Benchley, Peter - Novel 08 Page 25

  “It’s Architeuthis.” Talley said. “Smell the ammonia. He left us his calling card.” He turned off the camera.

  “Don’t other things stink of ammonia?” Darling asked.

  “Not like Architeuthis does, Captain. It’s his signature, and it’s the main reason we know anything about him. Nobody has seen a live one, not in this century, except for one that killed some people in the 1940s, and that was in the dark and they never really saw it. But people have seen dead ones; two washed up off Newfoundland in the sixties. The reason they washed up instead of sinking—they’re not like fish, they don’t have swim bladders—is that their flesh is full of ammonium ions, and the specific gravity of ammonium ions is slightly less than that of seawater. It’s one-point-oh-one against one-point-oh-two-two, if you care. I saw the dead ones, Captain, and they didn’t just smell of ammonia, they reeked of it.” Talley turned to Manning and grinned. “It’s him, Osborn. He’s here, no question. We’ve found him.”

  “Listen, Doc,” Darling said, “either you’re crazy or you’ve been holding out on us. You can’t catch a giant squid on a hook. You can’t catch him with a submarine. So how in Christ’s name do you plan to catch him?”

  Talley said, “Living things are driven by two primal instincts, Captain, isn’t that correct? The first one is hunger. What’s the other?”

  Darling looked at Sharp, who shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Sex?”

  “Yes,” Talley said, “sex. I intend to capture the giant squid with sex.”

  45

  TALLEY HAD NUMBERED his cases, and had included detailed descriptions of their contents in the customs manifest. Now he consulted the manifest and, with the help of Sharp and Darling, sorted the cases and arranged them on the afterdeck in a precise order.

  Manning stood aside, and stared out at the water. To Darling, he seemed to be reducing himself to a single core, with a single purpose, stripping away the layers of social conditioning and leaving only a naked compulsion to kill. Darling had known people like Manning in the past, people who had lost all regard for safety; there was nothing more dangerous on a boat.

  When Talley was satisfied with the arrangement of his cases, he beckoned Darling and Sharp over to a long aluminum box the size of a coffin, which was secured with snap locks. He undid the locks and lifted the lid. “Admit it,” he said proudly. “Isn’t this the sexiest thing you ever saw?”

  Cushioned in foam rubber was what looked to Darling like a six-foot-long bowling pin, made of one of the new plastics and painted bright red. Hundreds of tiny stainless-steel hooks hung from swivels all over it, and a three-inch stainless ring was embedded in its top.

  Talley lifted the thing by the ring and passed it to Darling. It couldn’t have weighed more than ten pounds, and when Darling tapped it, he heard a hollow sound.

  “I give up,” Darling said simply, and he handed the thing to Sharp.

  “It’s genius, pure and simple,” Talley said.

  “Obviously,” said Sharp. “But what kind of genius?”

  Talley took the thing from Sharp and put a hand on either end and held it up before him. “Think of this,” he said, “as the main body, the head and torso, what we call the mantle, of Architeuthis. As a general rule, the body of a giant squid—whatever its species, whether it’s dux, japonica or sanctipauli—constitutes about a third of its total length. So this represents an animal whose total length, counting the tentacles and whips, would be about eighteen or twenty feet.”

  “A baby,” Sharp said. “A squirt.”

  “Not necessarily. In any case, that’s not important; the sex drive doesn’t notice size. Even if our animal is, as I think it is, four or five times as big as this thing, its impulse will be to breed with this. If the beast is a male, it will want to deposit sperm in here; if it’s a female, it will want its eggs fertilized.”

  “Why the hell would it want to do anything with a piece of plastic?” Darling asked.

  “That’s where the genius comes in.” Talley began to unscrew the steel ring. “I’ve spent years developing a chemical that perfectly replicates the breeding attractant of Architeuthis. Over time, I’ve been able to collect tissue samples from two dead specimens. I removed the oviduct from a large female that had stranded in Nova Scotia, and then two years ago I heard that part of the mantle of a male had washed up on Cape Cod. By the time I got there, there wasn’t much left; birds and crabs had been working on it. But part of it had been buried in the sand and protected, and I was able to recover the entire spermatophoral sac. It was over three feet long. For months, I analyzed both parts, male and female, with microscopes and spectrographs and computers. Finally, I was able to synthesize the chemical trigger.”

