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?" CHAPTER II 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."