a primitive transportation system based on clumsy engines which ran on rails and dragged cars mounted on wheels behind them.” The narrator concludes that there must have been two kinds of people in the city of Grand Central Terminal, those with a “smoky” and those with a “nonsmoky” complexion; and he theorizes that in this primitive transportation system they were probably segregated as “smokers” and “nonsmokers.” A third strain of earth-dwellers, endowed with wings, appears to have died out earlier, since none of the numerous skeletons belonged to this winged strain and since their images “are much more frequently found among the older paintings than among the more recent paintings.”