White Shark (12 page)
Authors: Peter Benchley
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Mystery, #Suspense, #Thriller, #Horror
Chase had agreed instantly, while trying to temper the excitement in his
voice.
This could be salvation, not only
financially but intellectually as well — a terrific project, well funded, with
a respected colleague.
The only problem was, Dr. Macy was due to arrive in a few days, Chase had
spent a lot of money, money he didn't have, building facilities for her and her
sea lions, and Dr. Macy's first check hadn't come yet.
If she had changed her plans, if she had
decided to cancel without having the courtesy to call him, if... well, he
wouldn't think about it.
*
*
*
*
*
The Institute's nerve center was a twenty-two-room clapboard Victorian
pile that had formerly been the main house for the island's clan.
Though its structure hadn't changed, its
function had:
it was used for the
Institute's housing, dining, administration and communications.
It was ramshackle and inefficient, and
Chase's original, grandiose plans had called for it to be razed and replaced at
a cost of more than a million dollars.
By now, though, he was delighted that the house had remained untouched,
for he had come to love it.
His office
was large, high-ceilinged and airy, with a working fireplace and French doors
that gave him a view of Fishers Island and, on a clear day,
Island
When Chase and Max came into the office, Mrs. Bixler was polishing pewter
and watching The Weather Channel.
"Morning, Mrs. B.," Chase said.
"Morning's long gone," Mrs. Bixler replied, "and you look
like you've been on a three-day toot."
She looked at Max.
"Did you
really take this boy sharking?"
"I did, and he did just fine... thanks to the sandwiches you sent
along."
"You were lucky," Mrs. Bixler said, frowning and returning to
her polishing.
"You were lucky,
pure and simple.
Don't push your luck, I
say."
Nominally, Mrs. Bixler was Chase's secretary; in fact, she was the
Institute's majordomo and his self-appointed caretaker.
A sixty-year-old widow whose children lived
somewhere out West, she was a member of the island's founding family and had
lived there year-round since the Korean War, shuttling back and forth to the
mainland in her own boat, a 1951 wooden speedboat that she kept in her own
cove.
Initially, when the family had left the island, she had moved to a small
house on the water near Mystic, but as soon as Chase had taken over — and had
found himself calling her daily for advice and counsel about the island, its
buildings, its septic systems, its generators, its wells — he had asked her to
come back to the island and work for the Institute.
She had, on her terms, which included the
restoration of her four-room apartment off the kitchen of the main house.
The pewter collection, a museum-quality array of seventeenth- and
early-eighteenth-century mugs, flagons, plates, candlesticks and flatware, was
Mrs. Bixler's own and was probably worth several hundred thousand dollars.
She could have sold it, stashed it in a vault
somewhere or kept it in her rooms, but it had traditionally resided in the room
that was now Chase's office, and that, she told Chase, was where it would
continue to reside.
"Why are you watching that, ma'am?
"
Max
asked
,
pointing at the television set mounted in a
bookcase.
"Can't be too careful," Mrs. Bixler said.
"That's one thing you can never be, too
careful."
Mrs. Bixler was tuned to disaster.
She had been three years old in 1938, when the colossal hurricane had
devastated
seeing houses fly off Napatree Point and float out to sea; she had lived on the
island through half a dozen other hurricanes.
After Hurricane Bob had knocked down a bunch of trees and blown out a
bunch of windows and put a lobster boat high and dry on her lawn in 1991, she
had taken out a loan to buy a satellite dish so she could keep The Weather
Channel on at all hours of the day and night, and be ready for the next big
blow.
"What's going on?
"
Chase said.
"Nothing much, not enough to wet a frog's socks.
But there's a nasty-looking low-pressure
convection cooking down east of
"I meant about business.
Anything from the EPA or the DEP?
Did we get an okay to move the whale?"
"Not a peep.
I called ‘em
both, and I got a robot that told me to have a nice day."
Chase ruffled through a pile of letters on his desk.
"Did we get the check from Dr.
Macy?"
"Not yet.
If I was you, I'd
tell that woman you're gonna make two parkas and a pair of gloves out of her
seals if she doesn't pay up."
Mrs.
Bixler paused.
"One thing, though.
I was over to town collecting the mail; Andy
Santos told me Finnegan's fixing to make a run at your tax status."
"Damn!
"
Chase said.
"He won't give up, will he?"
"Not till he's got you turn-tail and running... or till you roll
over and sell out to him."
"I'll blow the island off its pins first."
Mrs. Bixler smiled.
"That's
what I told Andy."
Brendan Finnegan was a land speculator whose acumen was very sharp... and
usually about a year too late.
He had
made a fortune in the seventies, lost it in the early eighties, made it back in
the late eighties and been hammered by the most recent turnaround.
Currently, his empire was teetering not he
lip of bankruptcy, and he was in desperate need of a big score.
A month after Chase had closed his deal for
Finnegan had received a feeler from a third-rank Saudi prince who was worried
about the explosive resurgence of Moslem fundamentalism and was seeking a safe
haven for several million dollars' worth of sterling and deutsche marks.
