Peter Benchley's Creature (20 page)

The shark and the sea lion were clearly visible now, two dark bodies against a canvas of blue. A few bubbles floated up as the sea lion let air leak from its mouth.

Then, abruptly, the sea lion broke away from the shark and shot upward. At first, Chase thought the animal had tired of the game, or needed to breathe, but there was something about its movements, an urgency, that told him he was wrong. The sea lion sped past the cage and rushed toward the boat. As Chase's eyes followed it upward, he saw the other sea lions— two together, one alone—swimming at the boat with the same frenzied speed.

For God's sake, Chase thought,
now
what?

"I guess they've had enough," Tall Man said as he watched the sea lions struggle onto the swimstep. They were barking, shoving one another, desperate to get aboard.

"No," Amanda said, alarmed. "Something's frightened them. Something's out there."

"Like what?" Tall Man looked overboard. He could barely see the cage, for as it had sunk it had drifted into the shade of the boat. Holding the rope, he walked from one side of the boat to the other, then returned to the stem. "Nothing," he said. "I can't see anything out there."

"It's there, though," Amanda said. "Something . . . somewhere."

"Then whatever it is has gotta be deep. Either that, or ... shit!"

"What?"

"Under the boat." He pulled on the rope.

The cage shuddered as the rope tugged it. Chase reached to turn the air valves.

A shadow passed overhead, so huge that it cast the entire cage in darkness. Chase started, and looked up. A flash of sunlight blinded him for a moment, disorienting him; by the time his eyes had adjusted, he was unsure of the direction the shadow had been traveling. He turned.

Ten feet away, emerging from the shade of the boat, swimming at the cage with a mighty gracefulness that Chase had once admired but now found horrid, was the great white shark. It did not slow or hesitate. Its eyes rolled backward in their sockets; its mouth opened; its gums rotated forward; serrated white triangles stood erect. It bit down on the cage.

Reflexively, Chase ducked and flung himself on top of Max. The boy turned his head, his eyes widened in shock.

There was a sound of teeth scraping on metal, then a crunching sound of metal collapsing, then a sudden hiss of air and an explosion of bubbles.

The cage yawed crazily, swinging under the boat and slamming against the keel, and Chase knew instantly what had happened: the shark had destroyed one of the flotation tanks.

"Goddamn you!" Tall Man shouted. The sinews in his arms and shoulders stood out like wires as he strained at the rope. He had seen the shark only a second before it had struck, charging out from beneath the boat like a gray torpedo.

Amanda reached over, grabbed the rope and helped him pull. "I thought sharks never—"

"Yeah," Tall Man said. "But guess what: this one did."

"Why?"

"Christ knows."

They could hear the cage thumping against the keel, could feel the impact through their feet.

"Can you put the rope on the winch?" Amanda asked.

"I don't dare. The bastard weighs better'n a ton; the weight could tear the rope away from the cage."

"What do we
do
?
We have to—"

"If he comes out from under the boat, I'll shoot the son of a bitch," Tall Man said. "Till then, let's just pray he goes away."

Chase and Max huddled in the far corner of the cage, holding each other, holding the bars, as the cage swung wildly beneath the boat. The shark had locked its jaws, and it twisted and thrashed its massive body as if trying to beat the to pieces.

Chase saw bubbles flowing from Max's regulator in a continuous stream. The boy was hyperventilating. He made Max look at him, pointed to his own regulator, then to Max's, and gestured for Max to slow his breathing. Terrified, Max nodded.

Suddenly the shark released the cage, and the cage swung downward, hanging askew. Chase saw the shark's wide white belly slipping slowly before his eyes as the animal let itself fall. There were five parallel slash marks in the flesh forward of the genital slit.

"Pull!" Tall Man said. He and Amanda brought the rope in hand-over-hand. Looking overboard, they could see the top of the cage as it cleared the bottom of the boat. The shark was a gray form, hovering nearly motionless beneath the cage. Tall Man dropped down onto the swimstep and held the rope out over the stern. "Another five feet and we've got—"

"No!" Amanda screamed, pointing.

