White Shark

by Benchley-Peter

  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 zeroes 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 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 here," 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 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 two 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 treasu
re 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 not 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?" Bucks 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 soemthin’ 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."

  "You're gonna open it?"

  "Think of the tape, Brian. Even if the guys from Oregon jerk us around, think of the tape we'll get. First guys to open a long-lost bronze box. I tell you, we can sell it to Eyewitness News for... who knows how much?"

  "But suppose there's a body in it. That wouldn't be—"

  "There's no body, unless it's King Kong himself. Look at the size of the damn thing. It must've fallen off a ship, probably something valuable, too, if they took the trouble to case it in bronze." Buck turned off the camera and let himself drift down to the sand bottom. He steadied himself, adjusted the lamps, the focus f the lens. "Okay, Brian, swim down to it and sit on it so I can take your picture, show how big it is."

  "I don't know..." Brian hesitated, kicking slowly to maintain a position six or eight feet above the box.

  "C'mon, Brian... don't you want to be famous?"

  14

  In the sealed box the ambient pressure was constant, but in the electromagnetic field nearby, there was a change. It sensed this. There was life nearby, life of size and substance.

  And then a sound — though it did not recognize sound as sound but only as a miniscule compression of the tympanic membranes on either side of its head.

  Then the sound stopped.

  It was ravenous with hunger. When all the nourishment it had derived from the meal it had had in the alien and threatening surroundings above had been used up, it had left its box and hunted.

  It had found that there was no food here. It had emerged and sought to feed on some of the countless tiny animals to which it had become accustomed, but had found nothing. Confused, it had swum up and down the water column, seeking life — any life — that would give it sustenance.

  It had seen living things, but they had been too swift, too wary, too elusive. It had struck one or two, but been unable to catch them.

  Increasingly desperate, driven by signals that it knew only as need, it had swum further afield.

  It had found food —some, not much, barely enough to maintain life.

  There had been a small thing that had suddenly appeared above, thrashing in panic, and it had grabbed the thing and taken it down and consumed it, collecting indigestibles — fur and gristle — in the side of its mouth, like a cud, and then spitting them out.

  There had been a larger thing, almost as large as itself, also above, not at home here, and it had seized it form below and dragged it down and tried to consume it. But it had been too big to consume at once, and the uneaten part had drifted away. It had followed the body until a wave had carried it out of the water, out of range.

  Then another living thing, slow and clumsy, had fallen into the water, almost within its grasp, but had escaped.

  Its programming told it that it must hunt soon, and successfully, or surely it would cease to exist.

  It knew there was a living thing nearby now.

  It would eat it.

  15

  "Straddle the box," Buck said, "like a horse."

  "I can't, it's too wide."

  "Then sit sidesaddle. Pose for me. Pretend you're in Playgirl."

  Tentatively, awkwardly, Brian swung his legs over the side of the box. To steady himself against the current, with one hand he gripped the heavy black wire that led up to the surface.

  He's spooked, Buck thought as he watched Brian through the viewfinder. In another minute, he's gonna bolt for the boat. To distract him, Buck asked, "How's your air?"

  Brian reached for his gauge, raised it to his mask. "Fifteen hundred. How long we been down?"

  "We got another ten, fifteen minutes anyway."

  Brian leaned over the edge of the box and ran his hand along the lip of the lid. "How you gonna open the thing?" he said. "Don't look to be a latch anywheres."

  "If we have to, we'll go up and get a pry bar."

  "S'pose it's alive in there... a specimen, like."

  Buck laughed. "That box coulda been here years. What the hell could be alive?" He finished shooting, turned off the camera and let it hang from the thong around his wrist. "Now, let's see if we can crack that sucker open."

  Brian slid down off the box, and as he landed, his flippers disturbed the fine sand, kicking up a cloud of milky silt. He saw something fly upward in the cloud, then settle again a few feet away. "What's that?" he said.

  "What'd you see?" asked Buck, and he kicked slowly over toward Brian.

  Brian dropped to his knees and ran his fingers along the surface of the sand until they touched something solid. He picked it up and looked at it. "A bone," he said.

  "What kinda bone?"

  Brian held it up. It was about five inches long, and curved. "Looks like a rib bone. I dunno what from."

  "Size of it, I'd say a dog."

  "What's a dog bone doing down here?"

  "Beats me," said Buck. "See if there's any more."

  He dropped down beside Brian and together they began to dig.

  * * * * *

  It sensed faint sounds from the sand nearby.

  Prey.

  It felt for the release button. It pressed the button. Slowly the lid began to rise.

  * * * * *

  "Look here," Buck was saying. "A jawbone. It's a dog for sure, and something ate it." He
held up the jaw and pointed to the slashes in the bone. "Tooth marks."

  Buck saw something dark in the ashy silt, and he reached for it. It was round and blackish and hard, roughly the size of a plum. He ran his fingers over its surface, first one way then the other. "I'll be damned, Brian, it's a fur ball... like what a cat pukes up."

  Buck rose to his feet and took a step backward. He raised the camera and switched it on. "Two shots, Brian, then we're gone," he said. "Hold up a couple bones and the fur ball. You can go back up to the boat if you want, while I open the box."

  * * * * *

  It swam out of the box and landed on the sand. Because its body contained no air spaces, it was not weightless in water, it was negatively buoyant: it would sink. But because, like all of its kind, its chemical composition was more than ninety percent water, it was only a few pounds negative. It could hover with almost no effort, and — thanks to the webbing on its extremities — it could swim very fast, it could actually fly through the water.

  Now it propelled itself off the bottom and veered toward one end of the box.

  * * * * *

  Buck had composed a perfect shot. Brian filled the frame, on his knees, holding two bones in one hand and the fur ball in the other, all nicely contrasted against the white sand. Buck pushed the “record” button.

  "Good job, Brian," he said. "Now smile, like you're selling something in a commercial." He saw Brian try to smile, then look up at the camera.