own moonfish. Duggie pulled the fish basket in, helped his buddy unhook the fish, and took care of getting the fish into the basket. Then he checked his fishhook. "Darn moonie took my bait," he noted.

     Jac replied, "Yeah, they tend to. It's funny how much they love bings, when there's no way they'd ever see them in nature. Kinda like they are with wyrms, but they seem to love bings more."

     "Huh. Where'd you find the little suckers, anyway?"

     As he reached into their bait bucket and grabbed a wriggling bug, Jac replied, "Oh, these I just collected from the floor of my Pop's tool shed. They're practically takin' over the place. We're gonna have to get an exterminator in there soon, or we might have to fumigate all the out-buildings in the compound."

     Duggie fished a bing of his own out of the bait bucket. Like most bugs, the bing had four legs; but unlike any he'd seen before, it also had a papery, flexible carapace, feeling almost like cloth. He looked up at Jac, who had already eased his line back out into the water. "This guy's kinda big for my hook."

     Jac shrugged. "Go ahead and pinch off a piece, like you'd do with a big ol'  wyrm."

     "Okeydoke." Duggie pinched off one of the thing's limbs, and watched with interest as it writhed and bled in his hand, its blood as red and thick as paint. He dropped the bing back into the bucket, where it continued to move weakly, bleeding all over the place, its little fanged mouth opening and shutting spasmodically. As he wiped his hand on his trousers, his imagination kicked in, and he wonder if the wounded bing was screaming on some ultra-high frequency. If he had the right equipment, could he hear it? "Ugh. Look at the poor thing," he said to Jac. "Almost makes me feel bad that I hurt him."

     Jac glanced down into the bait bucket. "Don't worry, man. They're just bugs. Pop says they don't feel pain the way we do."

     "You sure? That bing sure looks like he's hurting."

     "It's an it, man, not a he. Don't go thinkin' of the bait as people, now. They're just critters, and you know what the Ministers say about that."

     "Yup. We have dominion over anything that flies, walks, or crawls on this Earth."

     "Yup. So no worries."

     Duggie threaded the bing's bony little appendage onto his hook and swung the line back out, hoping to catch a nice carppie. Jac's Pop had told them that carppie were overpopulated in this pond, and they could keep any they caught.

They fished on for a while; no carppie, but they added several moonfish to the basket. They were going to have a nice dinner, though Duggie wasn't looking forward to cleaning the fish. While adding another bing part to his hook, he told Jac, "I've never seen these bing thingies before. Cricks, sure. Wyrms, of course. I even used maggots a couple times when my Dad moved us overseas last year. Where'd these things come from? Besides your Pop's tool shed, I mean."

     Jac yanked on his line, but missed whatever was nibbling his bait. "Dang it," he muttered.  "Oh, uh, you know how my Pop does dimensional research?"

     "Yeah."

     "Well, a few months ago he impinged on a plane where everything was in miniature compared to normal. Tallest mountains maybe a quarter-mile high, oceans half a mile deep, biggest trees a couple feet tall, all that. No critters larger than a couple inches. The bings were everywhere over there, and some of them spilled over into our dimension before he could stop 'em."

     "Weird-looking bugs," Duggie pointed out. He glanced into the bait bucket, where the bloodstains from the injured bings were starting to crust into red-brown. "They look kinda like people in some ways."

     Jac laughed. "Pure coincidence. Naw, they're just bugs. They reproduce in, like, days. That's why they're taking over the place." He rolled his eyes. "One of the guys that works with Pop claims that back in their home plane, they split the atom and reached their moon, but I don't believe it."

     Duggie snorted and glanced up at the pockmarked full moon on the horizon. "Heck, we haven't even done that yet."

     "No kiddin'. It’s crazy. Imagine bugs havin' anything like a civilization!"

     Duggie forgot his concerns about the poor human bings when a sizable carppie yanked his bobber under, and the boy descended into the joy of fighting a nice, big fish on a barely-adequate rod.

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THE END