Universe Vol1Num2

by Jim Baen's Universe

  "Van der Plank had that," said Dexter. "And once he got over the fact that his consultants weren't both lily-white, he was very generous with it. His wife was away in town and he was catching up on his drinking while he had the chance."

  "Anyway we looked over the place, had a few beers, said polite things, not like 'you've got more money than sense,' had a few more beers, and got things set up in his hatchery building. We had a few more beers while we were setting up the egg-screens. I guess Van der Plank didn't get too many visitors, in the arse end of nowhere. And it was bloody hot. And dry." He looked pointedly at his glass. "Like that," he said. And all unbidden (well, undragged, and without someone having an armlock on her) Sheila went to get us another round. It was a dangerous sign.

  "Now, by this stage we getting quite inspired by the idea of selling South African catfish to the Americans. Clarias have real advantages over a lot of other aquaculture species. The water doesn't have to be clean and oxygenated and they'll eat damn near anything. And you can take them out of the pond and six hours later they're still alive, and will swim off if you put them back in the water. So Dexter here says "well, let's get your brood fish and give them their pituitary extract injection," to Van der Plank."

  "What? Inject them with what?" asked Steven.

  "Pituitrin," said Kevin, as if that explained everything. "It's like heroin but different. It's made from fish pituitary glands."

  "It's a date-rape drug for fish," explained Dexter.

  "And the pudding," I said. "I suppose there's a big market for it with fish shaggers—"

  "No, really!"said Dexter, hurt by my doubts. Well, trying to look as if he was. He didn't have the face for it. "Catfish only spawn when they get the environmental triggers. The summer flood. As soon as the water gets warm and muddy they release hormones from the pituitary gland, the eggs swell overnight and they're ready to spawn. We just cut out the middleman or the flood."

  "And this is where the mad scientists accidentally inject the fish with radioactive isotopes and instead breed super land catfish that are out to conquer the world!" said Sheila.

  "Well, I met one on the tube yesterday," I admitted. "So what did you beggars do to these poor fish, pissed as newts as you undoubtably were."

  "Nothing. And we weren't pissed yet. Just slightly cheerful. The newts part came later," admitted Dexter.

  "What do you mean nothing? Did you inject his wife by accident?" I asked.

  Kevin snorted. "I did that once. Well, I injected the guy who was supposed to be holding the fish still. He was convinced that his nuts were going to drop off."

  "And did they?" asked Sheila.

  "I never looked," said Kevin. "But his wife had twins nine months later, so either it worked in some other way, or she called in consultants to help out. Anyway this time it was that Van der Plank had collected some fish from the river but they were all too weeny. If you want quality eggs you've got get yourself some quality brood fish. Big females. The bigger the female the better the quality of the eggs."

  "I told you so," said Sheila, nodding.

  "Yeah, and they have more eggs and the size increases slightly too, which means better survival to swim-up. Anyway, Van der Plank only had little fish. Too small."

  "Besides you'd have been ashamed of yourselves injecting that stuff into little fish."

  "We should have stuck with them, but we'd got a bit inspired. We'd run out of beer and that's when things really went wrong, because Van der Plank turned out to be the local mampoer king. It's a sort of white-lighting he distilled from fruit. A very little bit of that stuff and you think that you're superman. A little more and you don't think at all. We decided to go down to the river to catch a really big mama. No messing around now, we were going to catch something that would give him a million eggs. Well, Van der Plank went looking for some tackle and left us to admire the quality of that mampoer, while he went into that house of his. It was one of those 'spogpaleis' places, you know, a got-rich-and-have-to-show-it thatched monstrosity, with white fluffy carpets, not for scruffy fisheries consultants. So we sat and kept the mampoer company. The stuff was like drinking barbed wire, but you got used to it after a while. He came back with a surf rod—one of those real old telephone poles from the very early days of fiberglass rods, solid enough to hammer into the ground as a mooring post, and strong enough to pole a cruise liner—with a twelve-inch Scarborough reel and a rusty 13/0 shark hook, and, I kid you not, a whole chicken. I might have said something about us needing a decent size bait for a decent size fish, and Van der Plank wanted the biggest and the best for his new venture. By that stage we wanted it for him too. The chicken was going to be lunch. We should have eaten it, but this was a holier purpose.

