MURRAY LEE WOKE ABRUPTLY, WITH the memory of the sound that had roused him drumming at the back of his head, though his conscious mind had been beyond its ambit. His first sensation was an overpowering stiffness in every muscle—a feeling as though he had been pounded all over, though his memory supplied no clue to the reason for such a sensation.
Painfully, he turned over in bed and felt the left elbow where the ache seemed to center. He received the most tremendous shock of his life. The motion was attended by a creaking clang and the elbow felt exceedingly like a complex wheel.
He sat up to make sure he was awake, tossing the offending arm free of the covers. The motion produced another clang and the arm revealed itself to his astonished gaze as a system of metal bands, bound at the elbow by the mechanism he had felt before, and crowned, where the fingers should be, by steely talons terminating in rubber-like finger-tips. Yet there seemed to be no lack of feeling in the member. For a few seconds he stared, open-mouthed, then lifted the other arm. It was the right-hand counterpart of the device he had been gazing at. He essayed to move one, then the other—the shining fingers obeyed his thought as though they were flesh and blood.
A sense of expectant fear gripped him as he lifted one of the hands to unbutton his pajamas. He was not deceived in the half-formed expectation; where the ribs clothed in a respectable amount of muscle should have been, a row of glistening metal plates appeared. Thoughts of body-snatching and bizarre surgery flitted through his mind to be instantly dismissed. Dreaming? Drunk? A dreadful idea that he might be insane struck him and he leaped from the bed to confront a mirror. His feet struck the floor with a portentous bang and each step produced a squeak and clank—and he faced the mirror, the familiar mirror before which he had shaved for years. With utter stupefaction he saw an iron countenance, above which a stiff brush of wire hair projected ludicrously.
One does not go mad at such moments. The shock takes time to sink in. “At all events I may as well get dressed,” he remarked to himself practically. “I don’t suppose water will do this hardware any good, so I’ll omit the bath; but if I’m crazy I might as well go out and have a good time about it.”
Dressing was a process prolonged by an examination of himself and the discovery that he was a most efficient metal machine. He rather admired the smoothness of the hip joints and the way the sliding parts of his arms fitted together, and was agreeably surprised to find that in the metallizing process his toes had become prehensile. Just for the fun of it, he pulled one shoe on with the opposite foot.
It was not until he was nearly dressed that he realized that the wonted noise of New York, which reached one as a throaty undertone at the forty-eighth story of a modern apartment building, was somehow absent. Surely, at this hour—he glanced at the clock. It had stopped at a quarter to two. No help there. His watch was inexplicably missing. Probably Ben had borrowed it.... Ah!
That was the idea. Ben Ruby, with whom he occupied the duplex apartment in the penthouse of the Arbuckle Building, was a scientist of sorts (mainly engaged in the analysis of “booze” samples for millionaires distrustful of their bootleggers, these days)—he would be able to explain everything.
He stepped across to the door and dropped the brass knocker, a little timorous at the sound of his own thudding steps. The door was snatched open with unexpected suddenness by a caricature of Ben in metal—as complete a machine as himself, but without most of the clothes.
“Come in! Come in!” his friend bellowed in a voice with an oddly phonographic quality to it. “You look great. Iron Man MacGinnity! What did you put on clothes for? As useful as pants on a rock-drill. I have breakfast.”
“What is it? Am I crazy, are you, or are we both?”
“Of course not. Greatest thing that ever happened. The big comet. They said she was radioactive, but most of ‘em wouldn’t believe it. Now look what it did.” (Murray Lee remembered vaguely some newspaper palaver about a giant comet that was going to strike the earth—argument and counter-argument as to whether it would have a serious effect.) “Everybody’s turned to metal; nize machinery, ate oop all de axle-grease. You need oil. Stick around.”
He disappeared into the bowels of the apartment, the sound of his footsteps ringing enormous in the vast silence. In an instant he was back with a radio battery in one hand and an oil-can in the other.
“Sorry, no grease on tap,” he remarked briskly. “Typewriter oil.” He went to work busily, squirting drops of oil into Lee’s new metallic joints. “Connect this thing up yourself. It fills you with what it takes.” He indicated the battery with an extended toe. “One arm and the opposite leg. There seems to be a resistance chamber in us somewhere that collects the juice.”
Without in the least understanding what it was all about, Murray Lee made shift to follow his instruction. It was the most singular meal he had ever partaken of, but he found it curiously invigorating.
“How about another? No? Have you seen anybody else? It finished most of them.”
“Will you sit down and tell me consecutively what it’s all about before I bash you?” asked Murray, petulantly. “Being turned into a machine is not the easiest thing in the world on one’s temper; it upsets the disposition.”
“Some sort of a special extra radioactive gas storm connected with the comet, I think, though I can’t be sure. It’s made machines of all of us, now and forever more. We’ll live on electric current after this and won’t have to bother about little things like doctors if we can find a good mechanic. But it killed a lot of people. Come along, I’ll show you.”
His hand rang on Murray’s arm as he grasped it to lead the way. The hall was portentously dark, and Ben pulled him straight across it to the door marked “Fire Exit.”
“Elevator?” queried Murray.
“No go. No power.”
“Oh, Lord, forty-eight stories to walk.”
“You’ll get used to it.” They were clanking to the landing of the floor below and Ben, without the slightest compunction, pushed boldly into the door of the apartment there. The lock showed signs of being forced. “Oh, I broke it in,” Ben answered Murray’s unspoken query. “Thought I might be able to help, but it was no use. That fat woman lives here—you know, the one that used to sniff at us in the elevator when we went on a bender.”
Any qualms Murray felt about looking on the naked face of death were perfunctorily laid to rest as the scientist led him into the room occupied by the late lady of the elevator. She lay solidly in her bed amidst the meretricious gorgeousness she had affected in life, the weight of her body sagging the bed grotesquely toward its center. Instead of the clean-running mechanical devices which marked the appearance of the two friends, she was nothing but lumps and bumps, a bulging, ugly cast-iron statue, distending the cheap “silk” nightdress.
“See?” said Ben, calmly. “The transmutation wasn’t complete. Prob’ly didn’t get it as strong as we did. Look, the window’s closed. This will be a warning to people who are afraid to sleep in a draft. Come along.”
Murray lingered. “Isn’t there anything ... we can do?” He felt uncomfortably responsible.
“Not a thing,” said Ben, cheerfully. “All she’s good for is to stand in the park and look at. Come along. We’ve got a lot of stairs to go down ... we’re too noisy; need a good bath in non-rusting oil.”
They reached the street level after an eon of stairs, Ben leading the way to the corner drug store. All about them was a complete silence; fleecy white clouds sailed across the little ribbon of blue visible at the top of the canyon of the New York city street.
“Lucky it’s a nice day,” said Ben, boldly stepping into the drug store, the door of which stood open. “We’ll have to figure out this rainy weather thing. It’s going to present a problem.”
Within, the drug store presented the same phenomena of arrested development as the apartment of the fat lady at the forty-seventh story. A cast-iron statue of a soda-clerk leaned on the fountain in an attitude of studied negligence, its lips parted as though addressing some words to the equally metallic figure of a girl which faced him across the counter. On her steely features was a film of power, and the caked and curling remains of her lip stick showed she had been there for some time.
“By the way,” Murray asked, “have you any idea what day it is, and how long we were—under the influence? It couldn’t have happened overnight.”
“Why not?” came Ben’s voice from the rear of the store. “Say, old dear, rummage around some of those drawers for rubber gloves, will you? I’d hate to run into high voltage with this outfit.”
“Ah, here they are,” came from Ben finally. “Well, let’s go.”
“What’s the next step?” They were outside.
