Peter Benchley's Creature (3 page)

"To the smoker? Not too long." The pilot tapped a gauge on the panel before him. "Water temp's creeping up. We gotta be close."

As the submersible rounded a sharp point of rock in the cliff face, its lights were suddenly dimmed by a cloud of thick black smoke.

"Here we are," the pilot said, and he stopped the boat's forward motion and reversed. They descended until the lights cleared.

Webber hunched forward and gripped his camera controls. "Tell Charlie to see if he can move around to the other side," he said. "I want to get him in the frame."

"Will do." The pilot spoke into his microphone, and Webber saw the white shape of the other submersible drift through the black cloud and hover spectrally.

From this distance, the vent didn't look like much: a roiling plume of black smoke against a background of black water, with occasional slashes of red-orange flame as the belly of the earth belched molten rock up through its skin. But the
Geographic
wanted comprehensive coverage of everything he saw, no matter how mundane, so Webber began to shoot.

Each camera was loaded with one hundred frames of 35-mm film, and the strobes recycled instantaneously, so he was able to fire shot after shot as the
pilot
guided the submersible slowly toward the mouth of the vent.

Webber was relieved to be working now, concentrating on angles and exposures, trying to avoid the glare from the other submersible's lights, his fear forgotten.

His shivering had stopped, he wasn't cold anymore. In fact, he felt hot, as hot as he had on the surface.

"What's the temperature out there now?" he asked.

"Almost two hundred Fahrenheit," said the pilot. "The vent's like a stove, heats everything around it."

Suddenly something bumped into Webber's porthole and ricocheted away into the cloud of smoke. Startled, he jerked backward and said, "What the hell?" It had been too fast and too close for him to distinguish its features; all he had seen was a fluttering blur of white.

"Just wait," said the pilot. "Don't use up all your film. We got lots of critters out there now, might even find something brand-new nobody's ever seen before."

They were approaching the mouth of the vent now. Here, supposedly, animals fed on the vent's chemicals. There was a deep staccato rumbling sound, and flashes of red and orange, as molten rock erupted from fissures in the cliff.

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," the 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 not 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 arms 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 these 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. There wouldn't be nothin' left."

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

"Me neither, but something's been eating these shrimp, by the goddamn thousands, and shelling 'em too. I think we better have us 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 of 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 that 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.

When they reached the forward deck area, the pilot disengaged the motor and let the submersible hover. "There's what sank her," he said, focusing the lights on an enormous hole in the deck. "She imploded."

The deck plates were bent inward, their edges curled as if struck by a giant hammer.

As Webber shot a picture, he felt sweat running down his sides; he imagined the moment, half a century before, when the men on this boat suddenly knew they were going to die. He could imagine the roar of rushing water, the screams, the confusion, the panic, the pressure, the suffocation, the agony. "Christ . . ." he said.

The pilot put the motor in gear, and the submersible inched forward. Its lights reached into the hole, illuminating a skein of wires, a tangle of pipes, a . . .

"Hey!" Webber shouted.

"What?"

"There's something in there. Something big. It looks . . . I don't know . . ."

The pilot maneuvered the submersible above the hole, tilted the bow down and, using the claws on the ends of the articulate arms, tore away the wires and pushed aside the pipes. He angled the lights into a single five-thousand-watt beam and shone it straight down into the hole. "I'll be damned. . . ."

"It looks like a box," Webber said as he watched the lights dance over the greenish-yellow surface of a perfect rectangle. "A chest."

"Yeah, or a coffin." The pilot paused, reconsidering. "No. Too big for a coffin."

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. They just stared at the box—wondering, imagining.

At last, Webber said, "We ought to bring it up."

"Yeah." The pilot nodded. "The only question is how. The bastard's gotta be eight feet long. I bet it weighs a ton. I can't lift it with this boat."