
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," Gloria 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 said. "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."
Gloria nodded. "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 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 of. 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 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?" said 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