"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.