The Troop

Q: Let’s clarify for the record just what we’re talking about. You were working on a diet supplement?

A: It was to be a pill. That’s the grail, right? A pill you can pop before bed. A little white pill. That was the idea.

Q: And this pill would be made of…?

A: Compressed dextrose. You know those candy hearts you get on Valentine’s Day? Same stuff. Basically it’s sugar pressed into a mold using pneumatic pressure.

Q: You mean a placebo?

A: Sugar pills are the classic test of the placebo effect—but no, these were fully loaded.

Q: Why a sugar pill, then?

A: Any delivery system would work—why not go with something sweet? Fact is, the mutagenic strain of the hydatid worm developed by Dr. Edgerton was incredibly hardy. They could have been packed into a dextrose pill and shot into space. If a creature with a humanlike digestive system were to find those pills floating out in space a thousand years later and swallow them, those worms would hatch and thrive. Nothing beats a worm in terms of survivability.

Q: So these worms were packed into a candy pill—

A: The eggs were. Freeze-dried, like the Sea Monkeys kids used to buy in the back pages of old G.I. Joe comics. The dormant-state eggs would become larvae and later full-stage hydatids.

Q: And the expectation was that people would be desperate enough to consume these pills to lose weight? That was what Dr. Edgerton and his silent partner–slash–bankroller pharmacy concern expected?

A: People are already desperate enough. You’ve never heard of the tapeworm diet? You’ve got people eating tainted beef to give themselves worms. It’s not nearly as uncommon as you’d think—it’s illegal in North America, sure, but Mexican diet clinics are doing a brisk business.

Q: What made your method a better option?

A: A beef tapeworm is a great diet aid… if it stays in your gut. Problem is, tapeworms are wanderers. They go on walkabout inside your body. They’ll swim out of your intestines—or needle through your intestinal wall—and encyst in your liver or brain or eyes or spinal cord. An encysted worm in your brain shows up the same as a tumor on a CAT scan. It can do the same level of damage, too. But the modified hydatid we were working on would be corralled in the host’s intestines. Like those electric fences cattle ranchers use to keep their cows in their fields. Dr. Edgerton was working on reconstructing the worm’s basic DNA sequence so that it would die as soon as it perforated the intestinal wall. It was a matter of weakening its natural immunities, making it more susceptible to white blood cell attack. White blood plasma would eat through Dr. Edgerton’s worms like acid. Anyway, that was the idea.

Q: And when a person reaches his target weight?

A: An oral antibiotic flushes out the worm colony in a matter of days. The two-pill solution, we’d bill it. One pill to give you worms, the other to flush them out.

Q: And in between?

A: You’d lose those troublesome pounds.

Q: But the worm you helped Dr. Edgerton develop didn’t act according to plan, did it?

A: I’d say that is somewhat of an understatement.