I guess he must be, by his own definition, a cereal killer. Or at least a serial liquid passer. I felt a pressing need for that myself, actually. So I got up in search of the gents while Stephen held forth on diet, and pernicious effects of raw vegetables. I hadn't known they caused scurvy. With Stephen it was hard to tell just whether he really believed something, or whether he was trying to see how much he could get you to swallow that he believed in.
Seeing as the trough (none of these "individual" urinals here in the wilds of Africa. According to one of my plumber buddies in the dark continent, they're for men who sit down when they wee. It's amazing how many people in Europe and America I've seen not using them properly) was awash with a noxious shoe-eating tide, threatening to overflow the raised step and take over the hotel if not the world, I took up residence in one of the throne closets. For some reason they used to make the doors to these end about seven inches above ground. Maybe so the lavatory attendant (back in the days when there was one), could see if there were feet in the "occupied" ones. Or how many pairs of feet. This place was still like that.
"Psst!" hissed someone from the next closet.
"I'm not yet, but I plan to be. It's the only way to get through this," I said.
"Psst! Beware the tentacles . . . NYARLHOTEP!! Agh . . . glll . . ." gargled the voice from the next cubicle.
That was Mozambique for you. Some of the vin ordinaire come from Portugal by sea—a month or two of hot rolling and bouncing about, of something that was not out of the first press anyway. Mix that with a plate of elderly fried squid and you too can be yelling "Nyarlhotep" at the great white tuba. I flushed and left the convenience. The poor bloke's feet were sticking out under the door. I would avoid the food in this place.
Fred was holding forth, perhaps in defense against Speairs inventive streak. ". . . cabbages have collective intelligence. Like bees, but different. And Acacia trees practice chemical warfare on grazers based on pheromonal communications between trees."
"I'd have said '. . . and the pudding,'" I informed them, sitting down a helping myself to the rapidly diminishing supply of full bottles, "if I hadn't read about the acacias myself. Biochemical signaling between plants does exist. So vegetarians really are cruel to innocent veggies, boiling them alive or eating them raw. There has to be a humane way of killing them."
"Killing vegetarians?" asked Fred quizzically.
"Purely to defend plants. And all the micro-organisms they brutalize. I actually meant the vegetables," I explained, to Speairs' obvious regret.
Stephen finished his beer and dropped a butt into the bottle. It hissed. "It does put a whole new meaning on 'I talk to the trees but they don't listen to me,'" he said.
A while, and several more rounds of beers, later the subject dragged itself back to the yellow submersible and the search for coelacanths. "We have actually found a closer hangout than going all the way to the Comoros."
"Or Sulawesi," said Fred who supposedly knew nothing about fish, and the recent discovery of Coelacanths there in a fish-market.
"Might be a different species," I said dismissing inferior foreign Coelacanths. "Anyway, Kevin and I might possibly have part of the scientific support team for the first attempt to see them in life. Along with a pompous ass of a self-important . . . distinguished foreign scientist from . . . uh, North America."
"You don't have to be so coy," said Fred, laughing a little.
"Trust me. If my buddy Kev knew I had said this much, I'd be a dead man walking. Anyway, that's scientist-speak. You need to keep it vague or you might have to prove it."
"Add a few lawyers into the mixture and you could be saying anything," grinned Stephen.
I had had my brushes with them. My ex was one. "Yeah, but that's because of the texture of lawyers. Mix them with anything and they make it go lumpy."
"It's their livers," said Stephen, "Speaking purely hypothetically you might possibly have been in the vague vicinity of this attempt to look at sealy-whatsits. How big are these things by the way? Worth catching?"
"If your interest is in weight, yes," I admitted. "They'll go about a hundred fifty pounds, maybe bigger, which you have to haul up from really, really deep . . . if that's your idea of fun. If it's game fish you're after I recommend you try something else. You could always just drop a lead weight or two and haul those instead, for the same feel. And we had to be a little closer than just the vague vicinity, because the water off the sides of the ship was quite deep and the shore was far off. We had to be on the scene. Well, within fifty yards of it, seeing as our distinguished foreign scientist's pride and joy little yellow two-man submersible was parked next to the mid-ship deck winch. I think part of the problem was we all wanted to play with it. It had a lot of neat external tools, lights etc. The inside really called for someone of a slight build."
"Like you," said Fred.
I choked on my beer. That was a bit too close to the truth for comfort. "Well, yes. Now that you mention it. I did . . . hypothetically speaking that is, think I was ideal. I'm good with machinery. . . . However the sub was controlled by the visiting scientist and our director had the second slot. Not that he was the most mechanical soul or best ichthyologist you've ever come across, but he was the director. Played the politics of science well."
"And so you swiped their submersible?" asked Stephen, knowingly.
"Well, no . . . I mean it was tempting, but seriously none of us knew how to drive the beast. Kev and I both have commercial diver's tickets, but this was a different matter, and the underwater gorge we were going to explore is deeper than we could handle."
