Peter Benchley's Creature (6 page)

The whale was a young humpback, and at first light they saw what had killed it. Fishing nets floated like shrouds around its mouth and head. It had blundered into huge commercial nets, had ensnared itself further by thrashing in its struggle to escape and had strangled to death.

The white shark had arrived just after dawn. She was a big mature female, probably fifteen or twenty years old, of prime breeding age. And she was pregnant, which Chase had discovered when the shark rolled on her back as she plunged her massive head deep into the pink meat of the whale's flanks, exposing her swollen belly and genital slit.

No one knew for sure how long great whites lived or when they first began to breed, but current theory favored a maximum age of eighty to a hundred years and a breeding cycle that began at about age ten and produced one or two pups every second year.

So, to kill her, to hang her head on the wall and sell her teeth for jewelry, would not be to kill a single great white shark. It would be to wipe out perhaps as many as twenty generations of sharks.

They had inserted the transmitter dart quickly and easily. The shark had never felt the barb, had not interrupted her feeding. They had watched her for a few minutes, and Chase had taken pictures. Then, as they prepared to leave, Tall Man had turned on the radio and heard charter fishermen talking back and forth about the whale. Clearly, the bluefisherman had gone to a bar and, feeling that he had done his duty by phoning the Institute first, had been unable to resist making points with his mates by talking about the whale.

Where had it gone? the fishermen would have wondered. Who took it? The goddamn government? Those bleeding hearts from the Institute? East. They had to have taken it east of Block.

The fishermen were coming, coming to slaughter the pregnant shark.

Chase and Tall Man had had no discussion. They had fetched some explosives from below—a brick of plastique left over from the building of the Institute's docks—and had carefully inserted charges into parts of the whale farthest from where the shark was feeding. They had detonated the charges one by one, blasting the whale carcass into pieces that immediately began to disperse and sink. The fishermen's radar target was gone; now they could never find the remains of the whale—or the shark.

The shark submerged, following pieces of blubber down into the safety of the deep.

If the EPA or the DEP wanted to try to make a case against them, Chase thought, let them. There had been no witnesses, the evidence would be flimsy and if any of the charter fishermen were smart enough to figure put what he'd done and why, and fool enough to lodge a complaint, they'd be hanging themselves by admitting they'd been intending to get closer to the dead whale than the law allowed.

Most important, the shark would still be alive.

They had lowered their tracking sensor and followed the white for a few more hours as she moved eastward into deeper water and then turned to the north.

Under normal circumstances, Chase would have pursued the shark without interruption, for to break away meant risking losing her: she could wander out of range, and they might not find her again before the transmitter's batteries gave out—two days, three at most.

But Max had been scheduled to arrive at the Groton/New London airport that evening, flying in from Sun Valley via Salt Lake and Boston. For the first time ever, Max was going to spend a solid month with his dad, and Chase was damned if he'd let the boy be met by a taxi driver from the nearby town of Stonington, and then ferried, alone and in twilight, out to a rock that would have looked to him about as appealing as Alcatraz.

So he and Tall Man had abandoned the shark, praying that she wouldn't roam up to New Hampshire or Maine or out to Nantucket, and that with luck they could be back tracking the animal within six hours. Chase had no idea how close she was to giving birth, but the electronic sensor would record the event if it occurred, would transmit changes in body temperature and chemistry. They might even see the birth if it happened near the surface. No one—no scientist or sportsman—had ever witnessed the birth of a great white shark.

Max had said he didn't need to unpack, and they hustled out of the airport, into the truck, onto the ferry, out to the island and onto the boat. Red-eyed, exhausted, the boy had also been deliriously excited at the thought of seeing a live white shark. When he called his mother from the cellular phone on the boat, the only adjective he could summon was "awesome."

Corinne had been less than thrilled, had asked to speak to Simon, had lectured him to be careful. Max had settled the matter. He had taken the phone back from Chase and had said, "Chill out, Mom, it's okay. Great whites don't want to hurt people."

"What do you mean?"

Max had laughed and said, "They just want to eat them." But when he had heard his mother gasp, he had added, "Just kidding, Mom ... a little shark humor."

