There was a door at the further end, next to the one they had investigated before. Toward this he strode, clump, clump on the carpet, and flung it open likewise. Empty again. No, there was something. The questing beam came to rest on a brown army tunic behind the desk, followed it up quickly to the face and there held. For, staring at them with mechanical fixity was another of those simulations of the human face in metal with which they were by now, so familiar. But this one was different. For it held the balance between the walking cartoons of men in metal, such as they themselves were, and the ugly and solid statues they had seen strewn about the streets of New York. It had the metal bands across the forehead that they possessed, above which issued the same wiry hair, but in this case curiously interwoven as though subjected to some great heat and melted into a single mass. And the nose was all of solid metal, and the eyes--the eyes ... were the eyes of a statue, giving back no lustrous reflexion of glass. A moment they paused breathless, then stepped forward, and as the beam of light shifted when Stevens moved, rattle, rattle, came the sound Marta Lami had heard, and when the light went back those unseeing eyes had moved. For a few seconds no one spoke. Then: "Good God, it's alive!" said Vanderschoof in a hushed voice and a thrill of horror went through the others as they recognized the truth of his words. Stevens broke the spell, stepping swiftly to the desk. "Can we do anything for you?" he asked. No movement from the metal figure--only that ghastly rustle of the eyes as they turned here and there in the fixed head, searching for the light they would never find again. The Wall Street man lifted one of the hands, tried to flex the arm that held it. It dropped back to the deck with a crash. Yet the metal of which they were composed seemed in itself to be as pliant as that of their own arms. A feeling of wonderment mingled with the horror of the spectators. "What happened to him?" asked Marta Lami in a whisper as though she feared awakening a sleeper. Stevens shrugged. "What's happened to all of us? He's alive, I tell you. Let's ... get out of here. I don't like it." "But where to?" asked Vanderschoof. "Follow the Albany road," said Stevens. "We ought to move on. If those birds come back in the morning--" he left the sentence unfinished. "But what about this poor egg?" asked Marta Lami. "Leave him," said Stevens, then suddenly giving way, "there's too much mystery about this whole business around here. I'm going, I tell you, going. You can stay here till you rot if you like. I'm clearing out." CHAPTER V The Menace