"So did you drop it over the side?" Stephen stood up. "Don't tell me yet. Save it for when I get back. This Welsh beer goes straight through a man." He staggered off in search of the gents.
"An interesting fellow," said Fred. "What does he do for a living? He knows a great deal about collective intelligence, and H. P. Lovecraft."
"Dunno. Why don't you ask him? I met him in the pub," I said.
"I did," said Fred. "Somehow we got onto the aliens controlling Number 10 Downing Street. Which may be true, but didn't answer my question."
Stephen came back. "There's a bloke passed out in one of the booths. His feet are sticking out from under the door."
"He was in there when I went in, puking his lungs out. He told me to be careful about the squid," I explained for the benefit of their future meal choices.
"Oh," said Fred. "What else did he say?"
"A sort of violent gargly noise, as I recall," I said brightly. "I think he was talking to the great white tuba, not me, though."
Stephen nodded. "I have tried that myself on occasions. Never really got a good answer from one of them, though. Or why carrots and peas seem to be involved, no matter when you last ate them. I think it is the vengeance of the vegetables."
"Nothing to do with beer?" I asked.
Stephen waved a disparaging paw. "What a silly idea. Now, about when you pushed the submersible overboard . . ."
"We didn't. We just went back to the cabin and drank duty-free brandy, which in retrospect was a mistake."
"It can give you a mother-in-law of a hangover," agreed Stephen. "Brandy, that is."
I nodded. "And not leave you able to think very fast in the morning. When it is time for the explanations of things that you don't entirely remember doing in the first place, but that probably seemed like a good idea at the time."
Fred rubbed his jaw, his face showing genuine sympathy. "Which is when having a quick glib mouth pays off."
"Yeah, not a mouth that tastes like an ostrich used it for an outhouse, and a brain with all the snap and sparkle of blotting paper. Which is what I will have tomorrow," said Stephen, hastily washing the thought away with more beer. "We seem to be running dry here, I notice. It's probably about my round," he said reluctantly, starting to sway upward.
Fred waved him down. "Your money is no good here."
Stephen looked owlishly at him. "Devolution's going
a bit far. The Welsh have always been happy enough to take my money before. Too often, if you ask me."
"That maybe, but I have an arrangement with the management here." He waved to the waiter, before I got around to trying to disabuse Stephen of the idea that were still in the UK. Besides, letting him believe that seemed like a good amusing idea at the time. I should have remembered that ideas at that stage of the evening seldom were. Funnily enough that information always disappears from your memory at the time too.
We drank. And with a sort of juggernaut inevitability we returned to the submersible. "So what did you do?" asked Speairs.
"Well, I was chief technical officer, see. And I had a range of files—metal files, not the kind that MI5 keep."
"They keep that kind too. Trust me," said Stephen. "So what did you lads do?"
"Staggered out and down the deck and filed off some of the shiny yellow paint. We made some really neat tooth-marks, about an inch across each, around the propulsion housing unit."
Stephen looked startled. "Is that all? I mean I thought you guys had at very least killed someone by the way you went on about it."
"Well . . . that was all we actually did . . . we thought we'd point them out and give the tight-assed bastard a few revs about the monster of the deep having been behind him and he didn't even see it happen. It seemed pretty funny at the time. They launched the submersible early the next morning just around dawn. You couldn't see much when they launched, but light conditions on the bottom approached zero anyway, and we were paying for ship-time. I had a deadly hangover, and Kev was maybe worse. We had to be up and in the operations room—where they got the live feed from the sub—via a long aerial on a float. I honestly didn't even remember the stunt with tooth marks. We sat there and nursed coffee and peered at screens full of nothing but black seawater, while our Distinguished Foreign Scientist and our fine . . . director kept up the inane chatter on their way down into the depths. We also had them on sonar, of course. When they got down to the canyon lip we started to see some fish in the lights and some interesting inverts. No coelacanths naturally, but it was a real long shot that we would. Of course, we had a film crew from national television, just in case we did. That was the sort of thing the director organized well. He was better at that than dealing with fish, really."
"It's evidence that Darwin was wrong. He shouldn't have wasted his time in the Galapagos. If you ever need proof the creationists are right, just cite the boardroom. Survival of the shittest. Nothing like that could ever have evolved to fill the upper niches," said Fred. "That's what got me into the line I am in now."
"Yeah, well, what occasioned our transfer of fields was one of those really big swells you get for no reason—well, no reason that has been discovered yet, out in Mozambique channel. Our intrepid explorers in the underwater canyon had just caught sight of something blue and fishlike—it didn't show up on camera of course, but it sounded dramatic, when the ship rolled on the swell like a donut down a fifty degree slope. There was one hell of yell from outside and we all went to see what was going on. One of the junior scientists had been standing on the rails to take a picture and had fallen overboard. Bit of a circus fishing him out. Fortunately someone saw the fool fall."
"You could have at least have included some details about the sharks," said Stephen, grinning.
