Read Peter Benchley's Creature for Free Online Page A

contrary) weekly long-distance calls were no way to reach out and touch someone.
    Chase and Max's mother had married too young and too hastily. She was an heiress to a timber fortune, he an impecunious Greenpeacer. Their naive premise was that her money and his idealism would interact synergistically, benefiting the planet and allowing them to live in Eden. They soon discovered, however, that while they shared common ideals, their means of attaining ends were less than compatible. Corinne's notion of being on the front lines of the environmental movement included giving tennis parties, swimming parties, cocktail parties and black-tie dinner-dances to benefit the movement; Simon's involved being away from home for weeks at a time, living in the stinking fo'c'sles of ratty ships and confronting ruthless foreigners on the high seas.
    They tried to compromise: Simon learned to play tennis and to give speeches; she learned to scuba dive and to differentiate between the Odontoceti and the Mysticeti. But after four years of drifting apart, they agreed to disagree . . . permanently.
    The only synergy that came from the relationship was Max—handsomer than either of them, smarter, more sensitive.
    Corinne got custody of Max: she had money, a large and caring family, a home (several, in fact) and, by the time the divorce was final, a stable relationship with a neurosurgeon who had been the number-one singles tennis player in Northern California.
    Simon was the only son of deceased parents, and he had no steady income, no fixed residence and fleeting relationships with several women whose prime assets were their looks and their sexual fervor.
    Through her lawyer, Corinne had offered Chase a generous financial settlement—she was neither cruel nor vengeful, and she wanted her son's father to be able to afford a decent home for Max to visit—but in a fit of self-righteous nobility, Chase had refused.
    Several times since, Chase had regretted what he now regarded as misplaced sexist lunacy. He could have put the money to good use. Especially now that the Institute— his institute—was teetering on the brink of insolvency. He had been tempted to reconsider, to call Corinne and offer to accept that last beneficence. But he couldn't bring himself to do it.
    What mystified him, what he could not fathom, was the fact that somehow, over the years and the thousands of miles, his son had been able to see through the sheltering veil of private schools and country clubs and trust funds, and to maintain an image of his father as a figure of adventure . . . someone not only to long for, but to emulate.

    *     *     *

    As Chase followed Max outside onto the open stern of the forty-eight-foot boat, he slid his sunglasses down from the top of his head. The day was bound to be a scorcher, 95-plus degrees even out here on the ocean, one of those days that used to be rare but in the past few years had become more and more common. Ten summers ago, there had been eight days when the temperature had reached 90 degrees in Waterboro; three years ago, thirty-nine days; this year, meteorologists were predicting fifty days over 90 and as many as ten over 100.
    He used the zoom lens as a telescope and scanned the surface of the glassy sea. "See anything?" he asked Max.
    "Not yet." Max rested his elbows on the bulwark, to steady the binoculars. "What would she look like?"
    "If she came up to bask on a day like this, her dorsal fin would stand out like a sail."
    Chase saw a tire floating, and a plastic milk jug, and one of the lethal plastic six-pack holders that strangled turtles and birds, and globules of oil that when they reached the beach and stuck to the soles of children's feet would be cursed as tar. At least he didn't see any body parts today, or any syringes. Last summer, a woman at the town beach had had to be sedated after her four-year-old presented her with a treasure he had found in the wavewash: a human finger. And a man had taken from