There was a flash of a scythelike tail, a rush of water, and the conical head of the shark broke the surface. The mouth barely opened; it struck the swim-step, skidded, and fastened on the rope. With a single shake of its head, the shark tore the rope from Tall Man's hand and sheared it from the cage. Tall Man fell backward into the stern.

The shark swam away; the cage began to fall.

Chase lurched to his feet, grabbed the air valve on the intact flotation tank and twisted it all the way on. There was a hiss of air, and the cage's descent slowed. But it was still falling.

Chase inflated his buoyancy vest and Max's, hoping that removing their weight and adding buoyancy would stop the cage, make it neutral, until Tall Man could lower a rope to them.

The cage continued to fall. Chase looked at the depth gauge on the tank: the needle passed thirty feet, then thirty-five, forty. ...

He looked quickly in every direction. The shark had vanished.

Fifty feet . . .

Chase knew he had no choice, they could not ride the cage to the bottom. They would both run out of air, probably before they reached the bottom, certainly before Tall Man could reach them.

He pulled Max to his feet and pushed open the hatch. He put his hands on Max's shoulders and looked into the boy's eyes, willing him to recall the lessons he had learned, praying that the boy had listened. He took his mouthpiece out and shouted the word, "Remember!"

Max understood.

Sixty feet . . .

Chase propelled Max up through the hatch and followed immediately. He took the boy's hand, and faced him so he could monitor Max's breathing.

They were rising too fast, faster than their own bubbles; the air in their vests was expanding, seeking the surface, dragging them upward. They
had
to slow down; if they kept rising at this pace, they were risking a ruptured lung or an embolism or the bends.

Chase vented the vests, and they slowed. Now their bubbles were preceding them. Good.

Chase looked at his depth gauge: forty feet . . . thirty-five ... He didn't look down, he kept his eyes on Max's face. He didn't see the shark rising beneath them.

Twenty feet . . . fifteen . . .

Suddenly there was a splash above them, and a roil of water, and Tall Man swam down at them, carrying a spear gun.

Now Chase did look down, and he saw, rising like a missile through the gloom, the yawning mouth and the prolapsed jaw of the great white shark.

Tall Man pulled the trigger. There was a puff of bubbles from the carbon-dioxide propellant, and the spear shot from the gun. It struck the shark in the roof of the mouth, and stuck. The shark hesitated, shaking its head to rid itself of the annoyance. It bit down, bending the spear, crushing it.

Chase broke through the surface, pulled Max after him and shoved him onto the swimstep. Amanda grabbed Max and hauled him into the boat as Chase swung his legs up, rolled onto the swimstep and reached down for Tall Man's hand.

But Tall Man stayed just beneath the surface, watching. At last, he kicked upward and, in a single motion, flung himself onto the swimstep.

Chase shrugged out of his harness, dropped his tank on the deck and crawled forward to Max, who lay on his side as Amanda helped him out of his tank. "Are you okay?" Chase asked.

Max's eyes were closed. He nodded, managed a faint smile and said, "Jeez . . ."

"You did great. . . you followed the rules . . . you didn't panic. You did
great
!" Chase felt guilty and stupid and relieved and proud; he wanted to express all those feelings, but he didn't know how, so he simply took one of Max's hands in his, rubbed it and said, "What a hell of an initiation to open-water diving." .He saw Tall Man walking forward, toward the cabin, and said, "Hey, Tall . . . thanks. I wasn't looking, I didn't see it coming."

"I know," Tall Man said. "I thought I better give the bastard something else to chew on other than you. That was our shark, y'know. She's still got the tag in her."

"I've never
seen
behavior like that, never
heard
of it. She was berserk! It's weird, like the blue sharks, only opposite: the white was nuts with aggression instead of fear." Chase paused. "But whatever's causing this behavior, it's the same creature: there were five slashes on that white shark's belly."

They raised the anchor, turned to the west, heading for home. Chase stood at the wheel on the flying bridge; Max lay on a towel behind him, warming himself in the high afternoon sun. Amanda was feeding the sea lions. When she had settled them in the stern, she climbed the ladder to the bridge.

