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

Naturally, exploration of the familiar, yet unfamiliar world into which they had suddenly been thrown was the first preoccupation of the New York colonists. None of the group cared to wander far from the Institute during the first weeks, however, in view of the possible difficulty of obtaining electrical food for a long trip, and Beeville's researches on the potentialities of their new bodily form advanced so slowly that they hardly dared leave.

His discoveries in the first weeks were, in fact, purely negative. Farrelly, the publisher, smashed a finger in some machinery, but when O'Hara turned an exact duplicate out on his lathe and Beeville 

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