ill be getting into more
trouble before you get accustomed to the metal bodies."

But Professor Jameson was doing a great deal of thinking. Doubtlessly,
these strange machine men who had picked up his rocket in the depths of
space and had brought him back to life, were expecting him to travel
with them and become adopted into the ranks of the Zoromes. Did he want
to go with them? He couldn't decide. He had forgotten that the machine
men could read his innermost thoughts.

"You wish to remain here alone upon the earth?" asked 25X-987. "It is
your privilege if you really want it so."

"I don't know," replied Professor Jameson truthfully.

* * * * *

He gazed at the dust around his feet. It had probably been the
composition of men, and had changed from time to time into various other
atomic structures--of other queer forms of life which had succeeded
mankind. It was the law of the atom which never died. And now he had
within his power perpetual existence. He could be immortal if he wished!
It would be an immortality of never-ending adventures in the vast,
endless Universe among the galaxy of stars and planets.

A great loneliness seized him. Would he be happy among these machine men
of another far-off world--among these Zoromes? They were kindly and
solicitous of his welfare. What better fate could he expect? Still, a
longing for his own kind arose in him--the call of humanity. It was
irresistible. What could he do? Was it not in vain? Humanity had long
since disappeared from the earth--millions of years ago. He wondered
what lay beyond the pales of death--the real death, where the body
decomposed and wasted away to return to the dust of the earth and assume
new atomic structures.

He had begun to wonder whether or not he had been dead all these forty
millions of years--suppose he had been merely in a state of suspended
animation. He had remembered a scientist of his day, who had claimed
that the body does not die at the point of official death. According to
the claims of this man, the cells of the body did not die at the moment
at which respiration, heart beats and the blood circulation ceased, but
it existed in the semblance of life for several days afterward,
especially in the cells of the bones, which died last of all.

Perhaps when he had been sent out into space in his rocket right after
his death, the action of the cosmic void was to halt his slow death of
the cells in his bod