A minute.”

“A minute.”

“Maybe less.”

That is the whole thing.

That is what the empire was defending.

Not a catastrophe.

A seventy-four-year-old man crouched on concrete for under a minute, who assessed a nine-year-old’s leg with an eye that had been assessing equipment damage since 1972, and decided it was a nuisance rather than an emergency — and then built a seven-hour afternoon on top of an assessment that took him less time than reversing a truck.

Everything afterward was that first minute compounding.