“Oh. My. Good. Arse.”

He stumbled slowly, nervously across the room, seeming to hang back, chary of seeing what he was seeing. He approached the cage.

Inside, a colossal mass of beautifully coloured grub-flesh wriggled unhappily. Isaac stood uneasily over the enormous thing. He could feel the odd little vibrations of alien unhappiness in the æther around him.

The caterpillar had at least tripled in size overnight. It was a foot long, and correspondingly fat. The faded magnificence of its coloured patches had returned to their initial, burnished brilliance. With interest. The sticky-looking hairs on its tail-end were wicked-looking bristles. It had no more than six inches of space around it on all sides. It nudged weakly against the sides of the hutch.

“What happened to you?” hissed Isaac.

He recoiled and gazed at the thing, which waved its head in the air blindly. He thought quickly, pictured the number of dreamshit lozenges he had given the grub to eat. He looked around and saw the envelope containing all the remains where he had left it, untouched. The thing hadn’t got out and gorged itself. There was no way, Isaac realized, that the little pellets of drug he had left in that hutch contained anything like the number of calories that the caterpillar had used on growth over the night. Even if it had just piled on weight ounce for ounce with what it had eaten, it would not have represented an increase in this league.

“Whatever energy you’re getting out of your supper,” he whispered, “it’s not physical. What in Jabber’s name are you?”

He had to get the thing out of the cage. It looked so miserable, flailing pointlessly in that little space. Isaac hung back, slightly afraid and a little disgusted at the idea of touching the extraordinary thing. Eventually he picked up the box, staggering under the massively increased weight, and held it just above the ground in a much larger cage left over from his experiments, a chicken-wire-fronted mini-aviary five feet high that had contained a small family of canaries. He opened the front of the hutch and tipped the fat grub into the sawdust, then quickly closed and latched the front grille.

He stood back to gaze at his rehoused captive.

It looked directly at him, now, and he felt its childish pleas for breakfast.

“Oh steady on,” he said. “I haven’t even eaten yet.”

He backed uneasily away, then turned and made for his parlour.

Over his breakfast of fruit and iced buns, Isaac realized that the effects of the dreamshit were wearing off very quickly. It might be the worst hangover in the world, he thought wryly, but it’s gone within the hour. No wonder the punters come back.

From across the room, the foot-long caterpillar scrabbled around the floor of its new cage. It nosed miserably around the dirt, then reared up again and waved its head in the direction of the packet of dreamshit.