White Shark (4 page)

Another animal sped by, then another.
 
And then, as the submersible settled above a
small mesa of newly hardened lava, a blizzard of them:
 
shrimps.
 
They were huge, ash white, eyeless; thousands, hundreds of thousands of
shrimps, perhaps millions.
 
So many that
they filled the field of vision, swarming, pulsating like a living mountain.

"Sweet Jesus...
"
Webber said, both riveted and appalled.
 
"What are they doing?"

"Feeding," he pilot said,
"on whatever's in that smoke."

"Shrimps can live in
two-hundred-degree water?"

"Born in it, live
in it and die in it.
 
Once in a while, one'll tumble into the mouth
of the vent — that's about seven hundred degrees in there — and he'll burn
up...
pop
, just like a tick in a
match flame."

After Webber had fired a dozen shots, the
pilot nudged the submersible forward, parting the shrimps as if they were a
thick bead curtain.

Surrounding the mouth of the vent, rooted
to the lava and growing like a nightmare garden, were long bony stalks, six or
eight feet tall, from the ends of which protruded red and yellow feathery
fingers that moved sinuously in and out of the billows of smoke.

"What the hell are
they?
"
Webber
said.

"Tube worms.
 
They build
those houses for themselves out of something they excrete,
then
send their fans out to feed.
 
Watch."
 
The
pilot reached for a control lever and extended one of the submersible's
articulate arms toward the nearest stalk.
 
As the steel claws of the arm drew near, the fans seemed to freeze, and
a split second before they would have been touched, they vanished, withdrew as
if by magic into the shelter of their calcareous tubes.
 
"Did you get a picture of that?"
the pilot asked.

"Too fast," said Webber.
 
"Let's try again.
 
I'll set the shutter speed for a
two-thousandth."

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

An hour later, Webber had shot more than
three hundred frames of film.
 
He had
photographed the shrimps and the tube worms in close-up, wide-angle and with
the other submersible in the background.
 
He hoped he had at least twenty
Geographic
-quality
images.
 
He had no idea whether or to his
pictures would verify the existence of chemosynthetic species, or would simply
prove that blind albino shrimps lived in 200-degree water two and a half miles
below the surface of the sea.
 
Either
way, he knew he had some spectacular shots.

For insurance, he had had the pilot use
the submersible's mechanical arm to gather half a dozen shrimps and two tube
worms; they were secured now in a collecting basket on the outside of the
boat.
 
He would take some macro shots of
them in the lab on board the mother ship.

"That'll do it," he said to the
pilot.
 
"Let's go."

"You're sure?"
 
I don't guess your boss'll want to spend
another fifty grand to send us back down here."

Webber hesitated briefly,
then
said, "I'm sure."
 
He was confident that he had the money
shots.
 
He knew his cameras, sometimes he
felt as if his brain were an extension of them, and he could picture now the
images in his mind.
 
They were excellent,
he was certain.

"Okay."
 
Into his radio, the pilot said, "We're
outta here."
 
He put the boat into
reverse and backed away from the vent.

A moment later, Webber was making reminder
notes on a pad when he heard the pilot say, "Son of a bitch..."

"What?"

"Look over there."
 
The pilot was pointing at something on the
bottom, outside his porthole.

Webber leaned to his own porthole and held
his breath so he wouldn't fog the glass.
 
"I don't see anything," he said.

"Down there.
 
Shrimp shells.
 
Zillions of them.
 
They're all over the sand."

"So?
 
Don't you figure those creatures eat each other?"

"Well, I dunno.
 
I never saw it like this.
 
I s’pose they do eat each other, but would
they
shell
each other too?
 
Maybe it's one of them deep sharks, a
six-gill or a sleeper.
 
But would
they
stop to shell a shrimp before they
eat it?
 
It
don't
make a lick of sense."

"Could it eat them whole and spit out
the shells?
 
Regurgitate them?"

"A shark's got digestion like battery
acid.
 
Three wouldn't
be nothin' left."

"I don't get it," Webber said.

"Me neither, but
some
thing's been eating those shrimp, by the goddamn thousands, and
shelling ‘em too.
 
I think we better have
a look-see."

The shells appeared to taper off into a
trail, and the pilot turned the boat around and followed the trail, directing
the lights downward as he cruised along a few feet off the bottom.

The submersible moved slowly, no more than
a couple of hundred feet a minute, and after two or three minutes the monotony
of the whirring motor and the sameness of the barren landscape became
hypnotic.
 
Webber felt his eyes
glazing.
 
He shook his head.
 
"What are we looking for?" he
asked.

"I dunno, but my guess is it's the
same as usual — a clue that'll lead us to something nature didn't make.
 
A straight line or
something, maybe... a perfect circle... anything symmetrical.
 
There's damn little in nature that's
symmetrical."

They had been moving for only a few
seconds more when Webber thought he glimpsed an anomaly at the edge of the ring
of light.
 
