The Gift of Gab by Jack Vance (Astounding, September 1955)1 is set on the oceans of an alien planet called Sabrina, and begins with Sam Fletcher, an employee of Pelagic Recoveries (a metals extraction company) looking for Carl Raight to take over his shift. After Fletcher unsuccessfully searches the large raft they use for processing (barnacles for tantalum, sea slugs for rhenium, and coral for rhodium) and gets no useful information from his co-workers, he takes the launch over to the nearby collecting barge. It is also deserted, and Fletcher comes to the conclusion that Raight must have fallen overboard. Then, as Fletcher fills up the holds before returning to the raft, he is attacked by the tentacle of an alien life form that coils around his leg and tries to pull him overboard. Fletcher only just manages to avoid this by cutting the tentacle with a nearby tool. Then, when Fletcher then looks over the side of the barge he sees another alien creature, a ten-armed, one-eyed dekabrach, swimming nearby. Fletcher takes the barge back to the raft and tells the rest of the crew what has happened.
Fletcher then gets together with a scientist called Damon and they go through their (non-computerised!) card index machine to try to identify the creature that attacked him. They find a lifeform called a monitor, which may have been the creature responsible, and also look at the dekabrach records. It is obvious that that parts have been deleted, and Fletcher learns from Damon that Chrystal—an ex-employee who has set up his own private company and is working nearby—did the initial capture and dissection of the dekabrachs. Fletcher video-phones Chrystal and warns him about what has happened, and asks him about deletions on the dekabrach records: Chrystal is hazy on the details.
These events set up much of what happens in the rest of the story, which begin with another man going missing, and Fetcher being attacked again, which leads him to take a submarine down into the deeps to explore (the first of two trips he will make); meanwhile Damon catches a dekabrach.
When Fletcher returns later he has a tale of the dekabrachs’ social organisation and coral houses; then he learns from Damon that the dekabrachs’ bodies may be worth processing for niobium. This information, along with the doctored records, point the finger of suspicion at Chrystal, so Fletcher goes to visit him. After an argument about the sentience of the dekabrachs, Fletcher sees a catch of the creatures landed in the middle of a hail of sea darts fired from the sea. There is some gunplay, and Fletcher arrests Chrystal.
The last part of the story sees Fletcher and Damon learn how to communicate with the captive Dekabrach so they can prove its intelligence to a planetary inspector who will arrive shortly. When the inspector lands on the planet and starts his investigation, there is a melodramatic episode where Chrystal breaks free and tries to poison the dekabrach with acid. Fletcher and Damon manage to save the creature, and it then identifies Chrystal as its attacker. Chrystal isn’t finished yet though, and pulls out his recovered gun, although his attempt to shoot the dekabrach is foiled by Fletcher, who takes the bullet.
The story closes with (the recovered) Fletcher and Damon deciding to stay on the planet rather than shipping out. They release the captive Dekabrach with a plea to bring others of its kind back for language training—and it does.
I rather liked this piece for a number of reasons: first, it is set in an exotic ocean environment, but one made realistic by the industrial process at work there; second, the story is an interesting and absorbing one (although you can see the obvious bad guy a mile off); finally, the piece slowly morphs from a whodunit into a first contact story as it progresses. That said, it has a few problems: I’ve already mentioned the bad guy (who is obviously dodgy, and spends more time than is convincing causing havoc); the two trips that Fletcher makes to the deeps are not experienced directly by the reader but are recounted by him later (this also involves a slightly disorientating point of view change—the only one in the story—while he is away on the first trip); the communication section and its code table makes for a dull read (I’d put serious money on that latter having been inserted by a meddling John W. Campbell); and there are probably other things as well, such as the dekabrachs readily forgiving the mass murder of their people, etc. Still, it is an enjoyable alien ecology story—a good yarn I suppose you could say—with an uplifting, slightly sense-of-wonderish ending that just puts it into the star category below.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 17,650 words. Story link.
1. This was part of a group read on one of my Facebook groups. One commenter said, “It’s one of the least characteristic Vance stories I know, and of all those probably the best. (What I mean is, the other uncharacteristic ones strike me as potboilers, but this is pretty good.)”. Others added, “A surprisingly science-fictiony story by Vance”, “Atypical Vance but still good”, “A great story that isn’t very Vancian”, etc.