Ben came with three recruits. At the sight of the first, Murray gasped. Even in the metal caricature, he had no difficulty in recognizing the high, bald forehead, the thin jaws and the tooth-brush moustache of Walter Beeville, the greatest living naturalist. Before dark the others were back—Yoshio with one new acquisition and Mrs. Roberts, whose energy paralleled her strength, with no less than four, among them an elaborately gowned woman who proved to be Marta Lami, the Hungarian dancer who had been the sensation of New York at the time of the catastrophe.
They gathered in the Times Square drug store in a strange babble of phonographic voices and clang of metal parts against the stone floor and soda fountains. It was Roberts who secured a position behind one of these erstwhile dispensers of liquid soothing-syrup and rapped for order.
"I think the first thing to be done," he said, when the voices had grown quiet in answer to his appeal, "is to organize the group of people here and search for more. If it had not been for the kindness of Mr. Ruby here, my family and I would not have known about the necessity of using oil on this new mechanical make-up nor of the value of electrical current as food. There may be others in the city in the same state. What is the—ah—sense of the gathering on this topic?"
Stevens was the first to speak. "It's more important to organize and elect a president," he said briefly.
"A very good idea," commented Roberts.
"Well, then," said Stevens, ponderously, "I move we proceed to elect officers and form as a corporation."
"Second the motion," said Murray almost automatically.
"Pardon me." It was the voice of Beeville the naturalist. "I don't think we ought to adopt any formal organization yet. It hardly seems necessary. We are practically in the golden age, with all the resources of an immense city at the disposal of—fourteen people. And we know very little about ourselves. All the medical and biological science of the world must be discarded and built up again. At this very moment we may be suffering from the lack of something that is absolutely necessary to our existence—though I admit I cannot imagine what it could be. I think the first thing to do is to investigate our possibilities and establish the science of mechanical medicine. As to the rest of our details of existence, they don't matter much at present."
A murmur of approval went round the room and Stevens looked somewhat put out.
"We could hardly adopt anarchy as a form of government," he offered.