"Over there," he
said.
 
"That isn't exactly
symmetrical, but it doesn't look natural, either."

The pilot turned the boat, and as the
lights moved across the bottom, a mass of gnarled black metal appeared on the
carpet of powdery silt.
 
It had no
recognizable shape, and parts seemed to have been crushed, other parts torn and
twisted.

"It looks like junk," Webber
said.

"Yeah, but what
kind of junk?
 
What
was
it?"
 
The pilot radioed his position
to the other submersible,
then
dropped down until the
bottom of his boat rested on the silt.

The mass of metal was spread over too
large an area for the lights to illuminate all of it, so the pilot aimed all
ten thousand watts at one end and manipulated the lights foot by foot, studying
every shape and, as if constructing a jigsaw puzzle, trying to fit them
together into a coherent whole.

Webber didn't offer to help, for he knew
he couldn't contribute anything useful.
 
He was a photographer, not an engineer.
 
For all he knew, the heap of steel out there might have been a
locomotive, a paddle-wheel steamer or an airplane.

As he waited, he felt fear returning.
 
They had been down in this thing for almost
five hours; it would take them at least three more hours to return to the
surface.
 
He was cold; he was hungry; he
needed to take a leak; most of all, he needed to move, to
do
something.
 
And to get the hell out of here.

"C’mon," he said.
 
"Let's forget it and take off."

The pilot waited a long moment before he
replied.
 
When at last he did, he turned
to Webber and said, "I hope you still got a pile of film left."

"Why?"

"
‘Cause
we
just found ourselves one hell of a bonus."

6

The pilot summoned the other submersible
and positioned it fifty yards away, across the field of wreckage.
 
With the four lamps throwing a
twenty-thousand-watt pool of light, they could see nearly the entire site.

The pilot grinned at Webber and said
"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Well, what is it?"

"How the hell do I know?
"
Webber snapped.
 
"Look, I'm freezing, I'm tired,
I
have to
hit the head.
 
Do me a favor and
stop—"

"It's a submarine."

"It
is?
"
Webber said, and pressed his
face to the porthole.
 
"How do you
know?"

"Look there."
 
The pilot pointed.
 
"That's a diving plane.
 
And there.
 
That's gotta be a snorkel tube."

"You mean a nuke?"

"No, I don't think so; I'm pretty
sure not.
 
It looks to be steel.
 
See how it's oxidizing — real slow, because
there's almost no oxygen down here.
 
But
it
is
oxidizing — and it's small and
the wiring's shitty, old-fashioned.
 
I'd
say we're talking World War Two."

"World War
Two?
"

"Yeah
,
 
but
let's try to get
closer."
 
The pilot spoke into his
microphone, and, on cue, the two submersibles began to crawl toward each other
at a speed barely above idle, skimming the bottom just high enough to avoid
roiling the silt.

Webber's film counters told him he had
eighty-six frames left, so he shot sparingly.
 
He tried to imagine the wreck whole, but the destruction was so complete
that he couldn't see how anyone could identify individual sections of the ship.

"Where are we on the thing?" he
asked.

"Looks to me like the stern,"
the pilot said.
 
"She's lying on her
starboard side.
 
Those pipes there should
be the after torpedo tubes."

They passed one of the submarine's deck
guns, and because it actually looked like something, Webber shot a couple of
frames of it.

They came to a gaping wound in the side of
the ship and saw on the silt a few feet away a pair of shoes looking as if they
were waiting for feet to step into them.

"Where's the guy who wore them?
"
Webber asked as he shot the shoes from different
angles.
 
"Where's the body?"

"
Worms
would've eaten him," the pilot
said.
 
"Crabs,
too."

"Bones and all?
 
Worms eat
bones?"

"No, but the sea does.
 
Deep, cold salt water dissolves bones... it's
a chemical thing.
 
The sea seeks out
calcium.
 
I used to want to be buried at
sea, but not now, not anymore.
 
I don't
like the thought of being lunch for creepy crawlies."

They saw a few more recognizable items as
they crept toward the bow:
 
pots from the
galley, the frame of a bunk, a radio.
 
Webber shot them all.
 
He was
readjusting one of his cameras when, at the edge of his field of vision, he saw
what looked like a letter of the alphabet painted on a steel plate.
 
"What's that?" he said, pointing.

The pilot turned the submersible around
and moved it slowly forward.
 
Looking
through his porthole, he said suddenly, "Bingo!
 
We just identified the boat."

"We did?"

"The kind, anyway.
 
That's a
U
painted on one of the conning-tower
plates.
 
It's a U-boat."

"A U-boat?
 
You mean she's
German?"

"She was.
 
But what she was doing this far south in the
middle of nowhere, the Lord only knows."

Webber shot pictures of the
U
from several angles as the pilot
nudged the submersible on toward the bow of the submarine.