nd the yellow stuff was venom. A tenth of a milligram of it in your
blood and it's "Get the Gate open, St. Peter; here I come."

Tom saw it as soon as I did. His face got the same color as the cop's.
I don't suppose mine looked any better. When Murell saw what had been
buddying up to him, I will swear, on a warehouse full of Bibles,
Korans, Torah scrolls, Satanist grimoires, Buddhist prayer wheels and
Thoran Grandfather-God images, that his hair literally stood on end.
I've heard that expression all my life; well, this time I really saw
it happen. I mentioned that he seemed to have been reading up on the
local fauna.

I looked down at his right leg. He hadn't been stung--if he had, he
wouldn't be breathing now--but he had been squirted, and there were a
couple of yellow stains on the cloth of his trouser leg. I told him to
hold still, used my left hand to pull the cloth away from his leg, and
got out my knife and flipped it open with the other hand, cutting away
the poisoned cloth and dropping it on the dead snail.

Murell started making an outcry about cutting up his trousers, and
said he could have had them cleaned. Bish Ware, coming up, told him to
stop talking like an imbecile.

"No cleaner would touch them, and even if they were cleaned, some of
the poison would remain in the fabric. Then, the next time you were
caught in the rain with a scratch on your leg, Walt, here, would
write you one of his very nicest obituaries."

Then he turned to the cop, who was gabbling into his belt radio, and
said: "Get an ambulance, quick. Possible case of tread-snail skin
poisoning." A moment later, looking at Murell's leg, he added, "Omit
'possible.'"

There were a couple of little spots on Murell's skin that were
beginning to turn raw-liver color. The raw poison hadn't gotten into
his blood, but some of it, with impurities, had filtered through the
cloth, and he'd absorbed enough of it through his skin to make him
seriously ill. The cop jabbered some more into the radio, and the
laborer with the lifter brought it and let it down, and Murell sat
down on his luggage. Tom lit a cigarette and gave it to him, and told
him to remain perfectly still. In a couple of minutes, an ambulance
was coming, its siren howling.

The pilot and his helper were both jackleg medics, at least as far as
first aid. They gave him a drink out of a flask, smeared a lot of gunk
on the spots and slapped plasters over them, and helped him into the
ambu