Jim Baen's Universe

Serials - parts and parts.

Fish Story, Episode Fourteen, Punctiphobia: An Inordinate Fear of Spots

Written by Andrew Dennis, Dave Freer and Eric Flint

Illustrated by: Barb Jernigan

"You!"

"You!"

I confess I found the opening gambits in this particular conversation, from Sheila and Dexter respectively, less than scintillating. Although, following our unpleasant manner of arrival and the constitutional shocks I'd endured in the preceding few moments, I was barely able to manage more than a grimace of surprise myself.

I'll gloss over the lengthy session in the Dog and Bikechain, whence this narrative departed some chapters ago—although watching Modi and Magni try and get fresh with Big Ron the barman is a sight I'll not forget in a hurry, especially when I want a cheap laugh. I mean, your Norse gods are all very well but Mine Host at the Dog and Bikechain is ex-forces (Catering Corps, and those lads you'd be better inviting the entire SAS outside to Say That Again) turned Hell's Angel.

Anyway, one mild recreational slapping later we discovered what was behind the mysterious door in the Dog's gents' conveniences: a churnel. In this one the smell of ammonia had nothing to do with cleaning fluid. And there I was in my good shoes. Ron was unapologetic. "Got to have the ammonia. Quickest and easiest way to get it in my opinion."

Cheapest, too, was my unspoken thought. Ron was fanatical about real ale in a way unusual even by biker-pub-barman standards, and tended to let the other details of hostelry management slide. Like hygiene. Since most of his clientele considered hygiene to be sufficiently satisfied if they washed their hands before degunking their bike engines, this didn't impact his trade any. Although the lunchtime pie menu was an ordeal of courage and fortitude.

McCann cut in as I hesitated on the threshold of the churnel. "Break it up, will ye? Daylight's wasting."

I shot him a look that ought to have left him in smoking holes on the suspiciously-stained tile floor, and stepped into the seething vortex before he could quote again.

"I better not get any spots out of this," Sheila remarked as she staggered out of the churnel at the far end. "This vessel's proverbial for the measles."

"I've had my shots," I remarked, as indeed I had. The upside to a nurse for a mother (the downside being that her distrust of anything that hadn't been boiled sterile extended to the culinary arts—I was nineteen before I realised that vegetables actually had a flavour) being that my immunisations were kept up to date with pitiless efficiency.

"So has everyone aboard," McCann remarked. "Welcome aboard."

"What?" It looked like a pub to me, albeit a fairly dingy, low ceilinged one. And then I took in the details. Low ceiling. Small, round windows. Everything secured against the motion of, for example, waves. Either this was a nautical-themed bar in a severe earthquake zone or—"You actually have a pub aboard?"

"Yup," McCann confirmed. "We've been known to sail seven years before the measles breaks out."

"Spots," moaned Sheila. "I knew it."

I forbore to comment on the inevitable skin complaints that arose from the abuse of steroids. It's a rare fool that pushes his luck around Ms. Rowen when she's in a low humour. "If this business takes seven years I shall be putting in for overtime," I said, "not to mention requiring compensation for the loss of a promising career. I can't see getting a sicknote to cover that level of absence from work."

"Big fish." McCann shrugged. "But a mighty big ocean. Might could be it takes a while."

"Right," I said, hiccupping slightly as I realised there was a bar present but no drink in my hand, a situation that always gives me a hint of the queasies. "We need a drink and a plan, in that order."

Some hours later, with McCann taking regular breaks to go aloft or above decks or whatever the nautical nonsense might be to shout suitably salty commands at his crew, we hit on the scintillating idea of just sailing about a bit—which by this time we were doing anyway—and seeing what happened.

"Seven years is our limit," I said, "after that it's the measles."

"Spots," Sheila moaned, having become maudlin on the subject some time since.

"Not just that," McCann said, with some relish. "This ain't your regular measles. This is folkloric measles."

"Folkloric spots," Sheila moaned.

I confess I went a little cross-eyed while I tried to imagine how a spot might be folkloric. The facial kind, that is. I tried to imagine minstrels singing about facial pustules, but it wasn't happening.

"Mortality rate's remarkable. Whatever the crew size, only ever two survivors. One of 'em a dog."