  “You’re positive?” Darling said. “Have you ever tried it?”

  “In the field? No. But in the laboratory, yes. It makes perfect sense scientifically. I won’t burden you with the specifics of the science, but just as a dog in heat emits a musk, just as human beings respond to testosterone and the pheromones and all our other hormonal signals, a giant squid responds to chemicals released by others of its species during a period similar to what we mammals call estrus.” He put his finger in the hole left by the steel ring. “A vial of liquid poured in here and diluted with seawater will seep out through tiny holes behind each hook. It will create a spoor that will travel for miles. Architeuthis will perceive that one of its kind is ready for breeding, and it will be a call of Nature that the beast won’t be able to resist.”

  “Won’t he know it’s a phony?” Sharp asked.

  “No. There’s almost no light down there, remember, so it doesn’t depend on its eyes for much. We know it can change colors, but we don’t know if it can see colors, so just to be on the safe side I painted the surrogate red, which we know is one of the colors of excitation. And the surrogate’s shape is correct. We’ll hang chemical lights beside it, so in case the animal is accustomed to using its eyes for confirmation, they should cast enough of a glow to be convincing.” Talley paused. “It may be overkill,” he said. “The spoor might work if I let it leak out of a bottle. But making the lure the right shape and the right color didn’t cost much and can’t hurt. When you play cards with the unknown, it’s good to hold as many trumps as you can.”

  “Okay,” Darling said. “So he comes and screws the bejesus out of this thing. Then what?”

  “The beast has eight arms and two whips, and it will wrap all of them around the object. It will press its body to it.” Talley flipped a few of the little hooks, and they tinkled. “Each one of these will set into its flesh—not enough to alarm it, certainly not enough to cause it pain. But when it tries to get away, it won’t be able to. That’s when we bring it up, just close enough on the surface for me to take pictures of it, and for Osborn to kill it. Then I’ll cut some specimens.” Talley looked from Sharp to Darling, and smiled.

  “Well, one thing’s for sure,” Darling said. “By the time he gets up here, that’s gonna be one pissed-off squid.”

  “I don’t think so. I think it will be concerned with only one thing: survival. The rapid change in water temperature may stun it, the change in pressure may kill it before it reaches the surface. It may be so exhausted it can’t respire. But whatever happens,” Talley said, turning and gesturing at Manning, “that’s when Osborn takes over.”

  Manning acknowledged Talley with a curt nod, and gestured with his rifle.

  “You know what scares me?” Darling said. “You’re too sure of all this. I’ve seen too many perfect plans go ass-upwards.” He turned to Sharp. “Marcus, I’m damn glad we built ourselves that bomb.”

  “You won’t need explosives, Captain,” Talley said. “You’ll see.”

  “I hope so. But from what I’ve seen, this is not a critter to underestimate.”

  It took them more than three hours to set Talley’s rig, which was a masterpiece of complexity, involving thousands of feet of rope, hundreds of feet of cable and a low-light surveillance video ca
mera housed in a Plexiglas sphere the size of a fortune-teller’s crystal ball. Talley hadn’t realized that objects on long lines underwater tend to spin unpredictably, and had mistakenly assumed that his camera would hang beside the lure and focus on it, so Darling had to fetch his chain saw from below and find a two-by-four, cut it and lash it between the camera and the lure as a connecting brace.

  “How long does the camera run for?” Darling asked as Talley plugged the power cord into the battery pack.

  “The tape is a hundred twenty minutes long,” Talley said, “and the lithium battery in the base will run camera and lights for all of that. But we won’t turn it on and leave it—a timer will set it off for one minute every five minutes. Or, I can turn it on whenever I choose from up here.”

  It was twilight when at last the rig was ready. The wind had died, and the sea was a meadow of steely swells.

