Murray Leinster - Creatures of the Abyss

The moment arrived when Terry Holt realized that he was simply holding the bag for Jimenez y Cia.—Jimenez and Company—in the city of Manila. He wasn’t getting anywhere, himself. So, painfully, he prepared to wind up the company’s affairs and his own, and start over. It seemed appropriate to take inventory, consult the police—they’d been both amiable and cooperative—and then make new plans. But first it would be a good idea to go somewhere else for a while, until the problem presented by La Rubia and radar and fish and orejas de ellos had been settled. He was at work on the inventory when the door opened, the warning-bell tinkled, and the girl came into the shop.

He looked up with a wary eye, glancing over the partition separating the workshop area in which the merchandise sold by Jimenez y Cia. was assembled. There were certain people he felt should not come into the shop. The police agreed with him. He was prepared to throw out anybody who came either to demand that he build something or else, or to demand that he not build it or else. In such forcible ejections he would be backed by the authorities of the city and the Philippine Republic.

But this customer was a girl. She was a pretty girl. She was pleasantly tanned. Her make-up, if she wore any, looked natural, and she carried a sizable parcel under her arm. She turned to close the door behind her. She was definitely from the United States. So Terry said in English, “Good afternoon. Can I do something for you?”

She looked relieved.

“Ah! We can talk English,” she said gratefully. “I was afraid I’d have trouble. I do have trouble with Spanish.”

Terry came out from behind the partition marking off the workshop. The shop was seventeen feet wide and its larger expanse of plate glass said, “ Jimenez y Cia.” in large letters. Terry’s now-vanished partner Jimenez had liked to see his name in large print. Under the name was the line “ Especialidades Electronicas y Fisicas.” This was Terry’s angle. He assembled specialties in the line of electronics and modem physics. Jimenez had sold them, not wisely but too well. At the bottom corner of the window there was a modest statement: “ Orejas de Ellos,” which meant nothing to anybody but certain commercial fishermen, all of whom would deny it.

The girl looked dubiously about her. The front of the shop displayed two glaringly white electric washing machines, four electric refrigerators, and two deep-freeze cabinets.

“But I’m not sure this is the right shop,” she said. “I’m not looking for iceboxes.”

“They’re window-dressing,” said Terry. “My former business associate tried to run an appliance shop. But the people who buy such things in Manila only want the latest models. He got stuck with these from last year. So we do—I did do— especialidades electronicas y fisicas. But I’m shutting up shop. What are you looking for?”

The shop was in an appropriate place for its former products. Outside on the Calle Enero there were places where one could buy sea food in quantity, mother-of-pearl, pitch, coir rope, beche-de-mer, copra, fuel oil, Diesel repair-parts and edible birds’ nests.

Especialidades fitted in. But though it was certainly respectable enough, this neighborhood wasn’t exactly where one would have expected to find a girl like this shopping for what a girl like this would shop for.

“I’m looking,” she explained, “for somebody to make up a special device, probably electronic, for my father’s boat.”

“Ah!” said Terry regretfully. “That’s my line exactly, as is evidenced in Spanish on the window and in Tagalog, Malay and Chinese on cards you can read through the glass. But I’m suspending operations for a while.

What kind of special device? Radar—No. I doubt you’d want orejas de ellos …”

“What are they?”

“Submarine ears,” said Terry. “For fishing boats. The name is no clue at all. They pick up underwater sounds, enabling one to hear surf a long way off. Which may be useful. And some fish make noises and the fishermen use these ears to eavesdrop on them and catch them. You wouldn’t be interested in anything of that sort!”

The girl brightened visibly.

“But I am! Something very much like it, at any rate. Take a look at this and see what my father wants to have made.”

She put her parcel on a deep-freeze unit and pulled off its paper covering. The object inside was a sort of curved paddle with a handle at one end. It was about three feet long, made of a light-colored fibrous wood, and on the convex part of its curvature it was deeply carved in peculiar transverse ridges.

“A fish-driving paddle,” she explained. “From Alua.”

He looked it over. He knew vaguely that Alua was an island somewhere near Bohol.

“Naturally a fish-driving paddle is used to drive fish,” she said. “To—herd them, you might say. People go out in shallow water and form a line. Then they whack paddles like these on the surface of the water. Fish try to get away from the sound and the people herd them where they want them—into fish-traps, usually. I’ve tried this, while wearing a bathing suit. It makes your skin tingle—smart, rather. It’s a sort of pins-and-needles sensation. Fish would swim away from an underwater noise like that!”

Terry examined the carving.

“Well?”

“Of course we think there’s something special about the noise these paddles make. Maybe a special wave-form?”

“Possibly,” he admitted. “But—”

“We want something else to do the same trick on a bigger scale. Directional, if possible. Not a paddle, of course. Better. Bigger. Stronger. Continuous. We want to drive fish and this paddle’s limited in its effect.”

“Why drive fish?” asked Terry. “Why not?” asked the girl. She watched his face. He frowned a little, considering the problem the girl posed.

“Oh, ellos might object,” he said absently. “Who?”

“Ellos,” he repeated. “It’s a superstition. The word means ‘they’ or ‘them.’ Things under the ocean who listen to the fish and the fishermen.”

“You’re not serious.” It was a statement.

“No,” he admitted, still eying the paddle. “But the modern, businesslike fishermen who buy submarine ears for sound business reasons call them orejas de ellos and everybody knows what they mean, even in the modernized fishing fleet.”

“Which,” said the girl, “Jimenez y Cia. has had a big hand in modernizing. That’s why I came to you. Your name is Terry Holt, I think. An American Navy Captain said you could make what my father wants.”

Terry nodded suddenly to himself.

“What you want,” he said abruptly, “might be done with a tape-recorder, a submarine ear, and an underwater horn. You’d make a tape-recording of what these whackings sound like under water, edit the tape to make the whackings practically continuous, and then play the tape through an underwater horn to reproduce the sounds at will. That should do the trick.”

“Good! How soon can you do it?” she asked.

“I’m afraid not at all,” said Terry. “I find I’ve been a little too efficient in updating the fishing fleet. I’m leaving the city for the city’s good.”

She looked at him inquiringly.

“No,” he assured her. “The police haven’t asked me to leave. They’re glad I’m going, but they’re cordial enough and it’s agreed that I’ll come back when somebody else finds out how La Rubia catches her fish.”

“La Rubia?”

“The Redhead,” he told her. “It’s the name of a fishing boat. She’s found some place where fish practically fight to get into her nets. For months, now, she’s come back from every trip loaded down gunwale-deep. And shemakes her trips fast! Naturally the other fishermen want to get in on the party.”