clang of her body on the stone, a long pencil of violet light sprang silently out from somewhere back in the hills, moved thrice across the sky and then faded as swiftly as it had come.

She felt the beam of a flashlight in her eyes, and got up, hearing her voice with a sort of inward surprise as it babbled something slightly incoherent about "things—in there."

Stevens' voice, rough with irritation. "What is it you're saying?" He shook her arm. "Come on, little woman, pull yourself together."

"There must be someone else around here," remarked Vanderschoof, irrelevantly. "Did you see that searchlight?"

Marta Lami pulled herself up short, shaking loose the hand with a touch of the arrogance that had made her the queen of the night life of New York.

"Something in there gives me the heeby-jeebies," she said, pointing. "Sounds like some guy shooting craps with himself."

Stevens laughed, somewhat forcedly. "Well, it's nothing to be scared of, unless it's one of those damn birds, and if it was that he'd be taking us apart now. Come on!"

He flung the door open and plunged in, the flashlight flickering before him. Empty.

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, 

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