Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
other minds in the other dimension. Man had waged a war and war had bred a pestilence. And the whole vast cycle of events was but a detail of a cyclopean plan. home. He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for had been a professor at State University. A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university. The street was gone. The rest of his house was gone. This room still retained its form. soaked up his will to make them walls and prints and lamps. He looked out the window into a blank world. His neighbors' houses already were gone. They had not lived with them as he had lived with this room. Their interests had been divided, thinly spread their thoughts had not been concentrated as his upon an area four blocks by three, or a room fourteen by twelve. forced to step off the walk to circle a boarded-off section of ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the room. The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers. "... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ... thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt...." The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled and with them went one corner of the room. A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it probably. He remembered one from many years before, something about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal. Something one could expect to happen. Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back. There was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers caught some excited words: "It's happening everywhere.... What do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain...." But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash. He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see him coming. Europe and Asia had flamed to an end to be followed by a terrible plague, a plague that even now was sweeping through country after country like wild fire, decimating populations. A plague undoubtedly induced by hunger and privation and the miseries of war. But those things he put away as items far removed from his own small world. He disregarded them. He pretended he had never heard of them. Others might discuss and worry over them if they wished. To him they simply did not matter. But there were two things tonight that did matter. Two curious, Huddled in the chair, he frowned slowly. It was disquieting to have something like that happen. There must be something wrong. Had his long exile finally turned his mind ... perhaps just a define nor understand. When finally he dozed off it was to lose himself in a series of horrific dreams. He dreamed first that he was a castaway on a tiny islet in mid-ocean, that the waters around the island teemed All next day he was uneasy and as he left the house that evening, at precisely seven o'clock, he kept saying to himself: "You must not forget tonight! You must remember to stop and get your cigar!" had disappeared! Now he understood why he had missed the store on the night What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up? Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded life, knew nothing about? talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself. He brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues. Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America, of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread into that nation's boundaries. Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South America. Billions, perhaps. And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own He stared at it in amazement, trying to determine what was wrong with it. He recalled how it had always stood, foursquare, a solid piece of mid-Victorian architecture. its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the school. It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as fate of this earth ... yes, even the universe. Billions of minds seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets ... and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and have kept things as they were.... Destroy those minds and the lie in juxtaposition with ours. Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as the university, had been forced into this hermit life. A tumultuous idea hammered at him. Men had died by the millions all over the world. Where there had been thousands of minds there intact. The plague had swept Europe and Asia almost clean of life, had blighted Africa, had reached South America ... might even have come to the United States. He remembered the whispers he had heard, the words of the men at the drugstore corner, the buildings disappearing. Something scientists could not explain. But those were merely scraps of information. He did not know the whole story ... he could not know. He never listened to the the missing piece of a puzzle into its slot. The significance of it all gripped him with damning clarity. There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the he approached them the houses materialized like two dimensional pictures without perspective, like twisted cardboard soldiers lining up for review on a misty morning. closed in behind him. The houses were wiped out, the sidewalk faded into nothing. He shouted, hoping to attract attention. But his voice frightened appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he saw.... They couldn't take this away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form. gone and that fitted in the pattern ... for it would be the least familiar things that would go first. Wheeling, he stared across the room. Was it his imagination, or the thing that had happened out there on the street. Or had it really happened? Might not all this exist within his own mind? Might not the street be as it always was, with laughing Could it be that he was going mad? He had heard whispers when he had passed, whispers the gossiping housewives had not intended him to hear. And he had heard the shouting of boys when he walked different minds in a different dimension. Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as

<question>:
Why was there a crowd of people surrounding the drugstore?

<options>:
A Because the store was getting ready to close
B They were trying to get medicine for the plague
C They were discussing the news surrounding the war
D They were discussing the disappearance of objects and places

<answer>:

D