"Sam! Kill him!" the Old Man rapped.
I burned his legs off and his trunk fell to the floor. It was a poor shot; I had intended to burn his belly.
I stepped quickly to him and kicked his gun away from his still-groping fingers. I was about to give him the coup de grace-a man burned that way is dead, but it takes him a while to die-when the Old Man snapped, "Don't touch him! Mary, stand back!"
We did so. The Old Man sidled toward the body, like a cat cautiously investigating the unknown. Barnes gave a long bubbling sigh and was quiet-shock death; a gun burn doesn't bleed much, not that much. The Old Man looked him over and poked him gently with his cane.
"Boss," I said, "about time to git, isn't it?"
Without looking around he answered, "We're as safe here as anywhere. Safer, probably. This building may be swarming with them."
"Swarming with what?"
"How would I know? Swarming with whatever he was." He pointed to Barnes's body. "That's what I've got to find out."
Mary gave a choked sob, the first honest feminine thing I had known her to do, and gasped, "He's still breathing. Look!"
The body lay facedown; the back of the jacket heaved as if the chest were rising. The Old Man looked at it and poked at it with his cane. "Sam. Come here."
I came. "Strip it," he went on. "Use your gloves. And be careful."
"Booby trap?"
"Shut up. Use care."
I don't know what he expected me to find, but he must have had a hunch that was close to truth. I think the bottom part of the Old Man's brain has a built-in integrator which arrives at a logical necessity from minimum facts the way a museum johnny reconstructs an extinct animal from a single bone.
I took him at his word. First pulling on gloves-agent's gloves; I could have stirred boiling acid with my gloved hand, yet I could feel a coin in the dark and call heads or tails-once gloved, I started to turn him over to undress him.
The back was still heaving; I did not like the look of it-unnatural. I placed a palm between the shoulder blades.
A man's back is bone and muscle. This was jelly soft and undulating. I snatched my hand away.
Without a word Mary handed me a fancy pair of scissors from Barnes's desk. I took them and cut the jacket away. Presently I folded it back and we all looked. Underneath the jacket the body was dressed in a light single, almost transparent. Between this shirt and the skin, from the neck halfway down the back, was something which was not flesh. A couple of inches thick, it gave the corpse a round-shouldered, or slightly humped, appearance.
It pulsed like a jellyfish.
As we watched, it slid slowly off the back, away from us. I reached out to peel up the singlet, to let us at it; my hand was knocked away by the Old Man's cane. "Make up your mind," I said and rubbed my knuckles.
He did not answer but tucked the end of his cane under the bottom of the shirt and worried it up the trunk. The thing was uncovered.
Grayish, faintly translucent, and shot through with darker structure, shapeless-it reminded me of a giant clot of frogs' eggs. It was clearly alive, for it pulsed and quivered and moved by flowing. As we watched it flowed down into the space between Barnes's arm and chest, filled it and stayed there, unable to go farther.
"The poor devil," the Old Man said softly.
"Huh? That?"
"No. Barnes. Remind me to see to it that he gets the Purple Heart, when this is over. If it ever is over." The Old Man straightened up and slumped around the room, as if he had forgotten completely the gray horror nestling in the crook of Barnes's arm.
I drew back a bit and continued to stare at it, my gun ready. It could not move fast; it obviously could not fly; but I did not know what it could do and I was not taking chances. Mary moved closer to me and pressed her shoulder against mine, as if for human comfort. I put my free arm around her.
On a side table there was an untidy stack of cans, the sort used for stereo tapes. The Old Man took a double program can, spilled the reels on the floor, and came back with it. "This will do, I think." He placed the can on the floor, near the thing, and began chivvying it with his cane, trying to irritate it into crawling into the can.
Instead it oozed back until it was almost entirely under the body. I grabbed the free arm and heaved what was left of Barnes away from the spot; the thing clung momentarily, then flopped to the floor. After that, under dear old Uncle Charlie's directions, Mary and I used our guns set at lowest power to force it, by burning the floor close to it, into the can. We got it in, a close fit, and I slapped the cover on.
The Old Man tucked the can under his arm. "On our way, my dears."
On the way out he paused in the partly open door to call out a parting to Barnes, then, after closing the door, stopped at the desk of Barnes's secretary. "I'll be seeing Mr. Barnes again tomorrow," he told her. "No, no appointment. I'll phone first."
Out we went, slow march, the Old Man with the can full of thing under his arm and me with my ears cocked for alarums. Mary played the silly little moron, with a running monologue. The Old Man even paused in the lobby, bought a cigar, and inquired directions, with bumbling, self-important good nature.
Once in the car he gave me directions, then cautioned me against driving fast. The directions led us into a garage. The Old Man sent for the manager and said to him, "Mr. Malone wants this car-immediately." It was a signal I had had occasion to use myself, only then it had been "Mr. Sheffield" who was in a hurry. I knew that the duo would cease to exist in about twenty minutes, save as anonymous spare parts in the service bins.
The manager looked us over, then answered quietly, "Through that door over there." He sent the two mechanics in the room away on errands and we ducked through the door.
We ended up presently in the apartment of an elderly couple; there we became brunets and the Old Man got his bald head back. I acquired a moustache which did nothing for my looks, but I was surprised to find that Mary looked as well dark as she had as a redhead. The "Cavanaugh" combination was dropped; Mary got a chic nurse's costume and I was togged out as a chauffeur while the Old Man became our elderly, invalid employer, complete with shawl and temper tantrums.
A car was waiting for us when we were ready. The trip back was no trouble; we could have remained the carrot-topped Cavanaughs. I kept the screen turned on to Des Moines, but, if the cops had turned up the late Mr. Barnes, the newsboys hadn't heard about it.
We went straight down to the Old Man's office-straight as one can go, that is-and there we opened the can. The Old Man sent for Dr. Graves, the head of the Section's bio lab, and the job was done with handling equipment.
We need not have bothered. What we needed were gas masks, not handling equipment. A stink of decaying organic matter, like the stench from a gangrenous wound, filled the room and forced us to slap the cover back on and speed up the blowers. Graves wrinkled his nose. "What in the world was that?" he demanded. "Puts me in mind of a dead baby."
The Old Man was swearing softly. "You are to find out," he said. "Use handling equipment. Work it in suits, in a germ-free compartment, and don't assume that it is dead."
"If that is alive, I'm Queen Anne."
"Maybe you are, but don't take chances. Here is all the help I can give. It's a parasite; it's capable of attaching itself to a host, such as a man, and controlling the host. It is almost certainly extra-terrestrial in origin and metabolism."
The lab boss sniffed. "Extra-terrestrial parasite on a terrestrial host? Ridiculous! The body chemistries would be incompatible."
The Old Man grunted. "Damn your theories. When we captured it, it was living on a man. If that means it has to be a terrestrial organism, show me where it fits into the scheme of things and where to look for its mates. And quit jumping to conclusions; I want facts."