Graves shut up and he and his assistant complied. Jarvis did not seem to mind; he seemed only partly aware of his surroundings. There was a nasty blue welt across his left cheekbone and temple, but that was not the cause; I did not hit him that hard. Graves must have drugged him.
“Turn him around,” the Old Man ordered. Jarvis let himself be turned; there was the mark of the slug, a red rash on the shoulders and neck. “You can all see,” the Old Man went on, “where the thing rode him.” There had been some whispers and one embarrassed giggle when Jarvis had been stripped; now there was a dead hush.
“Now,” said the Old Man, “we are going to get that slug! Furthermore, we are going to capture it alive. That warning is for you eager boys with itchy trigger fingers. You have all seen where a parasite rides on a man. I’m warning you; if the parasite gets burned, I’ll burn the man who did it. If you have to shoot the host to catch it, shoot low. Come here!” He pointed his gun at me.
I started toward him; he halted me halfway between the crowd and himself. “Graves! Take Jarvis out of the way. Sit him down behind me. No, leave his robe off,” Jarvis was led across the room, still docile, and Graves and his helper rejoined the group. The Old Man turned his attention back to me. “Take out your gun. Drop it on the floor.”
The Old Man’s gun was pointed at my belly button; I was very careful how I drew mine. I slid it some six feet away from me. “Take off your clothes—all of them.”
I am no shrinking violet, but that is an awkward order to carry out. The Old Man’s gun overcame my inhibitions.
It did not help any to have some of the younger girls giggling at me as I got down to the buff. One of them said, not too sotto voce, “Not bad!” and another replied, “Knobby, I’d say.”
I blushed like a bride.
After he looked me over the Old Man told me to pick up my gun and stand beside him. “Back me up,” he ordered, “and keep an eye on the door. You! Dotty Something-or-other—you’re next.”
Dotty was a girl from the clerical pool. She had no gun, of course, and she had evidently been in bed when the alarm sounded; she was dressed in a floor length negligee. She stepped forward, stopped, but did nothing more.
The Old Man waved his gun at her. “Come on—get ’em off! Don’t take all night.”
“You really mean it?” she said incredulously.
“Move!”
She started—almost jumped. “Well!” she said, “no need to take a person’s head off.” She bit her lower lip and then slowly unfastened the clasp at her waist. “I ought to get a bonus for this,” she said defiantly, then threw the robe from her all in one motion.
Whereupon she ruined her buildup by posing for an instant—not long, but you couldn’t miss it. I concede that she had something to display, although I was in no mood to appreciate it.
“Over against the wall,” the Old Man said savagely. “Renfrew!”
I don’t know whether the Old Man alternated men and women on purpose or not, but it was a good idea, as it kept resistance to a minimum. Oh, shucks, I do know—the Old Man never did anything by accident. After my ordeal the men were businesslike though some were obviously embarrassed. As to the women, some giggled and some blushed, but none of them objected too much. I would have found it interesting if the circumstances had been different. As it was, we were all bound to learn things about each other that we had not known. For instance there was a girl whom we used to call “Chesty”—never mind. In twenty minutes or so there were more square yards of gooseflesh exposed than I had ever seen before and the pile of guns on the floor looked like an arsenal.
When Mary’s turn came, she set a good example by taking off her clothes quickly and in a completely unprovocative manner—the Old Man should have called her first, instead of that Dotty baggage. Bare, Mary made nothing of it, and wore her skin with quiet dignity. But what I saw did nothing to cool down my feelings about her.