Peter Benchley's Creature (11 page)

"It's possible, if it was bleeding. One of them might take a bite out of it, and then the others see how easy it is and get in a frenzy and—"

"No." Again Max shook his head. "I thought maybe a shark, but when I got real close I saw . . . the deer had no eyes. Everything around the eyes was all torn. A shark wouldn't do that . . . couldn't."

"No. So you were right the first time . . . bluefish, probably."

Max ignored him. "I saw something sticking out of its cheek . . . something shiny. . . . I tried to reach for it but couldn't, so I took a step and slipped . . . fell in."

"What was it?"

Max opened his right hand. The wound in his palm was small and shallow, and already the bleeding had stopped. He passed the shiny thing to his father.

"Looks like a shark tooth," Chase said as he took the thing and turned out of the shadow cast by his own torso.

"That's what I thought, too."

But then, as Chase moved to the light on his desk and examined the thing in his hand, he started, and felt his pulse leap.

It did look like a shark tooth, a great white shark's tooth, perhaps fossilized, for it was a dingy gray color. It was a triangle, about half an inch on a side, and two of its three sides had finely serrated edges that, when Chase ran his thumb along them, shredded his skin as swiftly as a scalpel. The third side was slightly thicker and had a flat base, and on each end of the base was a tiny barbed hook. The two hooks faced each other. One had been broken off just above the barb.

Chase took a ruler from his desk and measured the triangle. It was not half an inch on a side but five eighths—exactly five eighths. The thing was a magnificently machined, perfectly precise equilateral triangle.

Chase rubbed it between his thumb and index finger. The gray patina felt like slime, and as he rubbed it, it transferred to his skin.

Now the tooth, or whatever it was, shone like polished silver.

Chase looked at Max. "Is this a joke?" he said. "Tell me you're jerking my chain."

"A joke?" Max shivered and gestured at the goose bumps on his arms and legs, and at the wound in his hand. "Some joke."

"Well, then . . . what kind of animal is there that's got stainless steel teeth?"

13

IT was two-fifteen when Buck and Brian Bellamy pushed off from the dock, nearly two hours later than Buck had wanted to leave, and Buck was furious. He had told Brian to fill the two scuba tanks, but his brother had been so wrapped up in helping his girlfriend put together her costume for Waterboro's parade for the Blessing of the Fleet that he hadn't gotten around to it. He had told Brian to be sure the boat was full of gas, but Brian had forgotten, so they'd had to wait for forty minutes in line at the fuel dock while some richbitch put two thousand bucks' worth of die-sel into a Hatteras so big that it blocked off all the pumps on the dock.

But Buck held his tongue. It wouldn't do any good to give Brian a chewing-out; Brian was immune to reprimands. After his time in the Army, those two years down in Texas near the border with Mexico, with all that cheap pot and tequila and God knows what else, Brian was pretty much immune to life. Nothing got to him; he was perpetually mellow. The last time Buck had hollered at him, for forgetting all the bait on a fishing trip, Brian had just said, "Aw, piss on it," and had jumped overboard and started swimming. They had been twelve miles offshore.

Buck, though, wasn't mellow; he was damn well excited, this could be the biggest day of his life. So instead of saying anything snappy to Brian he just asked him nicely to please sit on the padded box amidships so it wouldn't bounce around, and then he rammed his throttle forward. There were sailboats thick as flies everywhere in the harbor, and dinghies threading their way among them—people who'd come all the way from down-east Maine and the Jersey shore to watch all the half-assed Blessing folderol— but Buck didn't give a damn. If there was a marine cop around, let him try to catch them. There wasn't much afloat that could catch the
Zippo.
Buck had taken a stock Mako hull and modified the bejesus out of it, then added a turbocharged power plant that could generate four hundred and fifty horses and make the hull get up and
go.

He cleared Waterboro Point going about thirty, pulled back so as not to jar his precious box while he crossed the wakes of the big boats going in and out of the Watch Hill channel, then hammered the throttle again and kicked in the turbo, heading for Napatree with his speedometer quivering around sixty.