“Rubber shoes, I fancy,” said Ben, as his feet skidded on the pavement. “Let’s take a taxi there and go find a shoe store.”
Together they managed to slide the cast-iron taxi driver from his seat (Murray was surprised at how easily he was able to lift a weight he could not have budged in his flesh and blood days), deposited him on the curb and climbed in. The key was fortunately in the switch.
As they swung around the corner into Madison Avenue, Lee gave an exclamation. A scene of ruin and desolation met their eyes. Two or three street cars had telescoped and an auto or so had piled into the wreckage. All about were the iron forms of the passengers in these conveyances, frozen in the various attitudes they had assumed at the moment of the change, and from one or two of them thin streamers of metal showed where blood had flowed forth before it had been irretrievably crystallized to metal.
Murray Lee suddenly realized that an enormous amount of machinery had gone to smash everywhere when the guiding hands had been removed and the guiding brains frozen to useless metal. He gave a little shudder.
They swung round before a shoe store with grating brakes. The door was locked, but Ben, lifting his foot, calmly kicked a hole in the show window. Murray extended a restraining hand, but his friend shook it off.
“No use asking permission. If the proprietor of this place is still alive anywhere, it will be easy enough to settle up for the damage; if he isn’t, we have as good a right to it as anybody.”
The new toes, which appeared to be longer than those he remembered, made fitting a difficulty, and Murray split two or three shoes before he got a pair on.
“What next?” he asked. “I feel like a drink.”
“No use,” said Ben. “You’re on the wagon for good. Alcohol would play merry hell with your metalwork. The best thing is to find out how many people we are. For all we know, we’re the only ones in the world. This thing seems to have knocked out everybody along the street level. Let’s try some of the taller apartment buildings and see if we can find more penthouse dwellers.”
“Or maybe the others came to before us and went away,” offered Murray.
“True,” Ben replied. “Anyhow, look-see.” He led the way to the taxi.
“Wait,” said Murray. “What’s that?”
Above the sound of the starting engine came the echo of heavy footsteps, muffled by shoes.
“Hey! Coo-ee! This way!” shouted Ben. The footsteps tentatively approached the corner. Murray ran forward, then stopped in amazement. The newcomer was a girl—or would have been a girl had she not been all metal and machinery like themselves. To his eyes, still working on flesh-and-blood standards, she was anything but good-looking. She was fully and formally dressed, save that she wore no hat—the high pile of tangled wire that crowned her head made this obviously impossible.
“Oh, what has happened?” she cried at them. “What can I do? I took a drink of water and it hurt.”
“Everything’s all right. Just a little metal transformation,” said Ben. “Stick around, I’ll get you some oil. You squeak.” He was off down the street in a clatter, leaving Murray with the newcomer.
“Permit me to introduce myself,” he offered. “I am—or was—Murray Lee. My friend, who has gone to get you some oil, is Benjamin Franklin Ruby. He thinks the big comet which hit the earth contained radioactive gas that made us all into metal. Did you live in a penthouse?”
She eyed him darkly. “Somebody told you,” she said, “I’m Gloria Rutherford, and we have the top floor of the Sherry-Netherland, but all the rest were away when this happened.... Oh, pardon me, it hurts me to talk.”
There came a crash from down the street, indicating that Ben was forcing another store, and in a minute he was back with a handful of bottles. With a flourish he offered one to the girl. “Only castor, but it’s the best the market affords,” he said. “What we need is a good garage, but there aren’t many around here.... Go ahead, drink her down, it’s all right,” he assured the girl, who was contemplating the bottle in her hand with an expression of distaste.
Following his own recommendation, he tipped up one of the bottles and drank a deep draught, then calmly proceeded to douse himself from head to foot with the remainder.
She made a little grimace, then tried it. “Thank you,” she said, setting the bottle down. “I didn’t think it was possible anybody could like the stuff except in a magazine ad. Now tell me, where are all the other people and what do we do?”