Distrustful of markets and banks, he wanted
to own hard assets, and he believed that despite
property on the U.S. East Coast was among the world's hardest assets.
Its value might stall, might retreat, but
would never collapse... not with 70 percent of the population living within
fifty miles of the coasts, and more fleeing the middle of the country every
day.
There were houses for sale by the
score between
islands, and the prince was a dedicated paranoid who needed the security of a
self-contained redoubt.
Finnegan saw the prince as his big score, if only he could find an island
to sell him.
He didn't just want a
broker's commission; he wanted the seller's profit too.
Thus, he'd have to own the island.
Chase's financial problems were no secret.
The price he had paid for the island was
public record, and his difficulties meeting the day-to-day expenses were common
knowledge.
Finnegan had first offered Chase the same amount Chase had paid for the
island.
Ignoring Chase's insistence that
he didn't want to sell, Finnegan had upped his ante in increments of 10 percent.
His latest offer had been for 180 percent of
Chase's purchase price, or nearly two thirds of the assessed value of the
island.
Chase knew the game Finnegan was playing, and he wasn't trying to hold
the man up.
As he told Finnegan while
they were still on relatively amicable terms, he had finally found something he
loved, something he wanted to preserve and pursue, and he intended to keep it.
Finnegan had stopped being friendly.
He had begun to file nuisance complaints — with the zoning board, the planning
board, the Coast Guard and the EPA.
None
of the complaints had been sustained, but each had had to be answered, if not
by Chase himself then by his two-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer.
"What grounds has he thought up this time," Chase asked Mrs.
Bixler.
"Says you're not doing any real science out here, says your
experiments haven't produced anything concrete yet, so why should the taxpayers
support you."
"The arguments' got a certain appeal."
Chase paused.
"Dr. Macy's arriving just in time... the cavalry to the
rescue."
"Long as she pays the bills."
Max had appeared to be ignoring the conversation, watching the hypnotic
drone of the weather reports.
But now he
said suddenly, "Can't you afford all this?
Are you gonna lose the island?"
"No," Chase said, forcing a smile.
"Now let's go get us some scuba tanks
and have a lesson before we go back and dive up that sensor."
"Not likely," said Mrs. Bixler.
"Compressor's down."
"For God's sake... what now?
"
Chase
said, seeing Max's shoulders slump in disappointment.
"Gene said it's probably the solenoid.
But then, Gene thinks all the world's
problems can be traced to solenoids.
If
I were you, I'd have Tall look at it."
"Okay," Chase said.
He
felt panicky; now there were problems with the compressor.
What would break down next?
What he wanted to do more than anything was
take a nap.
But Max was here, and Chase was determined that Max was going to have the
time of his life.
He smiled and said,
"We'll go talk to
Tall
, help him feed Chief
Joseph.
Then we'll go check the tank
racks.
Maybe there're still a couple of
full tanks."
*
*
*
*
*
Tall Man was already in the equipment
shed, working on the diesel compressor, whose problem was not the solenoid but
clogged injectors.
He'd have it running
by late this afternoon, he said; there would be full tanks by tomorrow morning.
Chase didn't know how Max would react —
with sullenness, perhaps, or resignation — but the one attitude he would have
bet against was enthusiasm.
So he was
surprised and pleased when Max said, "That's the great thing about being
here for a month; there's always tomorrow."
He gestured.
"C'mon, Dad, gimme a tour of the rest of the
place."
There were three other buildings on the
island.
All had been homes, all had been
scheduled for demolition and all had instead been jury-rigged as laboratories,
storage facilities and, in one case, a makeshift infirmary.
The living room of the smallest house had
been stripped of furniture and carpeting, its floor had been tiled, its
Sheetrock walls plastered over.
In the
center of the room, bolted to the floor, lit by large ceiling-mounted
fluorescent tubes, was a cylinder twelve feet long and six feet high, with a
round hatch on one end and a small porthole in the middle.
Plastic tubing and coated wires ran from the
cylinder to a control panel on one wall.
"That's our decompression
chamber," Chase said.
"We call
it Dr. Frankenstein."
"What's it for?"
"Well, let's see how much you learned
from your diving lessons.
What are the
three main dangers in diving?
Aside from
stupidity and panic, which are the two most important and the ones they don't
tell you about?"
"That's easy.
Embolism first — that's from holding you
breath on the way up.
The
bends.
And
...
I
forget the other one."
"Some people call it the
rapture," Chase said.
"The rapture of the deep."
He led Max to a small refrigerator, from
which he took two cans of Coke.
He
passed one to Max and said, "You ever been drunk?"
Max flushed.
"Me?"
"Never mind, that wasn't a question
you have to answer.
What I'm getting at
is
,
the thing they call the rapture is like getting
drunk under water.
Its real name is
nitrogen narcosis.
When you breathe
compressed air in deep water, there's a high ratio of nitrogen in what you take
into your body, and nitrogen can become poison, pretty much like alcohol.
It affects people at different depths, in
different ways.
Some people never get
it, some people get it once and never again, some people get it so often
they're almost used to it.
And some
people die from it."