If everything went well with the tests today and the meeting tomorrow, by midweek he could be adding a whole bunch of zeros to his prospects, and he'd be able to tell the folks at Waterboro Lumber to find some other sap to peddle plywood and paint to yuppies. If Brian wanted to come along on the gravy train, he'd let him—all corporations had dim-witted brothers on the payroll—though if he had to put money on
it, he'd bet that Brian would choose to stay out there making change at the gas station on the turnpike.

There was no swell rolling in, so Buck kept speed up as he swung around Napatree and headed southeast, aiming for the space between the two humps that were Block Island and Osprey.

"Where we goin'?" Brian shouted over the shriek of the engine.

"To the
Helen J."

"Long ways."

"Got a better idea?"

"Nope," Brian said, leaning toward the cooler. "Think I'll have me a foamie."

"Later, Brian. We got head work to do."

"Well, hell, Bucky . . ." Brian sat back.

Brian was right, the wreck of the old schooner
Helen J
was a long way away, but it was the only wreck around decent enough for videotaping. It was shallow, so the light would be good, and it was relatively intact, so it looked good. Buck needed a nice set for the demo movie he was going to make to show the honchos from Oregon. Sure, he could run the tests in a swimming pool somewhere, but it wouldn't look like much, certainly not enough to impress hi-techies with fat checkbooks. Presentation was everything, details counted, and if Buck Bellamy was anything, he was a details man.

"Look there," Brian said, pointing off to starboard.

Buck looked, and saw a big yellow buoy with lettering on it. "So? A buoy." .

"Never seen a buoy like that. Wonder what's under it."

"Got no time to look, Brian. We lost a lot of time."

"Could be a boat," Brian said thoughtfully. "Storm
last week, maybe somebody lost a boat, buoyed it for the barge to find . . . could make pretty pictures."

"Fat chance," Buck said, but as he passed the buoy, he thought: Why not have a look? Give it five minutes, and if it is a boat, a newly sunk boat, those five minutes could save me two hours. He throttled back and swung the boat in a tight circle. "Good idea," he said. "You're thinking, Brian."

Brian beamed. "I can, Bucky, when I put my mind to it." He leaned over the bow and-grabbed the buoy and brought it aboard, straining at the weight of the coil of wire.

"Power wire," said Buck.

"What's the 'O.I.' mean?"

"Who cares? There's something down there. Put a tank on and have a look while I set up the gear."

"Right, I'll have a look."

"But just a look, Brian. Down and up, that's it. I don't want you sucking up a bottle of air dicking around on some lobster trap."

Brian nodded. "A bounce dive. I like bounce dives."

"And you're good at 'em, too," Buck said. Maybe compliments would accomplish what reprimands couldn't.

"Damn right." Brian put the tank harness on over his T-shirt and buckled the belt to which he always kept ten pounds of lead weights attached. He picked up a sheath knife and began to strap it to his calf.

"Think some monster's gonna eat you?" Buck said, smiling.

"You never know, Bucky, and that's a fact." Brian slipped a pair of flippers on, spat in his face mask and rinsed it overboard. Then he sat on the side of the
boat, fit the mask over his face, put his mouthpiece in and flung himself backward into the water.

Buck watched until Brian had cleared his mask and, with a burst of bubbles, begun to recede downward into the gray-green gloom. Then he opened the padded box nestled before the console.

There were two full-face masks in Styrofoam beds inside the box. Each resembled half of the helmet of a space suit, and contained an air-regulator apparatus, a microphone and an earphone. On the back of each mask, secured by straps, was a small rubber-covered box about the size of a cigarette pack. It was this box that represented Buck's future.

What Buck had invented was an inexpensive, compact, self-contained underwater communications system. His was not the first device to allow divers to talk to one another underwater—he had no illusions about that—but all the existing systems had two major drawbacks: conversations had to be relayed through a receiver-transmitter on a boat or platform on the surface, and they cost several thousand dollars, which limited their use to commercial or scientific professionals. With Buck's system, two or three (or five or ten) divers could talk directly to one another, just like on a telephone conference call, and the devices could be manufactured for less than two hundred dollars apiece. The average sport diver spent well over a thousand dollars on equipment, so a couple of hundred more—especially for something exotic, glamorous and potentially lifesaving—amounted to nickels.

