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: