Peter Benchley's Creature (2 page)

The rush of fresh air, as a crewman opened the conning-tower hatch, smelled to Kruger as sweet as violets. He stood at the base of the ladder, holding a bar of soap, and savored the drops of rainwater that fell on his face.

The crewman scanned the horizon with binoculars, called out, "All clear!" and slid backward down the ladder.

Kruger climbed up, stepped over the lip of the bridge and descended the exterior ladder to the deck. Four crewmen followed him, scaling the ladders as nimbly as spiders. They gathered on the afterdeck, naked, and passed a bar of soap among them.

The rain was steady but soft, not wind driven, and the sea was slickly calm. The long, gentle ocean swell lifted the submarine so slowly that Kruger had no trouble keeping his footing. He walked forward to a flat stretch of deck, took off his clothes and spread them on the deck, hoping the rain would rinse the
stench from them. He lathered himself and spread his arms.

"Herr Doktor!"

Kruger dropped his arms and looked aft; the four naked crewmen were rushing up the ladder to the bridge.

"A plane! Hurry!" The last crewman on the ladder pointed at the sky, then kept climbing.

"A what?" Then, over the sound of his own voice, Kruger heard the drone of an engine. He looked in the direction the crewman had pointed; for a moment, he saw nothing. Then, against the lighter gray of the western clouds, there was a black speck skimming the wave tops and heading directly at him.

He scooped up his clothes and ran for the ladder. His foot hit something, some obstruction on the deck, and he sprawled forward onto his knees, scattering his clothes.

The drone of the plane's engine sounded closer; it had risen to a yowl.

Stunned by a sharp, hot pain that shot from his big toe up through his calf, Kruger abandoned his clothes and struggled to his feet. He glanced backward to see what he had hit; one of the deck plates just aft of the forward hatch looked warped, as if a weld had popped and sprung one of the plate's edges.

He began to climb the ladder.

The engine noise was deafening now, and Kruger ducked reflexively as the plane screamed overhead. He looked up as it began a long loop into the sky.

One of the crewmen leaned down from the bridge, reaching his hand out to Kruger, urging him on.

From somewhere inside the hull Kruger heard the klaxon for an emergency dive, and as he fell over the lip of the bridge and sought footing on the interior ladder, he felt the thrum of engines and a sensation of motion forward and down.

The hatch clanged shut above him, the crewman shimmied past him down the side of the ladder, and Kruger found himself standing on the bottom rung, naked, drenched, a film of soap running down his legs.

Hoffmann was bent over the periscope. "Pull the plug, Chief," he said, "we're taking her down."

Kruger said, "On the deck, one of the—"

"Periscope depth," the chief called. "E motors half speed."

Hoffmann spun the periscope ninety degrees. "Son of a
bitch
,"
he said. "The bastard's coming back."

"He didn't fire on us," Kruger said. "I think you—"

"He will this time; he was just making sure. He's not about to let a U-boat get across the Atlantic, war or no war. Forward down fifteen, aft down ten. Take her to a hundred meters."

Hoffmann slammed the wings of the periscope up and pushed the retractor button, and the gleaming steel tube slid downward. He glanced at Kruger, noted the stricken look on his face and said, "Don't worry, we're a needle in a haystack. Night's coming on, and the chances of his finding us—"

"Fifty meters!" called the chief.

"On the deck," Kruger said. "I saw a ... one of the pieces of metal . . . have you taken this boat to a hundred meters before?"

"Of course. Dozens of times."

"Seventy meters, Herr Kaleu!"

At seventy meters below the surface, there was nearly a hundred pounds of water pressure on every square inch of the submarine's hull. The boat had been designed to operate safely at more than twice that depth, and had done so many times. But when the forward deck plates had been removed to take on Kruger's cargo, one of the welders assigned to replace them had worked too hastily. A few superficial, inconsequential welds had failed during the shallow dives, but all the critical ones had held. Now, however, with thousands of tons of water squeezing the hull like a living fist, one gave way.

There was a noise forward, a resonant boom, and the boat lurched downward. Men were thrown from their seats; Kruger slammed into the ladder, bounced off and then grabbed it to keep from pitching down the passageway.

Hoffmann's feet skidded out from under him, and he clutched the periscope.

"Emergency surface!" he shouted. "Bring her up! All back full! Blow fore and aft!" He shot a glance at Kruger. "Did you dog the forward hatch?"

"I can't remem—"

There was another boom then as the forward hatch blew open, and a solid jet of water five feet high and three feet across blasted from the torpedo room through the petty officers' quarters. It rushed into the galley and the officers' wardroom.

"Ninety meters, Herr Kaleu!" a voice shrieked.

The boat continued down. Kruger suddenly felt weightless, as if he were in an elevator.

There were loud creaking noises; somewhere a pipe burst; there was a hiss of steam. The control room filled with the sour smell of sweat, then of urine, and, at last, of oil and feces.

Another boom, at two hundred meters.

Darkness. Screams. Wailing.

In the millisecond before he died, Ernst Kruger reached a hand forward, toward the torpedo room, toward the future.

4

THE submarine sank swiftly. It plummeted, bow first, to a thousand feet. There, well beyond its test depth, the pressure hull finally gave way, in a dozen places at once. Air rushed from ruptures of torn metal, the boat shuddered and torqued. Its hydrodynamics destroyed, it began to tumble.

Down, down it went, passing through two thousand feet, then five thousand. And with every thirty-three feet another fifteen pounds of water pressure forced the hull, rushed into tiny pockets of residual air and crushed them like grapes. At ten thousand feet, more than two tons of water pressed against every square millimeter of steel, and the last scintilla of air popped from the shattered hulk and drifted upward in the darkness.

The submarine descended as if it were a discarded soda can, until finally it struck a mountainside, bounced and rolled in slow motion, throwing clouds of unseen silt and dislodging boulders that accompanied it into a stygian canyon. There, at last, it came to a halt, a heap of twisted steel.

*    *    *

In the rubble of the bow, the huge box, cast of bronze, sealed with rubber, denied penetration to the seeking sea.

The silt settled, time passed. Legions of infinitesimal organisms that patrolled the abyss consumed what was edible.

Calm returned to the ocean bottom, and the relentless cycle of life and death went on.

PART TWO

1996

LATITUDE 26 DEGREES NORTH

LONGITUDE 45 DEGREES WEST

5

ABSOLUTE darkness is rare on earth. Even on a moonless night, with clouds hiding the stars, the loom of civilization glows against the sky.

In the deep oceans, absolute darkness is commonplace. Rays of the sun, thought for millennia to be the sole source of life on earth, can penetrate less than half a mile of seawater. Nearly three quarters of the planet—vast plains, great canyons, mountain ranges that rival the Himalayas—are shrouded in perpetual black, broken occasionally by bioluminescent organisms that sparkle with predatory or reproductive intent.

Two submersibles hovered side by side like alien crabs—white-bodied, brilliant-eyed. The two five-thousand-watt lights mounted on their concave snouts cast a path of gold some two hundred feet in front of them.

"Four thousand meters," one of the pilots said into his radio. "The pass should be dead-ahead. I'm going in."

"Roger that," the other pilot replied. "I'm right behind you."

Propellers turned simultaneously as electric motors were engaged, and the first submersible moved slowly ahead.

Inside the steel capsule—only ten feet long and six feet across—David Webber half lay, half crouched beside the pilot and pressed his face to a six-inch porthole as the lamps picked up steep gray escarpments of dirt and rock that seemed to go on forever, as if descending from nowhere above to nowhere below.

Four thousand meters, Webber thought. Thirteen thousand feet of water, more or less. Two and a half miles. All that water above him, all that pressure around him. How much pressure? Incalculable. But certainly enough to turn him into a Pudding Pop.

Don't think about it, he told himself. If you think about it, you'll go apeshit. And this is not a good time or place to go apeshit. You need the work, you need the money. Just get the job done and get the hell out of here.

A few drops of condensation dripped from the overhead, landed on his neck, and he jumped.

The pilot glanced at him and laughed. "Wish I'd have seen it coming," he said. "I'd have screamed along with you, made you think we were buying the farm." He grinned. "I like to do that to first-timers, watch 'em go goggle-eyed."

"Nice," Webber said. "I'd have sent you my cleaning bill." He shivered and crossed his arms to rub his shoulders. It had been 85 degrees on the surface, and he had been sweating in his wool pullover, wool socks and corduroy trousers. But in the three hours it had taken them to descend, the temperature had dropped more than fifty degrees. He was freezing. He was still sweating, but now it was from fear.

"What's the water temperature out there?" he asked, not from genuine curiosity but because there was comfort in conversation.

"Thirty, thirty-two," the pilot said. "Cold enough to pucker your dickie, that's for sure."

Webber turned back to his porthole and rested a hand on the controls of one of the four cameras he had installed in movable housings bolted to the skin of the submersible. The boat was skimming the side of a canyon wasteland, an endless terrain of monochromatic rubble that looked less inviting than the surface of the moon. He kept reminding himself that his and the pilot's were the first human eyes ever to see this landscape, and his lenses would be the first to record it on film.

"Hard to believe things actually live down here," he said.

"Oh, yeah, there's things, but nothing like you've ever seen. There's albino critters and things with no eyes—I mean, talk about tits on a bull, what good's eyes gonna do 'em here? There's transparent things— shit, there's life of some kind damn near everywhere. 'Course, I can't speak for the
bottom
bottom, like thirty-five thousand feet. I never been down there. But, sure, there's life all around here. What's got everybody in an uproar is the idea that some kinds of life actually
begin
here."

"Yeah," Webber said. "So I hear. They're calling it chemosynthesis."

Chemosynthesis, that was the point, the reason he was here. Here, freezing his ass off two miles down in the sea, in an utter, impenetrable blackness.

Chemosynthesis: the generation of life without light; the concept that living things could be created by chemicals alone. Fascinating. Revolutionary. Undocumented.

To discover evidence that chemosynthesis was possible, to record that evidence, to prove its existence beyond all reasonable doubt—this was his assignment, a photographer's dream. A freelancer on contract to
National Geographic,
Webber was to take the first pictures ever of deep-ocean vents in the recently discovered Kristof Trench, at the bottom of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge just west of the Azores. These vents, like pustulant sores on the skin of the earth, spewed out molten rock from the bowels of the planet into the icy water. The vents themselves were mini-volcanoes, but they were believed to harbor life forms that had been created by, and fed from, the chemicals the vents emitted. In other words, chemosynthesis. Life forms created chemically, and which did not need—did not know, could be born and live and die without—sunlight.

He had been chosen for the assignment over several of his peers because he was celebrated for possessing great ingenuity with his cameras, his lenses and his housings; and also because of his youth and his courage. He had accepted the assignment partly for the money, partly for the credit in the magazine, but mostly for the thrill of being the first to prove that this oddity of science really could occur in the sea, in nature.

He hadn't thought of fear; he considered himself inured to fear. Over the past fifteen years, he had lived through three plane crashes, an attack by a wounded lioness, bites from sharks and moray eels, scorpion stings and infestation by a
succession of exotic parasites and amoebas that had caused, among other inconveniences, the temporary loss of all body hair and the sloughing of the skin from his tongue and penis.

He was accustomed, in short, to surprises, to the bizarre tricks nature could throw at him.

What he hadn't suspected, had not even imagined and was amazed to discover in just the past few hours, was that he had become a claustrophobe.

When did this happen? And why? Blundering around blindly in an underwater mountain range deeper than the Rockies were high, with his survival dependent on the skills of some laid-back sub jockey at the helm of a minuscule capsule that had probably been welded together by the lowest bidder, Webber felt unwell: suffocated, compressed, imprisoned, ill.

Why hadn't he listened to his girlfriend and taken the other assignment instead? He'd be much happier in the Coral Sea, shooting close-ups of poisonous sea snakes. At least there he'd have some control; if things got hairy, he could just get out of the water.

But, no, he had to have the glory of being the first.

Asshole.

"How much farther?" he asked, eager for his voice to distract him from the sounds of his own heart.