Peter Benchley's Creature Read Free Page B

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 asuccession 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