Buck had run the numbers so many times that by now they were burned into his memory: there were said to be about four million divers in the U.S. alone; if his system was mass-produced, its unit cost could be
halved; add another fifty bucks for distribution and advertising. If he went with an aggressive company that marked each unit up 200 percent, and if they sold units to a quarter of the divers in the U.S., and if he took a 10 percent gross royalty, he could be looking at thirty million dollars.

And all thanks to a chance discovery . . . no, that wasn't true, he didn't believe in chance, not after ten years of tinkering with video and sound systems in his father's garage. Anyway, it was all thanks to discovering a new combination of wires and transistors and relays.

Now all he had to do was make a decent three-minute video for the guys who were flying in from Oregon, with high-fidelity sound of him and Brian talking crystal-clear across fifty or a hundred feet of open water. And if the guys still weren't convinced, why, he'd bring them out here and let them try it themselves. That was another beautiful thing: the system was so simple it could be used by anybody. Even his brother.

"Bucky!" Brian burst from the water and grabbed the low bulwark on the stern of the boat. "There's a coffin down there!"

It took a moment for Brian's words to sink in. Then Buck said, "Bullshit, Brian . . . come on . . ."

"I swear! Either that or a treasure chest. You gotta come see it."

"Brian ... we been diving out here a thousand times. There's fishing boats, car wrecks, a tow barge, a bunch of barrels and the
Helen J.
There's no fuckin' coffin! There's no treasure chest. Besides, you wouldn't know a treasure chest if it up and—"

"There is now, Bucky. A big one, too . . . looks like it could be made of
bronze."

Brian was slow, but he didn't have much of an imagination, he didn't make up things. If there was a big chest down there, with something in it ...

"I wonder . . ." Buck said, ". . . that storm . . ."

"That's what I was thinkin'. Probably churned it up."

Buck reached over and helped Brian aboard. "Let's go for it," he said.

He rigged the masks and connected Brian's wires for him and reminded him of the procedures for clearing the faceplate. Then he mounted the video camera in its housing, attached a bracket that held two 250-watt lamps—for insurance if the water was dark, for fill light if it wasn't—and plugged the connector from the housing into his own mask. He ran a few seconds of tape of himself and Brian in the boat, then watched the playback through the viewfinder to make sure everything was working. The picture was sharp, the sound perfect.

They sat on either side of the boat and, on cue, flopped overboard.

Buck went down first, kicking as hard as he could and guiding himself with his free hand on the wire. The water was murky, and there was a moment when he found himself suspended in a green haze, unable to see either the surface or the bottom. He gripped the wire and stopped.

"Did you check the depth?" Buck's words reverberated hollowly in his mask,

"I didn't go all the way down," Brian said from a few feet up the wire. "I just went till I got a good look."

Buck heard each of Brian's words as clearly as if he were standing beside his brother on the surface. "Isn't the sound in this thing fabulous?" he said.

"You're at fifty now," said Brian. "Drop down another ten, twenty feet."

Buck exhaled and thrust downward with his legs, pushing the video camera in front of him.

What he saw first looked like a yellow-green blur in a pea-green murk; then, as he drew nearer, it took shape: a perfect rectangle, at least eight "feet long, maybe ten, and about four feet wide and four feet thick. When he was ten feet above it, Buck framed it in his viewfinder, turned on his lights and swam in a slow circle around it, taping as he went.

He heard Brian say, "Must be somethin' good if they bothered to buoy it."

"They didn't buoy it, they snagged it. Look there: that's some kinda sensor head caught underneath, between the thing and that rock." Buck swam closer. "I don't even think they know what they got."

"Then it could be
really
good."

"It could ... or it could be fuck-all . . . just some bronze somebody chucked overboard."

"Why'd anybody do that? You can sell bronze for good money."

" 'Cause people are assholes," Buck said. "Anyway, we won't know till we open it."