"When I give the signal," he whispered, "we'll all grab at once."
"I heard that!" Marc yelled. "Stay away from me, you croakers, or I'll...!"
"Okay!" the doctor cried. "Grab!"
The scene over the operating table, for a moment thereafter, was a living abstraction in flailing arms and legs. Though Marc managed at one point to insert his thumb into the eye of the first doctor and his foot into the mouth of the second, the odds were too great against him. In the end he found himself pinioned helplessly to the table.
"All right, nurse," the doctor said, "fit the mask to his face. As soon as the body's relaxed...."
"You leave that body alone," a pert feminine voice said tartly. "That body happens to belong to me, for what it's worth, and I don't want it tampered with. I particularly don't want it relaxed. I want it alert and twitching in every fibre, and if you don't leave it alone I'm going to lay into the bunch of you bare fisted!"
A tense silence overtook the group around the operating table. The doctors looked at each other, then turned to observe the dismaying redhead who had mysteriously appeared just behind them.
"How did you get in here?" the first doctor said uncertainly.
"I'm the owner of that body you are flinging about there," Toffee said hotly, shifting the gadget under her arm and placing a hand on her hip. "That body's mine right down to the last molecule and I've come to fight for it if I have to."