Peter Benchley's Creature

by Peter Benchley

  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.

  "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 downw
ard 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.