“Do?” queried Ben. “Find ‘em. How? Ask Mr. Foster. Anybody else in your neck of the woods?”
She shook her head. Murray noticed that the joints of her neck rattled. “Paulson—that’s my maid—was the only other person in our apartment, and she seems to be even more solid-iron in the head than usual—like this lot.” She swung her hand round in an expressive gesture toward the image of a policeman which was directing two similar images to pause at the curb.
“How about a bonfire?” suggested Murray. “That’s the way the Indians or South Africans or somebody, attract attention.”
“What could we burn?” asked Ben. “... A building, of course. Why not? Property doesn’t mean anything any more with all the property owners dead.”
“I know,” said Gloria Rutherford, falling into the spirit of his suggestion. “The old Metropolitan Opera. That eyesore has worried me for the last five years.”
The suggestion was endorsed with enthusiasm. They climbed into the taxi and twenty minutes later were hilariously kindling a blaze in the back-stage section of the old building, running out of it with childish delight to watch the pillar of smoke grow and spread as the flames caught the timbers, long dry with age.
Murray sighed as they sat on the curb across the street. “This is the only time I’ve ever been as close as I wanted to be to a big fire,” he complained, “and now there isn’t even a policeman around for me to make faces at. But such is life!”
“What if it sets fire to the whole city?” inquired Gloria practically.
Ben shrugged. “What if?” he replied. “Doesn’t mean anything. Bet there aren’t more than a couple of dozen people alive. But I don’t think it will. Modern construction in most of these places is too fireproof.”
“Look, there’s a bird,” said Gloria, indicating a solid metal sparrow, fixed, like the human inhabitants of the city, in his last position in life at the edge of the curb. “By the way, what do we eat? Do we live on castor oil all the time?”
A Metal Community
THE CONVERSATION TURNED INTO A discussion of the possibilities of their new form. Whether they would need sleep was a moot point, and they were discussing the advisability of training mechanics as doctors when the first footsteps announced themselves.
They belonged to a man whose face, ornamented by a neat Van Dyke in wire, gave him the appearance of a physician of the more fleshly life, but who turned out to be a lawyer, named Roberts. He was delighted with the extraordinary youthfulness and vitality he felt in the new incarnation. Fully dressed in morning clothes, he bore the information that he was one of a group of four who had achieved the metal transformation atop the French building. He promptly plunged into a discussion of technicalities with Ben that left the other two out of it, and they moved off to the Seventh Avenue side of the building to see whether any more people were visible.
“Do you miss the people much?” asked Murray, by way of making conversation.
“Not a bit,” she confessed. “My chief emotion is delight over not having to go to the de la Poers’ tea tomorrow afternoon. Though I suppose we will miss them as time goes on.”
“I don’t know about that,” Murray replied. “Life was getting pretty complicated and artificial—at least for me. There were so many things one had to do before one began living—you know, picking the proper friends and all that.”
The girl nodded understandingly. “I know what you mean. My mother would throw a fit if she knew I were here talking to you right now. If I met you at a dance in Westchester it would be perfectly all right for me to stay out with you half the night and drink gin together, but meeting you in daylight on the street—oh, boy!”
“Well,” Murray sighed, “that tripe is all through with now. What do you say we get back and see how the rest are getting along?”
They found them still in the midst of their argument.
“—evidently some substance so volatile that the mere contact with animal tissue causes a reaction that leaves nothing of either the element or the tissue,” Ben was saying. “You note that these metal bands reproduce the muscles almost perfectly.”
“Yes,” the lawyer replied, “but they are too flexible to be any metal I know. I’m willing to grant your wider knowledge of chemistry, but it doesn’t seem reasonable. All I can think of is that some outside agency has interfered. These joints, for instance—,” he touched Ben’s elbow, “—and what about the little rubber pads on your fingers and toes and the end of your nose?”
There was a universal motion on the part of the others to feel of their noses. It was as the lawyer had said—they were, like the fingers and toes, certainly very much like rubber—and movable!