"I didn't want to upset you. They were huge. Ravening. In a mad, biting, feeding frenzy. Also somewhere else, just then. So we hauled the idiot out, and while we're doing that, Kev yells from the ops room. So we all run back there, thinking it's going to be a Coelacanth on screen."
"Bloody convenient this bloke falling overboard," said Stephen, suspiciously.
I nodded. "Especially as the little prat was Kev's intern. And yes, someone did point this out later. At the time we were too busy staring at the snow on the screens. And Kev is gibbering on saying he saw something just before they went blank. A coelacanth and a monstrous eye. And then it all blacked out, according to him. Yeah, well you can imagine how well all this went down. Everyone in panic mode. It's not like these systems don't malfunction anyway. I got busy, and yes, it had to be me—it was my job—and found a lead had been half kicked out. Hey, that's what I did. Kept the electronic equipment up and running, as well as fixing most of the hardware in the institute."
"It looks very suspicious indeed," said Stephen.
"Yeah. Well, I suppose it did. Up on screen pop our gallant underwater explorers. We could see squat on the external monitors. Just black foggy murk and two guys in the sub having a hairy canary about a hundred fifty meters down. Meantime the film crew are having the time of their lives. This has to be the most exciting nature program since the private life of the bonobos. And that got banned in seventeen countries."
"I've got a copy," admitted Stephen. "It's . . . strange. So what happened? Were they having it off in the submarine?"
"I wish. No they were just having a panic. Lost contact with the surface. Got jarred about and lost all external vision. Hysterical. Great showing of leadership. Of course someone had to ask them about the eye."
"Sauron is everywhere, Dexter," volunteered the ever-helpful Stephen Speairs.
"Yeah, but it was our rings that were on the line this time. Anyway, they settled down and figured that they must have brushed a protrusion and stirred up half a ton of fine sediment. It's a problem down there. There's not much to disturb it in some spots. No major water movement and not a lot of coelacanths either. And the mermaids don't do much vacuuming."
"It's so hard to get decent help these days to keep your undersea canyon clean," said Fred.
"I can see all of this is stacking up to be a frigging mess," said Stephen.
I nodded. "And it was, when they got to the surface, and winched the submersible up out of the water. The film crew got some really good close-up pictures of the prop housing unit. Someone pointed it out to the intrepid explorers—well, everyone was yelling—they could hardly not see it. And then of course the tall bull shit started to come out from the head honcho and our distinguished foreign scientist. How they hadn't wanted to alarm the surface team. How they'd survived an encounter with something down there. Talk was on about Architeuthis or Mesonychoteuthis . . ."
"Bless you. What?" asked Stephen. Fred just nodded.
"Giant squid," I explained
Stephen laughed. "They got attacked by calamari. Like the poor bastard in the gents."
"It'd be calamari rings the size of truck tires."
"No wonder he was being sick. Probably the same texture," said Stephen.
"Yeah, they said it wasn't silt stirred up, it was ink from the cephalopod . . . And then things came apart. Turns out someone—well, a pair of someones—saw two drunken bastards filing tooth marks into the housing. And for the good of science they couldn't let this hoax continue . . . and there were the filings and the paint-chips, still on the deck. It was just after the little brown-nose bastard came up with this gem, and just who he'd seen perpetrating this dastardly act, that someone figured out just who had fallen overboard, and who had stayed in operations room, and . . . of course, who had fixed the system."
Stephen steepled his fingers, looking thoughtful, or as thoughtful as a man with that amount of beer in him can do. "So . . . why had you let the joke get old? If you'd spoken up while they blathering . . ."
I nodded. "We should have. But we hadn't . . . because we were both in shock. You see . . . we had made a few tooth-marks. We hadn't made dinner plate size sucker circles on the body-work or taken a triangular piece out of the propeller housing. And I guess we were . . . shall I say suckered like everyone else. We'd been done up, done over, beaten at our own game, by some other bastard with a hand-drill and a buffing wheel, and a pair of bolt cutters. Of course they weren't going to admit it. Not now, with the head honcho screaming about the damage to the toy and the senseless risk to life and limb of two eminent scientists."
Stephen looked at me. Shook his head and started laughing. "Did you e
ver get had! It was probably the bloke who 'fell' overboard."
I shook my head sourly. "Kev thought so too. But he took his camera, his pride and joy, into the drink with him. And you do not fake a fall off an eight hundred fifty-ton vessel. It's not intelligent, and I have to admit he was. Also how did he organize a wave just then? Anyway, at the time, it was too much of an ugly firefight for us to have a proper Spanish inquisition. I wouldn't have thought Kev had an enemy in the world that hated him much. He was a good bloke, most of the time. Still is. Anyway, there was that lovely film footage—and the cameraman had been one of our drinking mates from another trip. He wasn't parting with it . . . which was a good thing because the dear director was all for having our guts for garters and tossing us overboard for the sharks, and no one else was admitting they thought it was funny. But in exchange for a bit of film . . . well, we got to resign more or less intact. We had no chance of working in Fisheries or Ichthyology again, though. That's what took us to the North Sea. The money is good."
Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 2 Page 28