"Ah, not a zoonotic disease, then," I averred, that being a word I'd only recently learned and was pleased to find a chance to use.

"No, folkloric," McCann insisted. "Subject to the imperatives and conventions of folklore."

"What, it goes wack-fol-a-diddle at the end of every line?" I was, you understand, trying to get a handle on this new concept.

"No," McCann said, shaking his head and shuddering, "That's folk music. I'm talking your actual folklore. You can't get immune, the third time you get it it kills you. If you're a minor character, it kills you. If you're on a quest that has already claimed your two older brothers, killed or missing in action, you're completely safe."

"Now hold on," I protested, "this strains all credulity, how does such a thing evolve? Diseases are organisms that—"

McCann slapped a hand down on the table, halting me in mid objection and rousing Sheila to a more alert state. "You're on the Irish Rover, out to hunt the Midgard Serpent on a mission from Odin, inducted into a secret war against the fishy menace, and you're insisting on science?"

"You also haff gotts in the room," Modi, or possibly Magni put in.

"Well, if you put it like that—" I began, but there was a sudden, not to put too fine a point on it, bang.

A chorus of "What was that?"s later, McCann fanned himself with a beermat. "Lord, what a shock," he said.

All present glowered at him.

"Just kiddin'" he said. "I'll see what's afoot."

"'ting on de end of your leg," said a grinning Magni, or possibly Modi, to general facepalming.

Unfortunately for my general peace of mind, McCann left the door, or hatch, or whatever they call it on board a ship, open behind him. From somewhere up on deck came the cry of "'ware tentacle!" followed by a good five seconds of Authentic Seagoing Profanity (which is like landlubber profanity but with more 'aaaar-ing' in it.)

"I like calamari," Sheila said, and rose to her feet.

Well, what's a gentleman (no sniggering at the back there) to do? I rose and followed her on deck. The sight that greeted me made me swear to treat every future portion of squid and chips with a great deal more respect. Gigantic, squamous and rugose tentacles were curled across the deck in best 40,000 leagues under the sea style, with swearing, sweating swabbies slashing and hacking at them with axes, cutlasses and kitchen utensils.

"Architeuthis redux," I swore, looking around in the fond hope that the finest, most erudite pun ever to pass my lips had not passed unnoticed.

It was not to be. McCann was bellowing orders, counter-orders and utter disorder in all directions, while generations of seafood took a vicarious revenge on the Irish Rover. Timber shattered and cracked under the remorseless pressure of the gripping tentacles, crewmen swore and hacked, the wounded screamed and the ocean thundered.

Modi and Magni as one screamed and charged, war-axes in one hand and the other making the sign of the horns. You could practically hear the power-metal guitar solos as they laid into the cephalopod menace.

If I sound like I'm trying to give the impression of a stirring tale of heroic battle against the odds, here, it's because I am. At the time, all I could think was 'where's Doug McClure when you need the bugger?' but there was derring being done on all sides.

A tentacle—possibly an arm, I've since been corrected with the news that squid have both, apparently, but when the bugger's trying to eat you it's hard to keep anatomical details like that as straight as the pedants would have you do—lashed over the rail and took Sheila by the wrist. A braver squid than I, this. She staggered with it a step, then two, and with a sudden grimness of expression that has since gone on to make judges quail, witnesses gibber and clients pay promptly, she jammed a spiked heel into the deck just short of the gunwales, planted an elbow firmly on the rail and flexed for all she was worth. I've never arm-wrestled Sheila, I think it a silly sport in general and would like to keep my arm attached in particular, but as I looked on in horrified fascination I realised that if anyone was going to beat her at that game we had a likely candidate in our friendly neighbourhood cephalopod.

My own hopes of beating the thing rather depended on being able to get it to sit down for a friendly game of three-card brag, for just enough stake to make it sporting, and given a few hours I could have had the shirt off its back, if it wore a shirt, and the deeds to its home, if it had a home. It was not to be. Lacking a true insight into the three-dimensionality of the conflict at hand, while I was watching the thunderous titanomachia of Sheila arm-wrestling a giant squid, one of its other tentacles, or possibly an arm, shanghaied me from the deck and with a splash and a rush of saltwater to the sinuses, I was out of the fight and shortly thereafter, out of consciousness.

