Peter Benchley's Creature (21 page)

"How long can they stay down?" asked Max.

"About ten minutes on each dive," Amanda said. "Not as long as the whales, but they can dive over and over again, and they can go to six or seven hundred feet."

"Deeper than a person."

"Much. And they don't have to decompress, they don't get bends, don't get embolisms."

From the flying bridge, Chase said, "You want the boat to follow them?"

"No, we'll stay here. I don't want the whales to think the boat's chasing them. You can shut the engine off if you want. The ladies know where we are."

"But how can you be sure the sea lions will come back?" Max asked.

"Because they always have," Amanda said, and she smiled.

Chase came down from the flying bridge, turned off the engine and took a glass from a cabinet in the galley. "Come on," he said to Max. "Let's see if we can get lucky."

"Where to?"

"These aren't breeding grounds, and humpbacks usually sing only on their breeding grounds. But maybe, just maybe, we can hear a little concert."

He led Max below, into the forward cabin. He lifted a corner of the carpet and rolled it back a few feet, then dropped to his knees and put an ear to the cold fiberglass deck, motioning Max to do the same.

"What do you hear?" Chase asked.

"Water," Max said, "sort of slopping around, and . . . wait!" His eyes widened. "Yeah, I do! But it's really weak."

"Here," Chase said, and he lifted Max's head and placed the bottom of the glass under his ear, the open bell against the deck. "Better?"

Max grinned, and Chase knew what he was hearing: the ghostly hoots and avian chirrups, the whistles and tweets, the lovely, lilting conversation between leviathans.

"Cool!" Max said, beaming.

"It sure is," said Chase, and he thought: being a father is too.

The whales passed a few hundred yards to the east of the boat and continued on their way. Gradually their sounds faded until, at last, even with the glass, Max could hear only faint echoes. He and Chase went topside and opened the cooler Mrs. Bixler had packed for them.

The first of the sea lions returned after half an hour.

They were sitting in the stern, eating, when they heard a bark and looked over the stern and saw the animal ride a little swell onto the swimstep.

"Hello, Groucho," Amanda said.

Chase shook his head. "I don't know how you can tell."

"Live with them night and day for three years, you'd be able to tell, too."

The sea lion raised itself up onto its long rear flipper and heaved itself through the door in the transom.

As Amanda removed the camera and harness, the sea lion barked excitedly and swung its head from side to side.

"What's she saying?" asked Max.

"She's telling me what she saw," Amanda said. "You know, like, 'Hey, Mom, get a load of this!' "

Chase said, "And what do you think she saw?"

Amanda held up the camera. "We'll look at the tapes on the way in," she said. "As soon as the others come back, we can try to catch up with the whales again." Then she said to Max, "Why don't you give Groucho some fish while I dry this off and reload it?"

Max lifted a hatch in the afterdeck, brought out a bucket of mullet and dangled a fish before the sea lion. It didn't snap at the fish, didn't lunge for it, just extended its neck, accepted the fish and seemed to inhale it.

The second sea lion, Chico, returned ten minutes later, the third, Harpo, a few minutes after that. Max fed them both, and when they had eaten, they waddled across the deck and lay down in a heap with Groucho, and the three of them slept in the sun.

Amanda checked her watch; Chase knew this was the tenth time in the past five minutes. Then she shaded her eyes and looked out over the flat water, straining to see any movement on the surface.

"You said they can keep diving all day," he said.

"They can. But they don't, especially after a workout like they had with the sharks." She looked at her watch again. "None of them has ever stayed out for two hours. They're trained to come back in under an hour. Besides, they
want
to: they get tired, hungry." She frowned. "Particularly Zeppo. She's the lazy one. She's late. Very late."

"Maybe she just decided to take off."

"Not a chance," Amanda said flatly.

"I don't know how you can be so certain. She's a—"

"They're
my
animals," she snapped.

Chase raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, and said, "Sorry."

"Where are the binoculars?"

"There's a set up top and a set down below."

Amanda started to climb the ladder to the flying bridge.

