Slither - Edward Lee [86]
"Yeah, but they don't eat five-pound mammals, they eat quarter-ounce crustaceans and mollusks." He looked over at Nora's microscope. "What's your ovum doing now?"
Nora eyed the scope. "Shit, it's about half the size of a marble now. A half hour ago it was smaller than a pencil point."
Trent came back in, looking just as flustered as Nora and Loren. "What's wrong with you two? You looked pissed."
.Not pissed," Loren offered. "More like aggravatedly confounded."
Trent frowned. "I can't find Annabelle anywhere."
"That's not good," Loren said. "Especially if we've got the kind of trouble we think we might have."
"What are you talking about?" Trent demanded, losing some patience.
"Well, Lieutenant," Nora began, "we seem to have a tiny parasitic worm that lives on land and sea and may be able to grow to unheard-of proportions. Big enough, at least, to attack, and kill, that." And she pointed to the possum on the table.
"Before you started cutting on it, it didn't look attacked," Trent said.
"Something sucked this thing's guts out for food," Loren specified.
Nora tacked on, "And then laid eggs in all its babies. And the eggs were the same yellow things we saw in the shower stall the other day."
"You can't be serious," Trent dismissed.
"Look familiar, Lieutenant?" Nora picked up the microscope slide and showed him what was on it: a yellow ovum with bloodred spots, the size of a pea.
"Holy shit ..."
"This thing's probably increased in size a hundredfold in less than an hour."
Trent rubbed his brows. "How is that possible?"
"We don't know," Loren said. "High infantile growth rates among worms and other soft-bodied invertebrates aren't uncommon. But motile ova like this are another story. They always stay the same size before they hatch."
Trent eyed the ticklike pod. It was moving about very slightly via its cilia. "So that thing's going to hatch into a worm."
"Maybe, maybe not," Nora said. "Certain types of ova-like certain types of sperm cells-aren't always fertile."
"That one's big enough to dissect now, Nora," Loren reminded her.
"Good idea." She placed the slide back under the scope, then carefully wielded forceps with one hand, and one of the microscalpels with the other.
"Ten to one there's no embryo in it," Loren said.
"I'm not following any of this now," Trent admitted. "I thought an ovum and an egg were the same thing."
.Not quite," Loren offered. "An egg always carries an embryo, while ova sometimes have dual purposes."
"I still don't get it."
"Be patient ... Nora held the yellow bud down with the tines of the forceps, then gingerly cut into the rubbery outer hull. The ovum popped more than split, and out issued a dollop of jellylike muck laced with something like white threads.
"You were right," she said. "There's no worm larva inside, just some white strands. Probably a mutagenic protein." Next she plucked up several of the previously killed ova and similarly cut them open. "Looks like half of these have infantile worms in them-"
"And the other half contain the mutagen," Loren already knew. "Just like a lot of the Trichinellas."
Trent shook his head. "Would somebody please explain what you're talking about?"
Nora sat back and began, "Motile ova-in other words, egg carriers that move about independently are part of this worm's reproductive system. Typically a parasitic worm will lay its ova in a living host. The nonfertile ova release a mutagen that genetically alters the host's own reproductive systems to make it a more compatible natal environment. Later, the fertile ova hatch. The mutagenesis has occurred in order to force the host to bear the worm's young."
"Yuck," Trent remarked.
"Sure, but a perfect system that increased the odds of positive reproduction. A similar thing happens in many mammals including humans, believe it or not. Not with ova but with sperm cells. Most people don't know that only about half of a man's sperm exist to fertilize a female egg. The remaining sperm have alternate duties: to kill sperm from other males, for instance, to run interference against