It is an unfortunate truth that, while the surest way to avoid a hangover is to sleep right through it, you have no chance of doing so. You are, after all, in the unhappy situation of having gone to bed with a skinful of a potent diuretic down you. Never mind your nose-painting and lechery, the one thing more certain than death and taxes is that you're going to have to leave your nice, warm bed to get as near the lavatory as you can in your befuddled state.

This was the state I was in when I realised that something was prodding me awake. I realised I was prostrate on a hard surface. Taking a quick mental inventory I realised that if I'd made it home, I'd not managed to make it to bed. Well, not the first time. And then the events of the preceding hours made themselves forcefully known to my not-yet-fully-spun-up-to-speed consciousness. Bad dream, surely? I resolved to try my willpower against my urgently-protesting bladder.

"Urk," I said. "Need the loo."

"Not in here," came an all-too-familiar voice. Wherever I'd ended up, Sheila was there too.

"Where are we?" I opened my eyes. Which was a mistake and a half. Now, I am a man of more than reasonable firmness in the face of ordinary threats to life, limb and sanity—did I not set out in quest of the Wandle Pike of legend? Crack the clam joke to an audience of bishops? Be that as it may, there is a crack in my armour.

Bugs.

I won't even eat prawns, the phobia runs that deep. I could wax psychological about childhood traumas and things of like kidney but at that moment the pressing thing on my mind was the presence of a honking great beetle-scorpion-spider thing.

"Aaaaaaaargh!" I said, and entirely lost bladder control.

"Oh well, it was wet in here anyway," Sheila said.

The next moments are confused in memory, but I do recall scrabbling backward over a hard stone floor away from the chitinous monstrosity. "What . . . what . . . ?" I burbled and then realised I was entirely underwater. And wearing some sort of beaded hat with a fringe of tasselly things around it. I reached up to feel what it was.

"Don't take that off!" yelled Sheila and the bug-thing at one and the same time.

I snatched my hand back. "It—it talks!" I stammered, glaring at the bug, which looked like the a nightmare sired on a horseshoe crab by a scorpion.

"It," the thing said with a definite air of sarcasm, "happens to have a name."

"Ishmael," Sheila said—and I noticed now that she was wearing the same damned silly hat I was, "allow me to introduce Earl Manning, who is a Eurypterid."

Entomophobia is all very well, but there's a definite advantage to being brought up in England, to wit, politeness is an ingrained reflex.

"Pleased to meet you," I said, although not so far gone as to offer my hand to shake Manning's claw. "Can I get a drink?"

Manning sniffed, or at least did something that sounded like a sniff that involved the wriggling of chelicerae that haunts my nightmares yet. "I think you've had enough."

"Oh, now steady on," I said, drawing up in as much dignity as I could manage with my suit sodden with the seawater I was immersed in and a spreading cloud of second-hand beer spreading about me, "I'll be polite to a sea scorpion and never mind the deep-seated phobias, but damn me if I'll take the sneers of some bluenosed teetotaller!"

"Steady on," Sheila warned me, "I was just trying to sort out whether Manning here is our host or our jailer. He certainly seems to be responsible for the squid that snatched us off the boat."

"Well, yes, but only indirectly. I convinced Cthulhu to have you brought down here. Much easier than sending out search parties. An elegant solution to our little problem."

"When you say little problem," I asked, "you mean what exactly?" While I've long had a sneaking suspicion that H. P. Lovecraft was definitely on to something vis a vis the whole uncaring-universe-too-maddeningly-strange-for-man-to-comprehend, see the continuing popularity of golf for a prime example, I found the mention of one of his more famous creations a little bit tricky to grasp. I mean, if a weedy little pulp writer from New England had been getting his story ideas from a seagoing beast that lacked the basic decency to wear its skeleton on the inside, I was going to have to review my tastes in reading matter.

"Primordial slime," Dexter said as he drifted in to the chamber we were in.

Which is where we came in, with him and Sheila performing the double-take and . . .

He sniffed and made a face. Speairs followed him in. "Smells like someone lost bladder control in here."

"Don't harp on it," I said. "They got you too?"

"More like