"That's what I would like to know—what happened. This man has been dead less than an hour."
"At eleven-thirty Central phoned in there was a receiver off the hook here and said the operator thought somebody had tried to call the police," Kennedy interrupted.
"Heh?" the doctor queried. His professional aplomb had deserted him completely. "The important point is: what was the cause of death? To my knowledge there is no record in medical history of a death like this. Look."
"I've already looked," Kennedy said, turning away. "Once is enough."
Rocks looked again at the solid, craggy face he had known so well. The skin had always been tanned, but now it was red. Puffed and discolored. And red—like a chunk of raw beefsteak, like the carcass of a skinned animal. The first impression he got was that the skin had been removed. But he bent over, fighting against the sickness in his stomach, and saw that the skin had not been removed. It had been punctured, in literally thousands of places. Morton's face looked like thousands of pins had been stuck in it. When the pins had been removed, the blood oozed through.
A later report by the medical examiner disclosed that there was not a spot on Morton's body that was not full of microscopic holes—millions of them. Even the soles of his feet, protected by his shoes, showed the same horrible markings.
But it was the coat that held Rocks' eyes. Where the doctor had taken hold of it, the cloth had crumbled. Rocks tested it. The cloth fell away in his fingers, fell into a dark ash. The cloth looked all right, until it was touched. Then it crumbled into a dust as fine as powder.
The hottest fire would not leave so fine an ash.
"What do you think killed him, Doc?" Kennedy asked.
The doctor brushed perspiration from his face. "Really, I could not hazard an opinion. There is nothing like this in medical records. It's appalling. I trust—ah—that it is not some new kind of plague. No, it couldn't be that. No disease would destroy his clothing. I can't even begin to guess what happened, but the body must be removed for a complete examination."