“Don’t know,” said Ben. “Who did it, though? That’s what boggles your scheme. Everybody’s changed to metal and nobody left to make the changes you mention. However, let’s go get the rest of your folks. I wonder if we ought to have weapons. You two wait here.”
He clanked off with the lawyer to the taxi. A moment later, the tooting of the horn announced their return. The party consisted, beside Roberts himself, of his daughter, Ola Mae, a girl of sixteen, petulant over the fact that her high-heeled shoes were already breaking down under her weight; a Japanese servant named Yoshio; and Mrs. Roberts, one of those tall and billowy women of the earlier life who, to the irritation of the men, turned out to be the strongest of any of them. Fat, apparently, had no metallic equivalent, and her ample proportions now consisted of bands of metal that made her extraordinarily powerful.
With these additions the little group adjourned to Times Square to watch the billowing clouds of smoke rising above the ruins of the opera house.
“What next?” asked Gloria, seating herself on the curbstone.
“Look for more people,” said Murray. “Surely we can’t be the only frogs in the puddle.”
“Why not?” put in Ben, argumentatively, with a swing of his arm toward the wreckage-strewn square. “You forget that this catastrophe has probably wiped out all the animal life of the world, and we seven owe our survival to some fortunate chance.”
The Japanese touched him on the arm. “Perhaps sir can inform inquirer, in such case, what is curious avian object?” he said, pointing upward.
They heard the beat of wings as he spoke and looked up together to see, soaring fifty feet past their heads a strange parody of a bird, with four distinct wings, a long feathered tail, and bright intelligent eyes set in a dome-like head.
There was a moment of excited babbling.
“What is it?”
“Never saw anything like it before.”
“Did the comet do that to chickens?” And then, as the strange creature disappeared among the forest of spires to the east, the voice of the lawyer, used to such tumults, asserted its mastery over the rest.
“I think,” he said, “that whatever that bird is, the first thing to be done is find a headquarters of some kind and establish a mode of life.”
“How about finding more people?” asked Gloria. “The more the merrier—and there may be some who don’t know how nice castor oil is.” She smiled a metallic smile.
“The fire—” began Ben.
“It would keep some people away.”
They debated the point for several minutes, finally deciding that since those present had all come from the top floors or penthouses of tall buildings, the search should be confined to such localities. Each was to take a car—there were any number for the taking around Times Square—and cover a certain section of the city, rallying at sundown to the Times building, where Ola Mae and Murray, who could not drive, were to be left.
Roberts was the first one back, swinging a big Peugeot around with the skill of a racing driver. He had found no one, but had a curious tale. In the upper floors of the New Waldorf three of the big windows were smashed in, and in one corner of the room, amid a maze of chairs fantastically torn as though by a playful giant, a pile of soft cloths. In the midst of this pile, four big eggs reposed. He had picked up one of the eggs, and after weighing the advisability of bringing it with him, decided he had more important things to do. The owners of the nest did not appear.
As he emerged from the building, however, the quick motion of a shadow across the street caused him to look up in time to catch a glimpse of one of the four-winged birds they had seen before, and just as he was driving the car away, his ears were assailed by a torrent of screeches and “skrawks” from the homecomer. He did not look up until the shadow fell across him again when he perceived the bird was following close behind him, flying low, and apparently debating the advisability of attacking him.
Roberts waved his arms and shouted; it had not the slightest effect on the bird, which, now that it was closer, he perceived to move its hind wings only, holding its fore-wings out like those of an airplane. He wished he had a weapon of some kind; lacking one, he drew the car up to the curb and ran into a building. The bird alighted outside and began to peck the door in, but by the time it got through Roberts had climbed a maze of stairs, and though he could hear it screaming throatily behind him, it did not find him and eventually gave up the search.
The end of this remarkable tale was delivered to an enlarged audience. Gloria had arrived, bringing a chubby little man who announced himself as F. W. Stevens.
