The Leech

'Fine. All right, Soldier,' O'Donnell told the operator. 'Carry out your orders.'

The scientists gasped in unison. The operator manipulated the controls and the blob began to overtake the dot. Micheals started across the room.

'Stop,' the general said, and his strong, commanding voice stopped Micheals. 'I know what I'm doing. I had that ship especially built.'

The blob overtook the dot on the radar screen.

'I told you this was a personal matter,' O'Donnell said. 'I swore to destroy that leech. We can never have any security while it lives.' He smiled. 'Shall we look at the sky?'

The general strolled to the door, followed by the scientists.

'Push the button, Soldier!'

The operator did. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the sky lit up!

A bright star hung in space. Its brilliance filled the night, grew, and started to fade.

'What did you do?' Micheals gasped.

'That rocket was built around a hydrogen bomb,' O'Donnell said, his strong face triumphant. 'I set it off at the contact moment.' He called to the operator again. 'Is there anything showing on the radar?'

'Not a speck, sir.'

'Men,' the general said, 'I have met the enemy and he is mine. Let's have some more champagne.'

But Micheals found that he was suddenly ill.

It had been shrinking from the expenditure of energy, when the great explosion came. No thought of containing it. The leech's cells held for the barest fraction of a second, and then spontaneously overloaded.

The leech was smashed, broken up, destroyed. It was split into a thousand particles, and the particles were split a million times more.

The particles were thrown out on the wave front of the explosion, and they split further, spontaneously.

Into spores.

The spores closed into dry, hard, seemingly lifeless specks of dust, billions of them, scattered, drifting. Unconscious, they floated in the emptiness of space.

Billions of them, waiting to be fed.

—PHILLIPS BARBEE

Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction December 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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