Beneath the Moors and Darker Places

David's Worm Professor Lees, chief radiobiologist at the Kendall nuclear research and power station, was showing his son some slides he had prepared weeks earlier from pond and seawater in irradiated test tubes. David was only seven, but already he could understand much of what his famous father said. "Look," the professor explained as the boy peered eagerly into the microscope. "That's anamoeba, quite dead, killed off by radiation. Just like a little jellyfish, isn't it? And this..." he swapped slides, "...is a tiny wee plant called adiatom. It's dead toothey all arethat's what hard radiation does to living things..." "What's this one?" David asked, changing the slides himself. "That's a young flatworm, David. It's a tiny freshwater animal. Lives in pools and streams. Funny little thing. That one's a type with very strange abilities. D'you know, when oneplanarian(that's what they're called) eats another" David looked up sharply at his father, who smiled at the boy's expression. "Oh, no! They're not cannibalsat least I don't think sobut if a dead worm is chopped up and fed to another, why! the live worm 'inherits' the knowledge of the one it's eaten!" "Knowledge?" David looked puzzled. "Are they clever, then?" "Noooo, not strictlyclever, but they can be taught simple things like how a drop in temperature means it's feeding time, stuff like that. And, as I've said, when one of them is dead and chopped up, whatever he knew before he died is passed on to the planarian who eats him." "And they're not cannibals?" David still looked puzzled. "Why, no," the professor patiently explained. "I don't suppose for one minute they'd eat each other if theyknewwhat they were eatingwe do chop them up first!" He frowned. "I'm not absolutely sure though....You could, I suppose, call themunwillingcannibals if you wished. Is it important?" But David was not listening. Suddenly his attention seemed riveted on the tiny creature beneath the microscope. "He moved!" "No he didn't, David. That's just your imagination. Hecouldn'tmove, he's dead." Nonetheless the scientist pulled his son gently to one side to have a look himself. It wasn't possibleno, of course not. He had been studying the specimens for three weeks, since the experiment, watching them all die off, and since then there had not been a sign of returning life in any of them. Certainly there could be none now. Even if the sustained blast of hard radiation had not killed them off proper (which of course it had), then colouring them and fixing them to the slides certainly must have. No, they were dead, all of them, merely tiny lumps of useless gelatin... * * * The next day was Saturday and David was not at school. He quitthe house early saying he was going fishing at the pool. Shortly after he left, his father cleaned off his many slides, hardly missing the one with the tiny planarium worm, the one in David's pocket! Davidknewhe had seen the worm move under the microscopea stiff, jerky movement, rather like the slug he had pinned to the garden with a twig through its middle one evening a few weeks earlier... DLumley, Brian is the author of 'Beneath the Moors and Darker Places' with ISBN 9780312878375 and ISBN 0312878370.