The low silhouette of Osprey Island was just coming into view when Tall Man appeared at the foot of the ladder and said to Amanda, "Your pilot's on the radio; he's got whales."

"How far away?"

"Not far, couple miles to the east."

Amanda hesitated. She looked at her watch, at the sea lions, then at Chase.

Chase said to Max, "How do you feel?"

"Fine," Max replied. "I'm fine. Let's go; I've never seen whales."

Chase turned to Amanda. "It's up to you," he said. "Do you think the sea lions will work?"

"Sure, till they're tired, then they'll stop,"

"They're not spooked?"

"No, I don't think so. If they see the white shark, they'll get out of the water, just like before. Besides, sharks usually stay away from pods of big, healthy whales."

"Uh-huh," Chase said. He swung the wheel to the left and headed east. "I wasn't thinking only about the white shark."

24

"I  CAN'T hear them," Max said.

Two hundred yards ahead, a pod of humpback whales was moving leisurely northward.

"You might if you were underwater," said Chase. "You could hear them for miles."

"But if they sing ..."

"It's not really singing, we call it that because we don't know how else to describe it. They don't actually have voices. They make sounds with a mechanism inside their heads. And they don't do it all the time."

They stood on the flying bridge. The boat was idling in neutral, bobbing slowly in the long ocean swells.

The great gray bodies rolled through the sea, displacing mountains of water with their huge bulbous heads, displaying vast flat tail flukes fifteen or twenty feet wide, spouting geysers of misty breath into the warm air. There were adults and young, males and females, but it was impossible to count them, for every so often one or two would slap the surface three times with their tails and then disappear in a deep dive, to reappear long minutes later in some unpredictable position among their fellows.

"What does their song say?" Max asked.

"For a long time, nobody knew; all they knew was that the whales were communicating, maybe talking about where they were going or where there might be food or if they sensed any danger. All whales communicate; I've heard that blue whales can keep in touch with each other over a thousand miles of open ocean. Humpbacks, though, are the only whales that sing in such a complex series of sounds and tones. Now scientists are pretty sure that the song of the humpbacks is sexual, that the males sing to attract the females." Chase smiled. "I like to think they're wrong, that the song is still a mystery."

"Why?"

"Mysteries are wonderful things. It would be boring to have all the answers. It's like the Loch Ness monster, I hope they never find him, either. We need dragons to keep our imaginations alive."

"Max!" Amanda called from the stern. "Come on down and get Harpo ready."

Max walked aft on the flying bridge and climbed down the ladder into the cockpit.

Three of the sea lions had been fitted with harnesses, and secured to each harness was a video camera whose lens pointed forward. The fourth animal shifted nervously from side to side as if confused.

Amanda handed Max the fourth harness and showed him how to fit it around the sea lion's shoulders, along its belly, behind its flippers and over its back.

As Max slipped the leather straps over the silky skin, the sea lion nuzzled him with its icy nose and tickled him with its whiskers.

Amanda attached the camera and called up to Chase, "All set."

Chase looked out at the ocean. Everything seemed normal, peaceful. And yet ...

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked. "We have three months."

"Yeah, but we won't get whales every day. Let's go."

"Okay, it's your call. How close do you want me to get? I don't need to break federal laws about harassing whales."

"Not too close. The important thing is for us to get in front of the whales so the sea lions don't get pooped trying to catch up with them."

Chase put the boat in gear and accelerated, keeping well away from the whales so as not to alarm them with his engine noise. On a day this calm, there would be no problem keeping the whales in sight; their tail flukes and spouts would be visible for a mile or more, so he traveled what he judged to be five hundred yards in front of them before throttling back and letting the boat idle.

In the stern, the four sea lions were poised behind one another like schoolchildren lined up for lunch. Amanda spoke to each one and made a series of gestures before switching on the video camera and sweeping her arm toward the opening in the transom. Max stood behind her, mimicking her gestures.

One by one, the sea lions waddled to the stern and flung themselves into the ocean.

When they had all surfaced behind the boat, Amanda raised both arms and pointed at the appreaching whales, and swept her arms downward.

The sea lions barked, turned and vanished beneath the surface.