"We can go look for her," Chase said.

"No, she knows where we are. We're staying here till she comes back."

If,
Chase found himself thinking.
If.

25

AS it had moved into deeper water, scouring the sloping sands in search of things to kill, the membranes in its head had sensed new sounds—unfamiliar, high-pitched, far away. It had tracked the sounds, feeling them grow ever louder and more pronounced.

Finally, in water that had lost its gray-green gloom and become clear blue, it had come upon the sources of the sounds: animals larger than it had ever seen, certainly too large to attack, dim shadows that rose and fell with ease, showing no vulnerability, no fear.

It had been about to turn away, to resume its hunt elsewhere, when it had noticed other things among the large animals: smaller, quicker things, things that might be prey. It had waited in the distance, moving just enough to keep pace.

Once, one of the new things had wandered close, and it had tried to catch it from behind—lunging forward with swift kicks and sweeping strokes—but the thing had sensed its approach and had fled, too fast to pursue.

Eventually, it had fallen behind, and soon the living things were out of sight, leaving only a tantalizing trail of sounds.

Now it hovered in midwater, its eyes glowing like white-hot coals as they probed the fathomless blue.

A sudden pressure wave startled it; it looked up, and it saw a black blur receding upward toward the light: one of the smaller living things had returned, swooping by and continuing on its way.

Instantly alert, it willed adrenaline into its veins and lactic acid into its musculature. It stayed as still as possible, moving its limbs barely enough to keep from falling.

Another animal passed by, slowing briefly but not stopping.

It did not give chase, sensing that any attempt at pursuit would be futile. It waited, feeling strength suffuse its body.

Another animal appeared, and this one came close, circling slowly and gazing curiously.

The creature hung motionless, wanting to appear harmless, dead.

The animal drew closer, shaking its head, expelling a stream of tiny bubbles.

The creature waited . . . and waited . . . and then there came an instant when the neurons in its brain formed a conclusion that possibility had become opportunity.

It struck, lashing out with steel claws. The claws found softness. They plunged deep into adipose flesh and curled in upon one another, fashioning a grip.

The other arm sprang forward, and its claws, too, found pinguid tissue.

The animal lurched backward. Its mouth opened with an explosion of bubbles. Its appendages thrashed, its body contorted as it struggled upward.

The creature expected the animal to retaliate, to defend itself, but it did not. Now the creature knew that the animal was an alien here, could not survive here, so success could be achieved simply by holding it here.

After a few moments, the animal stopped struggling. Its head lolled, and blood gushed from its torn flesh.

The creature began to feed. The animal was covered with a thick layer of fat—nourishing, energizing, warming fat—and so it was positively buoyant, it would not sink. Predator and prey were bonded together in still suspension.

As it ate, its peripheral vision detected other animals—larger animals, predators—attracted by the scent of blood and oil drifting in the current.

It surrounded its food arid consumed it ravenously.

Most of the animal was edible. Bones fell away into the abyss, and were surrounded by scavengers; bits of flesh escaped and were swarmed upon by schools of little fish. There was a hard inedible object, which the creature tore free and cast away. It floated upward, toward the surface.

26

"HOW long till dark?" Amanda asked. She sat on the bulwarks, stroking the heads of the three sea lions.

The late-day sun cast long shadows on the sea, and as she turned her head, Chase saw shadows on her face as well—in the lines of grief that etched the skin beneath her eyes.

"An hour," he said, "but we don't need light to get back. We can stay here all night if you want."

"No," she said softly. "There's no point."

They had not talked much during the past couple of hours; they had sat and watched until their eyes were red with strain and fatigue. Max had tried to entertain the three sea lions, had tried to feed them, but they seemed to sense something was wrong, and they had refused to respond.

Chase had offered no more theories, though he had one. Theories wouldn't help, especially if the one he harbored was correct.

"Okay," he said finally. He stood up and looked to the west, at the silhouette of Block Island. They had drifted at least two miles. He walked forward to start the engine as Tall Man climbed to the flying bridge. "It could've been the white shark," Amanda said, as if continuing an interrupted conversation.

