the Leech the Leech Illustrated by CONNELL Illustrated by CONNELL By PHILLIPS BARBEE A visitor should be fed, but this one could eat you out of house and home ... literally! A visitor should be fed, but this one could eat you out of house and home ... literally! The leech was waiting for food. For millennia it had been drifting across the vast emptiness of space. Without consciousness, it had spent the countless centuries in the void between the stars. It was unaware when it finally reached a sun. Life-giving radiation flared around the hard, dry spore. Gravitation tugged at it. The A planet claimed it, with other stellar debris, and the leech fell, still dead-seeming within its tough spore case. One speck of dust among many, the winds blew it around the Earth, played with it, and let it fall. On the ground, it began to stir. Nourishment soaked in, permeating the spore case. It grew—and fed. Frank Conners came up on the porch and coughed twice. "Say, pardon me, Professor," he said. Frank Conners The long, pale man didn't stir from the sagging couch. His horn-rimmed glasses were perched on his forehead, and he was snoring very gently. "I'm awful sorry to disturb you," Conners said, pushing back his battered felt hat. "I know it's your restin' week and all, but there's something damned funny in the ditch." The pale man's left eyebrow twitched, but he showed no other sign of having heard. Frank Conners coughed again, holding his spade in one purple-veined hand. "Didja hear me, Professor?" "Of
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