  "Well . . . the river. I don't know if you ever read the Kipling story about the Elephant's child? About the grey-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees? Well, this was like that, but smaller. I must have had at least one grey cell still functioning because I took a long look and said 'and what about crocs?' to our genial employer."

  "And that was the last grey cell that functioned all day," said Dexter. "'Cause Van der Plank said they'd all been shot out and we had a drink to celebrate. I mean, I'm all for biodiversity and all that, but not when I have to work in the water with the damned things."

  He shuddered. "So we did a kind of walking fall along the river bank looking for a good-sized hole to fish in. But the reason Van der Plank had little fish was pretty obvious—it was too shallow and too fast moving for a good big catfish habitat. Anyway, we found the best we could and sat down under a wild fig with the bottle and our new mate. He was telling us, lamenting really, that we couldn't go and fish in the Tinta Falls pool just off the bottom of his property. As a kid he'd caught catfish, big ones, in the waterfall pool. It's just the kind of place they like. The farm the pool was on had been bought by some rich city type who had put in game fencing—electric fences yet, 'cause he had buffalo, and then he'd fought with the locals. Accused them of poaching."

  "Utterly impossible of course," said Kevin, sniggering.

  Dexter coughed unconvincingly. "Never! Anyway, it was hot, and there was nothing much happening, and the flies were pretty bad . . . and our new buddy said that he was going back to the house to sleep it off before his wife and daughter got home. We stayed for a while. If it hadn't been for the flies we'd probably have stayed longer. But they were excessively persistent. Like tax-collectors. So we decided to move."

  "Yes, it was all the flies' fault," said Kevin, with all the facility of a man whose fault it never is. "And the rest of the bottle. We should have left the bottle. But that part was all Dexter's fault. He'd evolved this new fly-killing method. It involved taking a sip of the stuff and then trying to breathe out on a fly."

  "They withered. Or at least fell out of the sky," said Dexter. "It seemed like a good game at the time. You said we had to keep it secret from the Australians or they'd steal it and get better at it than we were."

  "Well, it's true enough. I won't bother you with the rules we worked out for drop goals and converting a fly instead of a try. Just in case there is an Australian listening in. They have stronger bladders than we do."

  "Ut sounds a fine game," said MacParrot. "Wud it worrrk on midges?"

  Dexter shook his head. "I'm not sure it even worked on the flies, although Kevin claimed several tries, penalty points, and a conversion. But between that game and the fishing rod, we were doomed. We took the rod along with us. We shouldn't have. Somehow we found ourselves at the top of the falls at the lower edge of Van der Plank's property."

  "Now I'd like to tell you that Vic Falls has nothing on the Tinta, but I'd be a liar if did that," said Kevin, righteously. "It's about five hundred feet high—"

  "Make that fifty," said Dexter.

  Kevin glared at him.

  "Meters I mean," said Dexter.

  "Sheer red dolerite, stained with white streaks of ibis shit. And down below it is this pool, in among the
boulders. Deep, dirty-green water, with a few bits of dead tree sticking out of it. The perfect place for big Clarias."

  "All fenced in by a twelve-foot electrified game fence," added Dexter.

  "Now, sober and sensible we would have looked at that fence and said 'whatever this guy has inside that kind of fence, we don't want to meet it, not on foot.' Instead, we took it as a challenge. He was trying to keep us out. Stop us catching the mama-catfish to end all mama-catfish. Bastard! He just had no idea of the caliber of men he was dealing with, or just how completely blotto we were. The fence met the rocks at the end of the cliff that the waterfall went over, and stopped. I guess it was just too hard to fence further, and it would have taken a fairly athletic member of the big five to climb out."

  "Too much for a leopard, but a piece of piss for two fish-crazed drunks and a fourteen foot surf rod," said Dexter, raising his eyes to heaven.

  "Yeah," agreed Kevin. "So we had a good look at the end bit of the cliff and decided we had a real problem."

  "The cliff?" I asked.

  Kevin shook his head sadly at the lack of Darwinian progress in my skull. "What's a mere cliff? No, this was serious. The bottle of what was left of the mampoer. We couldn't risk carrying the bottle on such a perilous journey."

