His shoulders shook. "No. But I still don't see why it proves that all fishermen are honest."
"Not all. Only the true fishermen. The salt of the earth, the good fellows who would give you their last bloodworm, the lads who would share their whiskey with you. The other kind are lower life forms," I explained.
"Hm. I seem to have met a fair number of bankers in angling pubs. Well, more like outright liars, because they claimed to be in almost every other profession, and yet they'd caught some amazing fish in unlikely places," said Dann.
"Ah!" I said the light dawned. "Pubs. That's different. They may cause good men to... exaggerate a trifle. It's the shortage of oxygen in your average crowded and smoke-filled pub. Watch. The no smoking rule will shrink fish by 25%. But really it's more a case of wishful thinking and the hitherto unknown elasticity of their arms, caused by alcohol. Really, it makes arms stretchy. But as for Megalodon . . . no one's arms are that long, no matter how elastic."
"So its a shark. A really, really big shark?" said Stephen Speairs with the sort of tenacity that should have worried me.
I nodded. "The biggest ever. The teeth are mostly what we have for evidence. They're about seven inches high."
"Seven inch high sharks? Wow." Speairs laughed.
"No, the teeth, you . . ." I took a look at the size of him. Swallowed the "moron" part. He wasn't. Irritating maybe, but he at least knew something about Cthulhu. "We're still guessing shark length as no one really knows what shape their bodies were. If you assume that it was something like a Great White—well you can guess at something like forty to sixty feet long.
"There have been larger estimates," said Dann. "A hundred feet," he said, dreamily. "Sixty tons . . . but even a forty-foot shark would destroy any attempt to catch it on rod and line. Destroy a trawl net. You're not going to catch one easily. Only the juveniles are even slightly vulnerable."
"Still, they have been extinct for at least one and half million years," I said.
Dann raised his eyebrows. "Like the coelacanth. No fossils since the end of the cretaceous."
It was a venerable defense. "The coelacanth is a deep water species. . . ."
Dann smiled with the delight of man who has tricked you into clinching his argument for him. Cthulhu poured more drinks. "And it is notable that most of the Coelacanth fossils came from shallow seas. Yet all the experts claim it was not found in the intervening time because it's a deep water species."
I'd dealt with that one before. "That's because that is where we can access the fossil material. It seems that all the Megalodon teeth came from shallow water dredges. They were a tropical coastal water species . . ."
"Which preyed on whales and pinnipeds—which, of course, are always far more abundant in resource-poor tropical oceans. You never get them among the krill in the great southern ocean," said Dann dryly.
Speairs chuckled. "I think the sarcasm meter just exploded."
"The water may have been too cold for them." I said, fighting a rearguard action. The Greenland Shark proved some sharks could live and thrive in icy water.
Dann looked at me over his steepled fingers. "Or—just as Great Whites have temperate distribution and raise their body temperature by the rete mirabile and gigantothermy, the same might just have applied to Megalodon, only more so."
Stephen took a long deep swallow of the green fairy. "Okay. You just lost me completely. That was Latin. I can smell Latin a mile away. It's usually used to make ordinary things sound like black magic or the law."
"An arterial/venous countercurrent heat exchanger, which enables the fish to raise its body temperature, despite being poikilothermic," I explained.
Stephen nodded. "Thank you. I'm an expert at foreign languages. And that was definitely Greek to me. I could tell by the way I didn't understand a word."
"Means it is warmer than the water it is living in, despite not being what you would call 'warm-blooded,'" Dann explained. "And because they are so big, the heat inside can be retained efficiently. Like dinosaurs, and," he said with a sneer of distaste, "whales."
"And elephants. They only live in arctic." I said, dryly.
Never waste your sarcasm the products of the British schooling system. "I thought that was the mammoths. Or was it mastodons. Never been too sure which was which."
"Both, said Cthulhu mournfully. "Very respectful and very tasty."
"It still doesn't answer the fact that remains: the teeth were found in shallow sea, temperate and tropical areas . . ." I said tenaciously.
"Mastodon teeth or mammoth teeth? Or dentures from the Spice Girls?" asked Speairs.
"Gah. The latter of course. Shark teeth, naturally. We're talking about sharks."
He nodded. "Megalo-whatsits. Great in those salmon streams for digesting the moneyed classes."
"Sadly, Megalodons are a bit large for the average stream, and they're allergic to waxed cotton. They're rare to mythical fish. You wouldn't want to waste them on those, even if you could find them." I said, unwarily accepting a refill.
"Well," said Dann, "I decided that they used to occur in the Southern ocean, and probably the arctic as well. They also used to follow the migratory whales. Keep in deep cool water, and nip in for a bite—which sometimes ended in lost teeth. These things happen when you dine on whales. And if there was going to be relict population anywhere, it had to be in the southern oceans, probably somewhere near 48°9'S, 123°43'W.
"A piece of ocean without anything at all," I said, envisaging it. It was, indeed one of the least visited pieces of the sea—thousands of miles of nothing.