  Sharp watched a pair of gulls wheel over the stern, looking for an offering of bread or baitfish, and then fly off. As his gaze followed them toward the sunset, he saw something in the distance, something on the surface of the sea. At first he thought he was seeing the splashes of diving birds, but they didn’t act like splashes: They lasted too long, and the water flew too high, more like spray. Then he knew.

  “Look, Whip,” he said, pointing. “Whales.”

  “Nice,” Darling said. “At least there’s some left.”

  “What are they, humpbacks?”

  “No. Sperm whales. Humpbacks don’t linger like that, they keep moving. Sperm whales always gather at twilight, I don’t know why, maybe to get together for a gam.”

  Talley looked at the whales, then cupped his hands together and shouted at them, “Go away!”

  Darling laughed. “What’ve you got against whales, Doc?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I just don’t want them to scare off Architeuthis. They eat squid, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Darling said. “I don’t know anything God ever made that would scare that beast away. Whales aren’t as stupid as us—they know when to leave well enough alone.”

  Talley went into the cabin, and by the time he came back, the whales had sounded, and the sea had closed over them.

  In his hands Talley held a six-ounce vial of clear liquid. At Talley’s direction, Darling and Sharp held the lure upright and poured in buckets of seawater. Then Talley unscrewed the cap from the vial, and he held it out to them. “For science,” he said.

  Darling hesitated, then shrugged and said, “What the hell … it’s not every day I get to sniff a randy squid.” He held Talley’s wrist and put his nose to the vial—and felt as if the lining of his nose had caught fire. His eyes watered, his stomach heaved; he staggered backward, coughing.

  Talley laughed and said, “What do you make of it?”

  “Make of it!” Darling choked. “Holy shit! Ammonia, sulfur … that stuff the freaks use to give their hearts a trumpeting—amyl nitrate—and something, I don’t know, something purely bad.”

  “Bad?” Talley said. “You mean bad as in evil? There’s no such thing as an evil animal.”

  “That’s what you say, Doc. Me, I’m beginning to think different.”

  Talley emptied the vial into the water in the lure and screwed the steel ring tight. They shackled the ring to the cable and then, with Darling holding one end of the two-by-four and Sharp the other, they lowered the rig over the stern and let it go. It floated for a moment, until the last of the air inside the lure was expelled, and then it slipped away in a flurry of bubbles.

  Darling and Sharp manned two hand-crank winches clamped on either side of the stern. Simultaneously, they fed first the cables, then the ropes, over into the sea, pausing every twelve feet to allow Talley to secure the camera’s cable to the rope.

  Then darkness fell; the stars strewed silver glitter on the still ocean, and the rising moon cast a golden path from the eastern horizon to the stern of the boat. From behind them came the warm glow of the cabin lights.

  Finally, at nine o’clock, the 480-fathom marks on the ropes slipped through their hands, and they halted the rig, wrapped the ropes around the winches and tied them off to an iron towing post that ran down through the deck and into the keel.

  “Want some food, Mr. Manning?” Darling asked as he and Sharp started forward.

  Manning shook his head and continued to stare at the water.

  Talley sat at the table in the cabin, adjusting the video recorder and the monitor and the control box. Darling walked behind him and looked at the monitor: The lure was in frame, swaying back and forth, and from the hundreds of holes in its skin, shimmering strands of spoor trickled out and trailed off into the blackness.

  Darling noticed that Talley was sweating and that his hand shook as he turned the dials on the control box. “Is it getting to you, Doc?” he said. “Sometimes it’s better if our dreams don’t come true.”

  “I’m not afraid, Captain,” Talley said sharply. “I’m excited. I’ve been waiting thirty years for this. No, I’m not afraid.”

  “Well, I am,” said Darling, and he stepped up into the wheelhouse. He looked through the windows at the calm night sea. There were no other lights out here, no fishing boats, no passing ships. They were alone. A little frisson passed up his back, and he shook it off.