“The boy plunger?” queried Murray absent-mindedly, and realized from Gloria’s gasp that he had said the wrong thing.
“Well, I operate in Wall Street,” Stevens replied rather stiffly.
Ben came with three recruits. At the sight of the first, Murray gasped. Even in the metal caricature, he had no difficulty in recognizing the high, bald forehead, the thin jaws and the tooth-brush moustache of Walter Beeville, the greatest living naturalist. Before dark the others were back—Yoshio with one new acquisition and Mrs. Roberts, whose energy paralleled her strength, with no less than four, among them an elaborately gowned woman who proved to be Marta Lami, the Hungarian dancer who had been the sensation of New York at the time of the catastrophe.
They gathered in the Times Square drug store in a strange babble of phonographic voices and clang of metal parts against the stone floor and soda fountains. It was Roberts who secured a position behind one of these erstwhile dispensers of liquid soothing-syrup and rapped for order.
“I think the first thing to be done,” he said, when the voices had grown quiet in answer to his appeal, “is to organize the group of people here and search for more. If it had not been for the kindness of Mr. Ruby here, my family and I would not have known about the necessity of using oil on this new mechanical make-up nor of the value of electrical current as food. There may be others in the city in the same state. What is the—ah—sense of the gathering on this topic?”
Stevens was the first to speak. “It’s more important to organize and elect a president,” he said briefly.
“A very good idea,” commented Roberts.
“Well, then,” said Stevens, ponderously, “I move we proceed to elect officers and form as a corporation.”
“Second the motion,” said Murray almost automatically.
“Pardon me.” It was the voice of Beeville the naturalist. “I don’t think we ought to adopt any formal organization yet. It hardly seems necessary. We are practically in the golden age, with all the resources of an immense city at the disposal of—fourteen people. And we know very little about ourselves. All the medical and biological science of the world must be discarded and built up again. At this very moment we may be suffering from the lack of something that is absolutely necessary to our existence—though I admit I cannot imagine what it could be. I think the first thing to do is to investigate our possibilities and establish the science of mechanical medicine. As to the rest of our details of existence, they don’t matter much at present.”
A murmur of approval went round the room and Stevens looked somewhat put out.
“We could hardly adopt anarchy as a form of government,” he offered.
“Oh, yes we could,” said Marta Lami, “Hurray for anarchy. The Red Flag forever. Free love, free beer, no work!”
“Yes,” said Gloria, “what’s the use of all this metallizing, anyway? We got rid of a lot of old applesauce about restrictions and here you want to tie us up again. More and better anarchy!”
“Say,” came a deep and raucous voice from one of the newcomers. “Why don’t we have just a straw boss for a while till we see how things work out? If anyone gets fresh the straw boss can jump him, or kick him out, but those that stick with the gang have to listen to him. How’s that?”
“Fine,” said Ben, heartily. “You mean have a kind of Mussolini for a while?”
“That’s the idea. You ought to be it.”
There was a clanging round of metallic applause as three or four people clapped their hands.
“There is a motion—” began Roberts.
“Oh, tie a can to it,” said Gloria, irreverently, “I nominate Ben Ruby as dictator of the colony of New York for—three months. Everybody that’s for it, stick up your hands.”
Eleven hands went up. Gloria looked around at those who remained recalcitrant and concentrated her gaze on Stevens. “Won’t you join us, Mr. Stevens?” she asked sweetly.
“I don’t think this is the way to do things,” said the Wall Street man with a touch of asperity. “It’s altogether irregular and no permanent good can result from it. However, I will act with the rest.”
“And you, Yoshio?”
“I am uncertain that permission is granted to this miserable worm to vote.”
“Certainly. We’re all starting from scratch. Who else is there? What about you, Mr. Lee?”
“Oh, I know him too well.”
The rest of the opposition dissolved in laughter and Ben made his way to the place by the counter vacated by Roberts.