"Do you have your windbreaker?" Corinne had asked.

"We're fine, Mom, really . . . love ya." Then Max had hung up.

Within an hour, they had relocated the shark, which Chase regarded as a fortuitous confirmation of one of his pet theories.

He was particularly interested in—and in fact was considering writing his dissertation about—the question of territoriality in great white sharks. Researchers in South Australia, at places like Dangerous Reef and Coffin Bay, where the water temperature varied little from season to season, had concluded that the region's whites were definitely territorial. Their food source was stable—colonies of seals—and in the course of roughly a week each white would make a tour of its territory and return to begin again.

Here on the East Coast of the United States, where the water temperature varied by as much as thirty degrees from winter to summer, and food supplies appeared and disappeared unpredictably, territoriality would seem to be impractical. Though no one knew for certain, Chase had been gathering evidence suggesting that these whites might be migratory: they seemed to go south in the winter, reappear in the spring or early summer (traveling, some of them, as far north and east as the Canadian Maritimes), stay till late September or early October and then begin to move south again.

But what intrigued Chase most was that the records of years of tagging were beginning to show that some whites returned to the same area year after year and reestablished the same general territory during their stay in that area. If he could prove that there were patterns of repetition, he might be able to open up a new field of research into the navigational capacities and memory-engram imprinting in great white sharks.

That is, as long as there were any great white sharks left to study.

"She's goin' down again," Tall Man called from the cabin.

"I guess she's one fickle lady," Chase said, disappointed. He looked toward shore. Napatree Point was abeam, the town of Waterboro just beyond, "Where to now?"

"She's off to Montauk, looks like. But not with any great purpose. She's strolling."

Chase walked forward into the cabin, hung up the camera and wiped sweat from his eyebrows. "Want a sandwich?" he called to Max.

"Not one of those gross sardine-and-onion things."

"No, I saved you a peanut-butter-and-jelly."

"Crack me a beer," Tall Man said, looking at his watch. "This watch may say it's nine-fifteen, but it doesn't know diddly about what time it really is." They had been sleeping in erratic four-hour shifts for the past forty hours. "My guts tell me it's straight up on beer o'clock."

Chase took a step toward the ladder that led to the galley below, when suddenly the boat lurched, lurched again and lost forward motion. The bow seemed to heave up, the stern to drop.

"What the hell's that?" Chase said. "You hit something?"

"In a hundred feet of water?" Tall Man frowned at the Fathometer. "Not hardly." The engine seemed to be laboring.

They heard a sound, as of rubber stretching—a complaining screech—and then the television monitor and the signal receiver began to inch backward on their mounts. The connecting wire was stretched taut through the doorway.

"Reverse!" Chase shouted as he ran to the door.

Tall Man shifted into reverse; the connecting wire went slack and drooped to the deck.

Outside in the cockpit, Chase saw that the coil of rubber-coated wire was gone; three hundred feet had spooled overboard. "The twine must've broken," he said. "The sensor's hitched in something on the bottom."

Chase took the wire in his hand and began to pull, and Max coiled it on the deck behind him. When the wire tautened again, Chase jigged it, pulling it left and right, giving it slack then hauling it tight. There was no give; the sensor was caught fast.

"I can't figure out what it's hitched in," he said. "Nothing down there but sand."

"Maybe," Tall Man said. He put the engine in neutral, letting the boat drift, and joined Chase and Max in the stern. He took the wire from Chase and held it in his fingertips, as if trying to decipher a message from its vibrations. "That nor'easter last week . . . forty knots of breeze for a day and a half will kick up hell with the bottom. Sand'll shift. It could be anything: a rock, a car somebody deep-sixed."

"It could be a shipwreck," Max said.

Chase shook his head. "Not around here. We've charted every wreck in the area." To Tall Man he said, "We got any tanks aboard?"

"Nope. I didn't plan on diving."

Chase went forward, into the cabin, and adjusted the scale on the Fathometer to its most sensitive reading. When he returned, he was holding a face mask and snorkel.

"Thirty meters," he said. "Ninety-five feet, give or take."

"You gonna dive for that sensor?" Tall Man asked, his voice rising.
"Free-dive!
Are you nuts?"