Chase started, for that had been his theory, the only one that made sense. The sea lions had escaped from the shark before, but they had been near the refuge of the boat. Alone in the open ocean, a sea lion—especially one tired and distracted—might well be ambushed by a big, fast great white shark.

"Yeah," he said. "It could've." He pushed the starter button and flicked the switch that turned on the boat's running lights. He rapped the overhead with his knuckles, to tell Tall Man to head for home.

"Maybe the others picked up something," Amanda said. "Let's look at their tapes."

As Tall Man swung the boat around to the west, Amanda took a video monitor from one of her boxes, placed it on the table in the cabin and switched it on. She connected a VCR to the monitor and inserted one of the tapes. When she had rewound it, she pushed the "play" button, and sat on the bench seat. Max sat across the table from her; Chase stood at the end of the table.

She fast-forwarded through a couple of minutes of blank ocean blue, then slowed the tape as the first image of a whale came onto the screen.

"The whale looks so small," Max said.

"It's a wide-angle lens," said Amanda. "It has to be, or all you'd see would be a lot of shots of blubber."

As they watched, the whale grew until it filled the frame.

"How close is she now?" asked Max.

"Sixty, seventy feet. She'll close in, then she'll stop at about thirty feet."

The image continued to grow, traveling along the side of the whale, passing an enormous fin, then slowing as it reached the head. When the eye came into view, Amanda pushed the "pause" button, and the image froze.

"Look at that eye," she said to Max. "Tell me that's not an intelligent being."

"It's different from a shark's eye,"' Max said. "It's ... I don't know . . . just different. Not as flat."

"Richer, deeper." Amanda smiled, enthusiasm for the moment erasing her loss. "You know why? Humpbacks have a brain the size of a basketball. They say the eye is the mirror of the soul. Well, there's a heck of a soul behind that eye."

She pushed the "play" button, and the image moved again.

There were shots of the whale from all angles, as the sea lion had swooped around it, playing with it, riding in its slipstream. The whale had ignored the sea lion, never altering its predestined course.

Amanda fast-forwarded through ten or fifteen minutes of tape, until through the jiggly scan lines she saw the whale begin to undulate more vigorously and plunge into a deep dive. She slowed the tape then and watched the image grow dimmer as the sea lion had followed the whale down into the benthic darkness.

When the whale was no more than a dark blob against the inky blueness, the camera angle suddenly swung upward and rushed toward the light far above.

"She broke off," Amanda said, "I'd guess at about five hundred feet."

The tape ended, and she replaced it with another.

The second sea lion had followed a large female humpback, and as the image on the screen grew, Max suddenly shouted, "Look! A baby!"

A calf, probably twenty feet long, was nestled under its mother's left pectoral flipper,

"They always ride there," Amanda said.

"Why?" asked Max.

"Partly to learn. Watch, you'll see that he does everything she does, imitates every move."

Indeed, the calf duplicated exactly his mother's every movement. When she rose to breathe, he breathed; when she dove, he dove; when she rolled on her side to look up at the sea lion, he rolled with her.

"See her looking?" Amanda said. "She's protecting him, too. If there's a big shark around, we'll see her snuggle him really close and get pretty agitated. She'll probably take him down into the deep."

But the mother didn't get upset. Evidently satisfied with her identification of the sea lion, she rolled back onto a level plane and continued her leisurely journey near the surface.

"Nothing," Amanda said, and she fast-forwarded through the rest of the tape.

Two minutes into the third tape, Amanda laughed and said, "This is Harpo's."

"How can you tell?" Max said.

"She's a chicken. Look"—she pointed at the screen—"she comes up behind a whale, and as soon as the tail flukes flap, she skitters away." The image on the screen went to empty blue, broke the surface and angled down onto another whale. "It takes her about ten minutes to figure out that they're not gonna eat her. She's learning, she's just not as quick as the others. They've all got quirks."