The next doses were wonderfully palatable, easily handled. The leech overflowed its bounds, growing, eating, and growing.
That was a taste of real food! The leech was as near ecstasy as it had ever been. It waited hopefully for more, but no more came.
It went back to feeding on the Earth. The energy, used to produce more cells, was soon dissipated. Soon it was hungry again.
It would always be hungry.
O'Donnell retreated with his demoralized men. They camped ten miles from the leech's southern edge, in the evacuated town of Schroon Lake. The leech was over sixty miles in diameter now and still growing fast. It lay sprawled over the Adirondack Mountains, completely blanketing everything from Saranac Lake to Port Henry, with one edge of it over Westport, in Lake Champlain.
Everyone within two hundred miles of the leech was evacuated.
General O'Donnell was given permission to use hydrogen bombs, contingent on the approval of his scientists.
"What have the bright boys decided?" O'Donnell wanted to know.
He and Micheals were in the living room of an evacuated Schroon Lake house. O'Donnell had made it his new command post.