"Also where Lovecraft betrayed R'lyeh to be," said Cthulhu glumly. "We don't have a lot of private spots to haul out and get the parasites off our shells, and that lowlife has to go and cooperate with the faceless one and his CIA lackeys to betray it. Do you know how much effort that cover up was? We had to try and track down all the original copies of the February 1928 Weird Tales and substitute them with the same story but a slightly different line of Latitude. Couldn't just disappear them or have our acolytes eliminate all the purchasers of Weird Tales, tempting though it was. We never quite got them all."
"So how come it doesn't come up on Google Earth?" I asked.
"We made certain arrangements," said Cthulhu, loftily. "Anyway, that's need to know basis information."
I looked at the glass of green fairy. I really had to stop drinking this stuff. "And so: I suppose you never caught Megalodon, Dann. You wound up here instead, occasionally dropping into bars in Mozambique."
His eyes took on a faraway look. "Yes. I caught a Megalodon. But no one told me they were telepathic. I should have guessed. Most fish are to some degree. That's why it is possible to catch salmon. They are, but their minds are so taken up with sex that they can be fooled. Otherwise—well, in some species the group mind is weak, too taken up with food. Of course, in some species even the group mind fails to achieve that critical threshold of intelligence, the level of the junior French railway official, and they never even attain the semblance of sentience. In other cases—if the fisherman is mindless enough, or paying attention to something else such as pornography (which confuses most fish), they can fool the prey, even if they could have read his mind. But when dealing with really large minds . . . you need more help."
He looked at us. "At that time I still believed it was just a question of tackle and tactics. Of being in the right place at the right time. I should have guessed because the right time to have been in a particular place is always . . . last week. Or next week. It is too much of a coincidence that the fishing is always better when you're not in that spot."
"That is an experience I've had," I admitted.
"I decided that the answer was lots of chum, and of course, some kind of longer range super-attractant. The sharks had to be successfully following the whales, which meant they had to be using something about the whales to track them. Whales use sound to communicate across large distances . . . a species that preyed principally on whales m
ight actually be using that very thing. Now, sound is more of a mammalian thing but I figured evolution might have driven the sharks in this direction."
"Selective breeding," said Cthulhu. "But they've abused it. We're in dispute about it."
"Which is why they've been engaged in industrial action for the last fifty years," explained Dann. "The Megalodons learned a fair amount from humans."
Cthulhu made a schlurping sound with its suckers. "Can't get decent help these centuries."
"Well, you can hear a sperm whale six miles away underwater, and a blue whale a hundred miles away. So you must it admit it was easier to find the baleens than the toothed whales," said Dann, apparently trying to be reasonable. It had the air of a well-worn argument.
"Excuses," said Cthulhu grumpily. "When we return the oceans to primordial slime, the whales will all have to go, but in the meantime humpback tunes are very popular with the younger Cthulhu. Anyone under forty millennia has no discernment. Rorqual music! Huh. More like raucous music. Not a patch on a patch on a good Permian era sixteen-hour hundred-piece shell-bashing."
We digressed into the virtues of chambered shell orchestra, the piscarmonic orchestra (which involves using various sized fish to beat the shell with) and of course the gut quartet, and then Cthulhu's personal one hundred-piece armpit orchestra recital, before Stephen steered us back around to fine art of catching the biggest sharks that ever lived, barring, of course, a few legendary sea-serpents. They'd probably show up later. Drinking lager and wearing hoodies, the way things were going. "So, Dann, you were telling us how to attract these Megalodons?"
"Ah, yes. I had more money than sense, I suppose. That was before 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.' I came up with the ultimate device for super-simulating whale-sounds. The bloop."
"How inspiring. How original," I said cheerfully.
Dann shrugged. "Don't blame me. Blame the US Hydrographic service. They called it that. Mind you, I am proud that they picked it up sixteen hundred miles away. It was, in its way, too successful."
Horrid Cthulhu waved his striped tentacles in agreement. "Like ice cream van music. He had all of the Megalodon break their picket and head out after him.
"For a . . . whatchacallit 'Bloop'?" I asked.
"Well, that and forty tons of whale meat and blubber as chum," admitted Dann.
"Whoa. How did you get forty tons of whale meat?"
"I pushed up the prices in Japan and South Korea in 1996," said Dann. "Purely scientifically-caught whale meat. Part of the famous Japanese scientific research project 'How many whales can you harpoon per day'?"
"Very important research. Valuable science," said Cthulhu. "But needs a bigger sample. And focus on sperm whales."
"Why?" asked Stephen.
"They're ugly," said Cthulhu of the slimy-green-and-red-tentacle mass.
"And their mothers dress them funny," I said to add depth and meaning to the discussion.
"Yes. Naked! And just incidentally they dine off us and our new race that we created to fill the beautiful depths with their cities. Our younger cousins. And if they get the chance, us. Cephalopod intelligence lives to dine on all other life, not to be dinner for fatheads." Cthulhu sighed. "Since the Megalodon work-to-rule action and the decline in the popularity of whale meat, it's been an uphill struggle," he said, with a second shlurping sigh. "You know, it really looked like we were winning until a certain—as he calls himself these days, Richard Moby, came to power. It's been downhill ever since. World domination and a return to happy primeval slime is so hard. In the old days we at least had anti-Trilobite liberation struggle solidarity to turn to. It was all the fault of the Trilobites."
