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 singlet, 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 stumped 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.