Jesse's Blog

We'd been floating along on the current, my father and I, for about infinity, when we finally got a nibble.

I waited, him looking over my shoulder expectantly, waiting for the quarry to take the bait before I reeled it in. Closer.. closer..

Snap! I could feel the tension as it fought, but I pulled it up to us, higher and higher, out of the murky blue depths. We reeled it in over the side.

"This is what we came all this way for?" I asked, examining it? It was, I had to admit, the strangest creature I'd ever seen!

It's lower half was bifurcated down the middle, creating two long appendages that were bent in the the middle and again just before the end. The creature only had two upper stalks, again with that strange middle and lower bend; the trailing ends splitting into many little stalks. Above these two stalks was a large bulbous sphere, with a gaping hole filled with sharpened fangs and another small tendril; these seemed in constant motion.

Father chuckled uproariously, and with the practiced motions of a veteran sportsman, moved the strange creature onto the measuring table, which began taking the legally required lengths and depths. "Imagine what you must look like it, son. Remember, he only perceives three dimensions." He took another drink from the cubby and began to quaff it; he'd be lubricated into drinking songs soon. I shuddered.

The measuring device trilled it's findings. "Huh," father said. "Too bad, son. Looks like you'll have to throw this one back. Too small."

"Dad," I asked, "do I have to touch it?"

"Use the beam," he said amiably, "but you will have to mount the one you keep." He motioned toward the far end of our craft, where his own rather grizzly trophies were kept.

I set the beam on reverse, and the creature, who had stopped struggling under the ministrations of the measuring device, was lowered back down into the depths of it's blue-green world, roughly into the same high-pressure atmosphere location, surrounded by the thick trunked plant life that they seem to congregate near. The measuring device supposedly cleans the memory of these simple minded beasts; can't have them remembering the psi-lure that draws them, else how would human-fishers like my father continue to hunt this isolated spot?

I cast the lure out on another one of the odd shaped continents of this world, steering our craft around a tracking satellite that had no more chance of seeing us than I had of weaseling out of this horrid weekend trip, and waited for my father to sing.