  "So you had to drink the rest of it." I said, understanding dawning. There was a certain logic to this, after all. The kind of logic all of us at that table understood perfectly.

  Kevin nodded. "Indeed. And it had got very smooth by that time. It was amazing how much lower it made the cliff seem. And to tell the truth it was only about sixteen or seventeen feet high. You could reach down with the fishing rod."

  Dexter started laughing. "He did. Only he lost his balance, and there he was clinging to the end of a bending fishing pole, yelling for me to haul him back."

  "Who is telling this story?" asked Kevin.

  "We are," said Dexter, taking a pull of his pint. "You leave out the good bits if I let you do it alone."

  "Did you rescue him?" asked Steven. Dexter was a small wiry man, whereas Kevin was red-haired and chunky.

  "I tried," said Dexter, "but it was a mistake. We both went over and did a sort of half-assed fishing-rod pole-vault into some thick scrubby bushes. I had a soft landing. I landed on his head."

  Kevin sniffed and continued. "So we were down, alive and not even too badly hurt. And there was a gully to follow down to the waterfall, and we had a rod. We were ichthyologists, dammit, off to fish the unknown and to collect bloodworms where no man had collected bloodworms before. Or at least not while a conservation official had been watching. Forward into the unknown, and down the scree-slope. How we got to the bottom of it without breaking our necks and the fishing rod, I will never know. We passed the mummified bodies of dead explorers in pith helmets and the wreck of a small Martian space-ship with rod-racks. . . ."

  "He is prone to exaggerate a little, but there was an old rusty dead Chevy with those big wing-mudguards from before the war and also the bones of a goat," said Dexter. "It really was not the easiest slope I've fallen down, even stone cold sober. It must have taken us about half an hour to get to the pool. The water polishes that red-weathered rock to glassy black and I have to admit that it was the sort of place that you'd have expected a horned green thing with a pitchfork to come out of a dark cave and charge you entry fees. It was hot enough, and the air was thick and still. The water lapped at the edge of black rocks before it slid away down polished channels. Nets of long filamentous algae swayed in the current. And then Kevin lets out a loud rebel yell that echoes off the cliff, just great for your secretive poacher, and shouts yeah baby, let's fish! at the top of his quiet little voice. He's a real boon to stealth, is Kevin, but other than maybe Beelzebub junior peering from his cave, I didn't think there was anyone to hear him. He picked a nice high rock to stand on, and started to get the rod ready. I was happy to let him because I'm from the Cape. We don't use Scarborough reels, and they take some getting used to."

  Now Kevin broke in. "A quick digression about the Scarborough reel. I don't know if anyone outside of South Africa still uses them, but they're a simple centerr-pin reel with bearings. It's kind of too-basic-to-go-wrong technology. It's also something that looks ridiculously easy to use in the hands of a pro, and a complete circus in the hands of a tyro. Casting with a Scarborough reel involves something that looks a little like a pirouette. Anywhere along the Zululand coast when the shad are running—shad are what you guys call blue-fish—you'll find a mob of Indian fishermen doing little ballet dance numbers and yelling 'Coming ho-vah!' as they fling old spark plugs—they're cheaper than sinkers—into the sea. When you hear that cry you make like you're a tortoise, because a low-flying spark plug can ruin your hairstyle. In the hands of a real pro they can throw as far as a man with a Penn."

  "Well, we didn't have to throw that far as this pool was only about forty meters wide. This was a good thing because I knew that Kevin was not half as good with a Scarborough as he liked to pretend he was."

  "A vile slander," protested Kevin loftily.

  Dexter snorted. "Yes, so vile that when I heard you say 'coming over,' I dived flat. I didn't care what was in front of me, and I should have, because it was the edge of the bloody river. I looked up from the water and there was Kevin doing the mightiest Scarborough reel pirouette I've ever seen. Only halfway through he lost his balance, sat down hard, and the reel hit his stomach . . . And it stopped spinning."

  Dexter took a mouthful of beer. "Now work out for yourself what happens when you put a four-pound chicken on the end of a fourteen-foot lever, then add a lot of acceleration to it . . . and just when it has really built up momentum . . . stop it dead. The hook dropped into the water about fifteen feet away from him."