"They've been blaming trilobites for about fifty million years now," said Dann in an under voice to me.
"What did you say?" said Cthulhu suspiciously.
"I said roll on the reuniting of Pangaea, F'tagn Cthulhu. It was all those dirty trilobites fault."
Cthulhu shook a tentacle, "Vile trilobites! We're still suffering from the trilobite legacy. They were as bad as that Nyarlhotep."
"But hang on," I said science cutting through a haze of alcohol, aniseed and thujone. "The trilobites have been extinct for 250 million years."
"About a vigintillion years," said Speairs, cheerfully.
"So?" said Cthulhu.
"You can't possibly remember it," I said.
"Inherited group memory," said Cthulhu loftily. "I remember back when Ammonoids were barely six feet across. Anyway, we are very long lived."
"I guess it means that what some trilobite said about great great-aunt Cthulhu a hundred million years ago really can cause a feud," said Speairs again, stirring the pot as usual
Cthulhu turned a soup-plate sized eye on him. "So you heard about it too, did you? It's not true. It's just a vicious rumor. Anyway, I wouldn't think it was physically possible, besides being perverted. And I don't see what it has got to do with fishing for the staff. I'm sure the Megalodon behavior is all a front for neo-trilobites forces wanting to recolonize us. They wouldn't really starve if they just ate toothed whales. Sperm whales are still far more numerous than blues."
"So you were fishing for sharks. The biggest ever sharks. What sort of tackle did that take? What does it need to land a sixty-foot shark? A deck winch and a cable?" I asked. We'd tried that on oceanic white-tips.
"Gearing," said Dann. "Spectacular gearing. And a rather special fighting chair. It was quite an interesting task getting it made up. Of course, the rod itself had to be more than a little different. I tried special aerospace composites. And you have to realize that an animal that can exert enough bite force to sever an undersea trans-oceanic cable is a problem. I'd wanted to catch it within IGFA rules of course. But it's going to take more than forty feet of leader and double line and more than just a Bimini twist or two to hold. And 130-pound test lines are just not going to work on an animal in the twenty-to-sixty-ton range. I would have to catch one. Take it back and get IGFA to consider a heavier line class. I needed that fish first."
"Ha. I once caught a three meter croc on five kilo line and a bass rod in the small craft dredging harbor in St Lucia estuary. I couldn't land it of course, but I did bring it to the edge of the pier." I said proudly. Not many people have had a half-ton crocodile on the end of bass rod. Admittedly, all the darn thing did was to log and make me lift it, by steady slow pressure. If it had tried anything else I would have broken off in seconds.
"Along with your sanity—right to the edge," said Speairs. " What were you doing fishing for crocodiles? And if you did land it, what would you have done with it?"
"We'd discussed that at the time," I said. "Thought of keeping it in the guest bathroom. And I could have landed it if I had one of those IGFA permitted rope gaffs. I suppose we could have tied the gaff to the pier and run like hell. We weren't fishing for crocodiles. We were after yellowfin perch. I got one, the croc got it, and we had a hour's worth of tussle about who got to keep it. Anyway, I was a good long way above the estuary, even if a croc can jump six feet out of the water. More like what did our great fisherman think he'd do with a sixty-foot shark, when it got that close. What size boat did you have, Dann? Its tail could swat most things to pieces, let alone the damage it could do with its jaws."
"The Lady Lucinda was adequate for the task," said Dann, stiffly. "And I must admit I did have a commercial whaling harpoon with an explosive head on board. Just in case. After all a certain sperm whale sank the 238-ton Essex and the Ann Alexander."
"So sad," said Cthulhu.
"Anyway," said Dann, "my technicians set up the bloop generator, the captain set a course for the outer reaches of the Pacific, the commercial mincer worked its way down the vast pile of whale meat and blubber, and I settled in for a pleasant cruise. Well, the weather is not so nice down in the roaring forties, but the swells were never higher than twenty feet."
"Quite small for those promiscuous parts, really," I said. I'd been down south to monitor toothfis
h long-line catches. I wasn't kidding. And if Dann was not just yanking our chain, he could afford to pay for all the drinks . . . twice.
"Yes, but my steward didn't like it much. He developed an allergy to smell of whale meat, and I have to admit it was pervasive. When we started chumming, he retreated to his cabin. I should have been suspicious, but I thought he was just sick. He was calling Nyarlhotep."
"Like the poor bastard back in the Hotel in Mozambique?"
Dann grimaced. "Yes. With much the same effect. I lost three of my crew before we discovered it. We were within moments of turning back to take up the matter with the authorities in Australia when we started to pick up sharks on the fish-finder sonar. Big sharks. Well, enormous fish, whale size, not behaving like whales. I had to make a choice. I had two gruesome murders and an apparent suicide—I should have headed back immediately. But here was a whole school of the fish that could be my greatest triumph. I might never find them again. I made the wrong choice. I promised the skipper we'd turn back just as soon as we had evidence. After all, how much difference would the time taken to land one mammoth size fish add to a three week cruise?"
Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3 Page 23