“The first thing we can do is have some light,” he ordered. “Does anyone know where candles can be had around here? I suppose there ought to be some in the drug store across the street, but I don’t know where and there’s no light to look by.”
“How about flashlights? There’s an electrical and radio store up the block.”
“Fine, Murray you go look. Now Miss Roberts, will you be our secretary? I think the first thing to do is to get down the name and occupation of everyone here. That will give us a start toward finding out what we can do. Ready? Now you, Miss Rutherford, first.”
“My name is Gloria Rutherford and I can’t do anything but play tennis, drink gin and drive a car.”
The rest of the replies followed: “F. W. Stevens, Wall Street,” “Theodore Roberts, lawyer,” “Archibald Tholfsen, chess-player,” “H. M. Dangerfield, editor,” “Francis X. O’Hara, trucking business,” (this was the loud-voiced man who had cut the Gordian knot of the argument about organization). “Are you a mechanic, too?” asked Ben.
“Well, not a first class one, but I know a little about machinery.”
“Good, you’re appointed our doctor.”
“Paul Farrelly, publisher,” “Albert F. Massey, artist"—the voices droned on in the uncertain illumination of the flashlights.
“Very well, then,” said Ben at the conclusion of the list. “The first thing I’ll do is appoint Walter Beeville director of research. Fact number one for him is that we aren’t going to need much of any sleep. I don’t feel the need of it at all, and I don’t seem to see any signs among you. O’Hara will help him on the mechanical side.... I suggest that as Mr. Beeville will need to observe all of us we make the Rockefeller Institute our headquarters. He will have the apparatus there to carry on his work. Let’s go.”
Rebellion
THEY WHIRLED AWAY TO THE east side of the city and up Second Avenue like a triumphal cortege, blissfully disregarding the dead traffic lights, though now and then they had to dodge the ruins of some truck or taxi that had come out second best from an argument with an elevated pillar where the driver’s hand had been frozen at the wheel. At Forty-ninth Street Ben’s car, in the lead, swung in to the curb and pulled up.
“What is it?” ... “Is this the place?” ... “Anything wrong?”
An illuminating voice floated up. “Electric store, get all the flashlights and batteries you can. We’re going to need them.”
A few moments later they were at the great institution, strangely dark and silent now after all its years of ministering to the sick, with a line of rust showing redly on the tall iron fence that surrounded the grounds. They trooped into the reception room, flickering their lights here and there like fireflies. Ben mounted a chair.
“Just a minute, folks,” he began. “I want to say something.... What we have to do here is build civilization up all over again. Undoubtedly there are more people alive—if not in New York, then in other places. We have two jobs—to get in touch with them and to find out what we can do. Mr. Beeville is going to find out about the second one for us, but we can do a lot without waiting for him.
“In the first place, there’s that funny-looking bird that we all saw and that chased Roberts. There may be others like it and a lot of new queer forms of animal life around that would be dangerous to us. Therefore, I think it’s in line to get some weapons. Miss Lami, you and Mr. Tholfsen are delegated to dig up a hardware store and find guns and cartridges.... Now for the rest, I’m open to suggestions.”
Everybody spoke at once. “Wait a minute,” said Ben. “Let’s take things in order. What was your idea, Mr. Stevens?”
“Organize regular search parties.”
“And a good idea, too. We don’t even need to wait for daylight. Everybody who can drive, get a car and trot along.”
“X-ray machines are going to be awfully useful in my work,” offered Beeville. “I wonder if there isn’t some way of getting enough current to run one.”
“As far as I remember, this building supplies its own current. Murray, you and Massey trot down and get a fire up under one of the boilers. Anything else?”
“Yes,” came from Dangerfield, the editor. “It seems to me that the first thing anyone else in the world would try to do if he found himself made into a tin doll like this is get hold of a radio. How about opening up a broadcasting station?”
“I don’t know whether you can get enough power, but you can try. Go to it. Do you know anything about radio?”
