Peter Benchley's Creature Read Online Free PDF Page A

enormous hole in the deck. "She imploded."
    The deck plates were bent inward, their edges curled as if struck by a giant hammer.
    As Webber shot a picture, he felt sweat running down his sides; he imagined the moment, half a century before, when the men on this boat suddenly knew they were going to die. He could imagine the roar of rushing water, the screams, the confusion, the panic, the pressure, the suffocation, the agony. "Christ . . ." he said.
    The pilot put the motor in gear, and the submersible inched forward. Its lights reached into the hole, illuminating a skein of wires, a tangle of pipes, a . . .
    "Hey!" Webber shouted.
    "What?"
    "There's something in there. Something big. It looks . . . I don't know . . ."
    The pilot maneuvered the submersible above the hole, tilted the bow down and, using the claws on the ends of the articulate arms, tore away the wires and pushed aside the pipes. He angled the lights into a single five-thousand-watt beam and shone it straight down into the hole. "I'll be damned. . . ."
    "It looks like a box," Webber said as he watched the lights dance over the greenish-yellow surface of a perfect rectangle. "A chest."
    "Yeah, or a coffin." The pilot paused, reconsidering. "No. Too big for a coffin."
    For a long moment, neither of them spoke. They just stared at the box—wondering, imagining.
    At last, Webber said, "We ought to bring it up."
    "Yeah." The pilot nodded. "The only question is how. The bastard's gotta be eight feet long. I bet it weighs a ton. I can't lift it with this boat."
    "How about both boats together?'"
    "No, we can't lift a thousand pounds apiece, and I'm just guessing. It could be a lot more than that. We couldn't. . ." He stopped. "Just a sec. I think they've got five miles of cable in the hold of that ship up there. If they can weight an end of it and send it down, and if we can get a sling around the box, maybe . . . there's a chance. . . ." He pushed a button and spoke into his microphone.

    It took the two submersibles nearly an hour to retrieve the weighted cable sent down from the mother ship and to secure the box in a wire sling. By the time they gave the ship the order to begin lifting, they were pushing the limits of their air supply. And so, as soon as they made sure that the box was free of the submarine's hull and was rising steadily, they shed ballast and began their own ascent.
    Webber felt exhausted and elated and challenged, impatient to get to the surface, open the box and see what was inside.
    "You know something weird?" he said as he watched the depth gauge record their meter-by-meter progress up toward daylight.
    "This whole thing's weird," the pilot said. "You thinking of something in particular?"
    "That wreckage. All of it was covered by silt. Everything had a gray film on it... except the box. It was clean. That's probably why I saw it. It stood out."
    The pilot shrugged. "Does silt stick to bronze? Beats me."

    7

    "I DON'T believe this!" Webber said. "Metallurgists, archaeologists, chemists . . . who gives a shit? All that counts is what's inside! What are they thinking of?"
    "Yeah, well, you know bureaucrats," the pilot said, trying to be sympathetic. "They sit around with their thumb up their ass all day, and now, suddenly, they got something to do, they gotta justify their existence."
    They were standing on the stern of the ship as it steamed westward toward Massachusetts. The box was secured on a cradle on the fantail, and Webber had spent hours mounting lights on the ship's superstructure to create a suitable atmosphere of mystery, for when the box was opened. He had chosen sunset, photographers' "magic hour," when shadows were long and the light soft, rich and dramatic.
    And then, not half an hour before he was to begin shooting, the ship's captain had handed him a fax marked "Urgent" from the Geographic: he was to leave the box untouched and unopened until the ship reached port, so that a cadre of scientists and historians could meet the