"It's worth a try. I've dived ninety feet before."

"Not without a tank, you haven't. Not since you were eighteen. Hell, Simon, you'll black out if you try
forty
feet."

"You want to try?"

"Not a chance. This country's already got enough dead redskins."

"Then we got a problem, 'cause I'm damned if I'm gonna lose three thousand bucks' worth of wire and three thousand more of transmitter."

"Buoy it," Tall Man said. "We'll get some tanks and come back for it later."

"By then we'll have lost the shark for good."

"Maybe . . . but we won't have lost you."

Chase hesitated, still tempted to try to free-dive for the sensor, or at least to go far enough down to be able to see what had snagged it. He was curious to know if he could still dive that deep. As youngsters, he and Tall had free-dived to bottoms invisible from the surface, had swum around the hulks of old fishing boats, had stolen lobsters from traps nestled in crevices in deep reefs. But Tall was right; he was no longer a teenager, an athlete who could party all night and swim all day. He might make it to the bottom, but he'd never make it back. Starved for oxygen, his brain would shut down and he would pass out—near the surface if he was lucky, far below if he was not.

"Talk to the man, son," Tall Man said to Max. "Tell him you didn't come all this way just to take your daddy home in a box."

Max started at Tall Man's bluntness, then put a hand on his father's arm and said, "C'mon, Dad. . . ."

Chase smiled. "Okay, we'll buoy it," he said.

"Can we get some tanks and come back and dive on it?" Max asked. "That'd be cool."

"You know how to dive?" Chase felt a pang, almost of pain, as if the fact that Max had learned to dive without him, somewhere else, from someone else, was a reprimand for his failures as a parent. "Where'd you learn?"

"At home, in the pool. Gramps got me some lessons."

"Oh," Chase said, feeling better. At least the boy hadn't really been diving; he'd been preparing for his visit. "We'll put you in the water, sure, but I think we'll start a little shallower."

Tall Man went to the cabin to disconnect the wire and waterproof the plug with O-ring grease and rubber tape. Chase lifted a hatch in the stern and found a yellow rubber buoy, eighteen inches in diameter, on which the initials "O.I." were emblazoned in red Day-Glo tape.

Walking aft, Tall Man coiled the wire around his shoulder and elbow. He had removed his sweat-soaked shirt, and the muscles in his enormous torso glistened as they moved beneath his cinnabar skin as if he had been oiled. He stood six feet six, weighed about two-twenty, and if he carried any fat, as his mother used to say as she pressed more food on him, it had to be between his ears.

"Whoa!" Max said as he looked at Tall Man. "Rambo meets the Terminator! You work out every day?"

"Work out?"
Chase said, laughing. "His two exercises are eating and drinking; his diet's a hundred percent salt-fried grease. He's a cosmic injustice."

"I'm the Great Spirit's revenge," Tall Man said to Max. "He's gotta do something to make up for five hundred years of white man's oppression."

"Believe that," Chase said to Max, "and you might as well believe in the tooth fairy. His Great Spirit is Ronald McDonald."

"So?" Tall Man guffawed. "A man's gotta pray to somebody."

. Max beamed, loving it. It was men's talk, grownups' talk, and they were including him, letting him be a part of it, letting him be grown-up.

He had heard of Tall Man all his life—his dad's best friend since childhood—and the huge Pequot Indian had become a mythic figure for the boy. He had almost been afraid to meet him, lest reality spoil the image. But the human being had turned out to be as grand as the myth.

Chase and Tall Man had separated several times: while Chase had gone to college, Tall Man had served in the Marines; while Chase had gone to graduate school, Tall Man had tried his hand as a high-steel worker in Albany.

But their lives had intersected again, when Chase had begun the Institute. He had known he would need an assistant proficient in the technical skills he himself lacked, and he had found Tall Man working as a diesel mechanic at a truck dealership. Tall Man didn't mind the work, he told Chase, and twenty dollars an hour wasn't a bad wage, but he hated somebody telling him when to come to work and when to leave, and he didn't like being cooped up indoors. Though Chase could offer him no fixed salary and no guarantees, Tall Man had quit on the spot and joined the Institute.