Gusano Loco (“Crazy Worm”) is a huge, intelligent flesh-and-machine worm used as a flying mount, able to reach the Moon in a few hours and the Sun in a week, which at the time of the events is being converted into a train.
| Type | Creature (beast-machine) |
| Spanish entry | Gusano Loco |
Description
Its body can carry several riders and swallow whole harvests in one bite; inside it is “a tough machine”, from which a piece of a mechanical hand has emerged. Its inner walls close, and healing shuts wounds dealt from inside. Cilia cover it, and riders hold on by them. Its tail lashes “in different ways”, knocking enemies down. It has been likened to the “typical amusement-park worm”.
As a mount
In flight its acceleration is “close to infinite”; near the ground it has “the speed of the fast dragon”. It feeds as it travels, swallowing from fields, plateaus and the Germans’ supply depots.
Its intelligence is low, but touching it while riding raises it; Claude did so, and the effect was recorded. An offer of “tickets to board trains at different times and places” begins to tempt it.
In an explanatory interlude, not in a scene, a worm is said to be able to “convert lava five hundred miles around”.
Conversion and condition
It is being converted into a train, “a revolutionary means of transport”, passing from a band’s private vehicle to a network with tickets. It is wounded but recovering, and it has been swallowed by something and will find it hard to get out.
Conflicting accounts
- The records speak of the worm, but two other names circulate: gusano lunar (“lunar worm”), tied to travel among the stars, and gusano gélido cósmico (“cosmic frost worm”), able to regenerate damaged limbs. Whether these are one being, three individuals or three species is disputed.
Open questions
- Whether “convert” lava means generate, transmute or cool it is unknown.
- Who issues the tickets, and on what terms, is not recorded.
- What swallowed it is not named.
- Its color, smell, sound, capacity, steering, and the origin of its mechanical parts are unknown.