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.

However, it did not. Just short of his lips, it halted. And after a few moments, it ceased to struggle.

Annoyed, but uncertain just why he was, Jerry attempted to re-mouth his tongue. It did not come back. His jaws lay open wide, and his tongue remained where it had shot forward to grasp the tentacled creature.

Something clicked in Jerry's mind, and he once more tried "seeing" out of the tongue's six eyes. He found that he still could, but dimly.

It took him about three seconds to figure out his peril.

The segment behind his own would never re-swallow his segment, which had been its tongue. It couldn't. It was dead. For the time-period in which his own segment had existed as the third segment's tongue, it had some control over it. It could extend the tongue, and could see through the eyes in the tongue. But then Jerry's segment had fed, had grown, and the parent-segment had died, as had its parent-segments before it. The thing, whatever it was, grew fast, too.

That was the frightening part.

Even while he thought this, he saw that the lump was gone from his tongue. But his tongue was twice the size it had been!

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