“A little.”
“All right. Pick whoever you want for an assistant and try it out. Any more ideas?”
“What day is it?” asked Ola Mae Roberts.
Nobody had thought of it, and it suddenly dawned on the assemblage that the last thing they remembered was when the snow on the roof-tops bespoke a chilly February, while now all the trees were in leaf and the air was redolent of spring.
“Why—I don’t know,” said Ben. “Anybody here got any ideas on how to find out?”
“It would take an experienced astronomer and some calculation to determine with accuracy,” said Beeville. “We’d better set an arbitrary date.”
“O. K. Then it’s May 1, 1947. That’s two years ahead of time, but it will take that long to find out what it really is.”
The assumption that sleep would be unnecessary proved correct. All night long, cars roared up to the door and away again on their quests. The number of people found was small—the cream had apparently been gathered that morning. O’Hara brought in a metallic scrubwoman from one of the downtown buildings, the tines that represented her teeth showing stains of rust where she had incautiously drunk water; Stevens turned up with a slow-voiced young man who proved to be Georgios Pappagourdas, the attach� of the Greek consulate whose name had been in the papers in connection with a sensational divorce case; and Mrs. Roberts came in with two men, one of them J. Sterling Vanderschoof, president of the steamship lines which bore his name.
At dawn Dangerfield came in. He had set up a powerful receiving set by means of storage batteries but could find no messages on the air, and could find no source of power sufficient for him to broadcast.
The morning, therefore, saw another and somewhat less optimistic conference. As it was breaking up Ben said, “You Tholfsen, take Stevens, Vanderschoof and Lee and get a truck, will you? You’ll find one about half a block down the street. Go up to one of the coal pits and get some fuel for our boilers here. We haven’t too large a supply.”
There was a clanking of feet as they left and Ben turned into the laboratory where Beeville was working, with the scrubwoman as a subject.
“Something interesting here,” said the naturalist, looking up as he entered. “The outer surface of this metal appears to be rust-proof, but when you get water on the inside, things seem to go. It acts like a specially annealed compound of some kind. And look—” He seized one of the arms of his subject, who gazed at him with mildly unresisting eyes, and yanked at the outer layer of metal bands that composed it. The band stretched like one of rubber, and she gave a slight squeal as it snapped back into position. “I don’t know of any metal that has that flexibility. Do you? Why—”
The door swung open and they turned to see Murray and Tholfsen.
“Beg pardon for interrupting the sacred panjandrum,” said the former, “but Stevens and Vanderschoof are indulging in a sulk. They don’t want to play with us.”
“Oh, hell,” remarked Ben cheerfully and started for the door, the other two following him.
He found the recalcitrants soon enough. The Wall Street man was seated across a doctor’s desk from Vanderschoof and looked up calmly from an interrupted conversation as Ben entered.
“Thought I asked you two to go with the boys for some coal,” said Ben, waving at them. “My mistake. I meant to.”
“You did. I’m not going.”
Ben’s eyes narrowed. “Why not?”
“This is the United States of America, young man. I don’t recognize that I am under your orders or anyone else’s. If you think you are going to get us to accept any such Mussolini dictatorship, you’ve got another guess coming. As I was saying—” he turned back to Vanderschoof with elaborate unconcern, and Murray took a step toward him, bristling angrily.
“Leave me alone, boys, I can handle this,” said Ben, waving the other two back. “Mr. Stevens.” The broker looked up with insolent politeness. “This is not the United States, but the colony of New York. Conditions have changed and the sooner you recognize that the better for all of us. We are trying to rebuild civilization from the ruins; if you don’t share in the work, you shall not share in the benefits.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“Put you out.”
There was a quick flash, and Ben was staring into the business end of a Luger automatic, gripped tightly in the broker’s hand. “Oh, no you won’t. You forget that you made this anarchy yourself when you refused to have a president. Now get out of here, quick, and let me talk with my friend.”