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want,” said Revel. “With as much Urschleim as you got. Of course, the smell kinda gets to you if you do it indoors.”
    “But it’s so odd,” breathed Tug. “That the slime out of your oil well is forming itself into jellyfish shapes just as I’m starting to build jellyfish out of plastic.”
    “I figure it for some kind of a morphic resonance thing,” nodded Revel. “This primeval slime’s been trapped inside the Earth so long it’s truly achin’ to turn into something live and organic. Kind of like that super-weird worm and bacteria and clam shit that grows out of deep undersea vents.”
    “You mean
around
the undersea vents, Revel.”
    “No, Tug, right
out
of ’em. That’s the part most people don’t get.”
    “Whatever. Let me try blowing an Urschleim air jelly.”
    Tug dabbled the horn’s tin rim in the picnic cooler, then huffed away at his own balloon of Urschleim. The sphere began to ripple internally, just as before, with just the same dimples and just the same luscious double crease. Tug had a sudden déjà vu. He’d seen this shape on his computer screen.
    It started to float away, but frugal Revel darted forward and repeatedly slashed at it with his Swiss knife, finally causing the air jelly to break into a flying burst of clear snot that splashed all over Tug’s feet and legs. The magic goo felt tingly on Tug’s skin. He wondered nervously if any of the slime might be passing into his blood-stream. Revel scooped most of the slime off the deck and put it back in the cooler.
    “What do you think?” asked Revel.
    “I’m overwhelmed,” said Tug, shaking his head. “Your Urschleim jellyfish look so much like the ones I’ve been building in my lab. Let’s go in. I’ll show you my jellyfish while we think this through.” Tug led Revel into the house.
    Revel insisted on bringing the Urschleim-containing cooler and the empty pressure canister into the house. He even got Tug to throw an Indian blanket over them, “in case we get company.”
    Tug’s jellyfish tanks filled up an entire room with great green bubbling glory. The aquarium room had been a domestic video game parlor during the early 1980s, when the home’s original builder, a designer of shoot-’em-up computer twitch-games, had shored up the floor to accommodate two dozen massive arcade-consoles. This was a good thing, too, for Tug’s seawater tanks were a serious structural burden, and far outweighed all of Tug’s other possessions put together, except maybe the teak waterbed that his ex-lover had left. Tug had bought the tanks themselves at a knockdown auction from the federal-seizure sale of an eccentric Oakland cocaine dealer, who had once used them to store schools of piranha.
    Revel mulled silently over the tanks of jellyfish. Backlit by greenish glow from the spotlights of a defunct speed-metal crew, Tug’s jellies were at their best. The backlighting brought out their most secret, most hidden interior curvatures, with an unblinking brilliance that was well-nigh pornographic.
    Their seawater trace elements and Purina Jellyfish Lab Chow cost more than Tug’s own weekly grocery bill, but his jelly menagerie had come to mean more to Tug than his own nourishment, health, money, or even his love-life. He spent long secret hours entranced before the gently spinning, ciliated marvels, watching them reel up their brine shrimp prey in mindless, reflexive elegance, absorbing the food in a silent ecstasy of poisonous goo. Live, digestive goo, that transmuted through secret alchemical biology into pulsating, glassy flesh.
    Tug’s ex-lover had been pretty sporting about Tug’s goo-mania, especially compared to his other complaints about Tug’s numerous perceived character flaws, but Tug figured his lover had finally been driven away by some deep rivalry with the barely organic. Tug had gone to some pains to Windex his noseprints from the aquarium glass before Revel arrived.
    “Can you tell which ones are real and which ones