His primary six eyes took in the pink-and-gray horror extending ahead of him. The tongue was almost like another animal, serpentine in construction, and had two horny—what?—arms?—pincer-jaws?—at either side of the "head". They were tubular, like a cow's horns, and lay at either side of a wide slit-mouth in the tongue itself.
On impulse, Jerry swiveled the tip of the tongue back upon itself, and gazed through the six eyes around the tongue-slit-and-jaws/arms at the main body of his host. Then, suddenly feeling ill, he snapped the tongue back into his mouth and shut his jaws.
It had been a horrible sight. Where he'd expected to see the abdominal region of his host, just behind the thoracic section, there lay a wet, red concavity, in the midst of gaping jaws. Jerry himself was enhosted in a "tongue" of some still larger creature within that soft earthen burrow! And some remaining fragment of his host's awareness told him that the creature of whom he was the tongue was itself the tongue of yet another creature. He was a segment of some gigantic segmented worm-creature whose origin lay who-knows-how-far beneath the earth.
Carefully, stilling a mental feeling akin to mal de mer, he re-protruded his tongue and looked more carefully at it. Sure enough, just behind the "head" of the thing were two stubby growths, not yet mature. In time, Jerry realized, those growths would develop into a pair of double-elbowed front "arms" with semi-tactile tesselated pads at the base, and the curving jaws/arms would drop off or be resorbed, while that "tongue" extended a "tongue" of its own.
"And then what happens to my segment?" he wondered. "Do I simply lie here forever with jaws agape?"
As he pondered this, there came a movement in the greenery just beyond the burrow orifice. A squiggly thing with an ill-assorted tangle of under-appendages came prancing with almost laughable ill-balance into view. Jerry, intent on observing this creature—very like a landbound jellyfish walking clumsily upon its dangling arms—relaxed his vigil as regards control of the host.
Before he realized it, his jaws were flung wide, and that self-determined tongue was leaping for its prey. The horny jaws/arms clamped into the viscous body of the passing creature, and the slit-mouth extended upper and lower lips like pseudopods to cover the writhing, squealing victim. Then a huge lump appeared in the tongue, just behind its "head." Jerry waited with a distinct lack of relish for the still squirming "meal" to make its alimentary way back into his own esophagous.