  He turned on the fathometer. A stylus traced a pattern on a sheet of graph paper, and Darling read the depth. The bottom was 3,000 feet away, so if he and Sharp had measured the lines correctly, the lure and camera were suspended 120 feet above it. He started back down into the cabin, then stopped, reached over and switched on the fish-finder and calibrated its reading depth to five hundred fathoms. As the screen warmed up, the bottom glowed as a straight line. Otherwise, it was blank.

  “That spoor’s driving everything away, from here to the Azores,” Darling said as he stepped down into the cabin. “There isn’t a porgy or a shark between us and the bottom.”

  “No,” Talley said, “there wouldn’t be. They know to stay away.” He turned off the camera and set the timer.

  Darling walked to the door and flicked a switch beside it. The halogen lamps mounted on the flying bridge flashed on, and the afterdeck was flooded with light. Through the window Darling saw that Manning didn’t budge, as if he hadn’t noticed the sudden explosion oflight. He sat on the midships hatch cover, his shoulders hunched, his rifle cradled in his lap.

  Sharp passed Darling a sandwich. He nodded toward Manning and said, “Should I take him one?”

  “He’s not interested in food,” Darling said. “The man’s eating himself up inside.”

  “Osborn is unfortunate,” Talley commented as he reached for a piece of bread and some cheese. “He’s lost his perspective. Three weeks ago, he was a man who had power and knew how to use it. We made a deal that would give him revenge. He regarded it as a good deal. But now the project has become an obsession.”

  “Can you blame him?” Sharp asked.

  “Of course. He’s being irrational.”

  “Worse than irrational,” said Darling. “He’s dangerous.”

  “It’ll pass. We’ll let him shoot his gun at Architeuthis, and he’ll be what he has always been: a winner.”

  “That simple, is it?”

  “Animals are predictable, Captain, even the human one.”

  “Including Architeuthis?”

  “Oh yes. It’s programmed as surely as any machine. Once we know the codes, its behavior is predictable. Absolutely.”

  By ten-thirty, the timer had activated the camera a dozen times, and each time they had gathered around the monitor and seen the lure swinging back and forth across the frame, leaking ribbons of spoor. Up-current from the lure, a few tiny crustaceans flashed like fireflies across the screen, leaving afterglows of phosphorescence. Down-current there was nothing but black.

  The boat drifted on the calm sea; even lying beam-to, it didn’t snap-roll but seemed to rock gently, like a baby’s cradle. The cabin lights were a snug orange c
ocoon that added to the illusion of peace.

  “Suppose he doesn’t come tonight,” Darling said to Talley.

  “In the morning, then, or the afternoon. But it will come.”

  “We might’s well get some sleep, then.”

  “If you can.”

  “Better had. You too.”

  Sharp went to the bunk room below. Talley watched the monitor through one more cycle, then lay back on the bench seat and closed his eyes. Darling went outside.

  Manning was still sitting on the hatch cover, but he was slumped over, asleep.

  Darling checked the ropes; they hung straight down, unmoving, untouched. Then he looked toward shore. The loom of Bermuda was a rosy glow against the black sky, and he could make out the light pattern of the huge Southampton Princess Hotel and the sweeping beam of the lighthouse on Gibbs Hill. They were ten miles away, but he took comfort in the knowledge that home was still there. He thought of Charlotte, in their house, in their bed, and suddenly he was suffused with loneliness.

  When he went back inside, the television monitor was running again, casting pale gray shadows on Talley’s sleeping face.

  Darling climbed up into the wheelhouse and stood quietly, listening to the sounds of the night. The generator purred; the stylus on the fathometer hissed as it tracked the boat’s drift along the five-hundred-fathom line; the fish-finder hummed, its screen still showing desolate emptiness. He heard the sound of the water softly caressing the steel hull, and the sound of Talley breathing.

  He went into the cabin and lay down on one of the bunks. He longed for sleep, for abstraction from himself, but, exhausted though he was, he was sure that his mind would refuse to retreat into the comfort of numbness. Ever since he had first gone to sea as a boy, whenever he slept on a boat a part of his brain had always stood watch, alert to any change in the wind, to the slightest alteration in the rhythms of the ocean.