  Kevin shook his head ruefully. "I blame the demon drink myself. The hook stopped. But the bait-chicken didn't. It hit the cliff wall about fifty feet up with a solid splat and bounced back and landed in the water. It must have had some air trapped in the body cavity, because it floated. Bob, bob on far side of the pool next to the waterfall."

  Dexter took over the tale. "I hadn't even sat up properly when it happened. You know, there should be that 'doom doom' music at this point, but we both saw it. I'm not kidding you, it was like the thing from the black lagoon. It came soooo slowly. All we saw was the mouth, barbels like black ropy tentacles spreading across the water, and then it sucked that chicken in, with a 'schloop' noise you could hear even above the waterfall. The mouth must have been . . . well I swear there was guy inside there looking for his Harley Davidson. This was no mortal fish. No, this was the offspring of Cthulhu himself, who had sneaked through some dark portal into this world for a quick chicken dinner. A thing of fear and trepidation swum up from some nether region. This was the Loch Ness monster's long lost cousin."

  "If you show two ichthyologists the peril from the deep . . . there can be but one reaction," whispered Kevin earnestly.

  Dexter nodded. "Indeed. We just had to catch it."

  "Not a matter of choice, a matter of stern duty!" Kevin raised his glass in a salute as his companion continued.

  "I got out of the water and took all my clothes off, and spread them out on the black water-polished rocks to dry. Man, we were in the middle of nowhere. There was no one to see me, except bloody Kevin, and we'd shared a cabin on enough research vessels for me know that I could bend over with perfect safety. And it was a hundred and ten degrees in the shade. I suppose could have kept them on and they would have dried on me in ten minutes. But I wasn't being as logical as I could be, not after seeing that fish. Meanwhile, Kevin had the full-steam mutters. 'Why the hell did we come down here with no bait?' and cursing and swearing much better. He'd taken off his shirt—it was hot work and he was turning over rocks looking for frogs or crabs or something we could use for bait. I went down to join him, me without a stitch on. Like, we're both on the far side of not sober, but that fish—well, it cut through alcohol like an ice bath.

 
"And then I heard a little 'clack-clack' on the rocks. It was the handles of the Scarborough reel, turning ever so slowly as something pulls out line."

  "I got to it before him," said Kevin, taking over. "Struck as hard as I could. There must have been a fragment of chicken left on the hook."

  "Or maybe it was just willing to swallow any foreign object that might possibly be edible. They caught a Zambezi shark with a full tin can in its stomach once. Anyway, Kevin was in. The fish took off like a steam train. It even bent that telephone-pole of a rod that we were using. And then we had an epic battle of man against the monster of the deep."

  "I was sure from the start that it wasn't the real monster, but I thought a fish fillet would be perfect bait for the Leviathan of Tinta Falls, never mind the fact that we didn't even have a penknife with us. I had the advantage of a heavy rod and line like cable. Oh, the fish tried to break me off on trees, but there I was, standing on the dark rock, lifting him off the bottom. It was a good size fish, one I'd have been delighted to catch on any other day of the week—but that day I had seen the holy grail of catfish fishing. That day it was just a fish. I called to Dexter to come and help me land it."

  "So there I was," said Dexter, "still as undressed as a man could be, and I rushed into the shallows to grab the fish. This is not IGFA rules stuff, Kevin had tackle you could subdue a five hundred pound shark with, and we were going to need it, if ever we got to the monster fish. Now, as I said the rocks down there were polished as smooth as slime-covered glass. It was a big fish. As I reached down for the fish and grabbed that lower jaw, my feet betrayed me. I had a grip, but I'm on my butt in the water, half covered in a fish that was damn near as big as me, and as slimy as hell and mad too. And then I figure that I am not alone in this bit of water, and I am not just talking about the catfish I am wrestling with. Obviously there are a lot of catfish in this pool, but they won't dare to go into the deeper water, because there is nothing big catfish like to eat as much as little catfish. With all this splashing going on they all come to see what it is about, and if there might be some scraps to eat. All of the little ones whipped themselves into a feeding frenzy. The were gripping onto anything they could find. They have tiny little teeth, but they're grabbing everything. And Kevin is yelling that the hook has come out and I must for God's sake not let go."