The holds were nearly full and the sun was going down in the west; Willie Pender squinted up at the sky and sniffed several times. He had checked the barometer twice, but it was stuck, and he remembered that this was not his boat and the instrument before him was an old one reclaimed from another age-demolished vessel. He tapped it vigorously. The brass needle under the glass jumped to a new position. This one wasn’t favorable at all. On the deck he ran up the “quit fishing” flag and pulled in his nets. They were done. He hoped the eater was too.
But the eater wasn’t done yet. His somnolence had been disturbed. Something had changed, something unseen yet felt, and it had awakened the eater from inanimate motionless to gentle, mean alertness. It coursed through its mass, striving for the motion this disturbance had instilled. Very gently the sea began to flow around it, giving the eater fresh life, and very gently it began its noiseless trek toward the surface, not hurrying at all.
Judy had taken Billy back to Peolle in her runabout. She got him on the Clamdip and set out to find Miss Helen, an elderly native who had some nurse’s training long ago during World War II, and who she asked to attend to Billy’s face. When she was satisfied that there was nothing broken and no infection had set in, she left Miss Helen with him and walked to the Lotusland, gradually quieting herself down as though nothing had happened at all.
Chana had given the crew another night out on the island, preferring to sit in her deck chair and watch the action through her night glasses. Nobody interfered with her, knowing she had odd behavior patterns, and the crew was glad to get time off to mingle with the lusty ladies around a beachside campfire or hit Alley’s bar. Beside her was a portable CB radio set to the fishing boats’ channel and she had caught the message that the mulako boats were homeward-bound. Lee went ashore to spread the news in case the report wasn’t received by the few active sets onshore. They were still hours away, but the fact that the three ships were filled with their catch and en route to Peolle was an excuse to light the fires on the beach and sing happy songs in a strange language.
There was no sign of Pell on the Lotusland. One of the crew thought he had seen him walking the dockway but it had been too dark to be sure. He told Judy something had been bothering Pell all day. He was furious at everybody and exploded when something annoyed him. He ordered a deckhand to clean out the inflatable to please him and he made the guy do it again before he was satisfied.
Judy thanked the crewman and when he walked off she went to Pell’s room. On her key ring was one key that was a master to every compartment on the ship. She opened Pell’s door and stepped inside. She had been there often enough and in five minutes was certain there was no place he tried to hide anything. He’d be too smart to secrete something on his own premises anyway, but it was a starting point. One thing she did notice. The drawer in his desk where he kept that gun, the drawer that was always locked, was slightly open and there was no gun in there at all. The slightly oily fleece rag he had had it wrapped in was there, but no gun.
She ignored the private quarters of the other crewmen. Pell would have wanted an area he could have gone to quietly that had total privacy and a good place to hide a few film packs. Everything he shot would have been on tape anyway, so the packs wouldn’t be hard to hide at all. For an hour she picked through out-of-the-way places in the ship. She found nothing at all. At the end of the corridor was one last door she had almost ignored. It was a small lavatory for the crew who worked below-decks. The EMPTY sign was in the slot over the knob and she opened the door. The toilet was a tiny place, but well equipped like that on a passenger plane. She locked herself in and looked over the area. This would be a valuable hiding place. It was in plain sight, simple to service, and there was a slot for a box of facial tissues very few of the crew would use when there was a container for large paper towels next to it. She pulled out the tissue box. It was a quarter empty, but much heavier than it should have been. Down at the bottom was the four-by seven-and-a-half-inch tape pack that Pell had used to capture the scene of the damaged boat of the Malli brothers, and with the camera equipment he had at his disposal, he probably had great close-ups too.
On the way to the private quarters that were always reserved for her, she went by a half-open door of a small office and smiled at the sound of an old-fashioned manual typewriter going at full speed. She pushed the door open with her forefinger and said, “Hello there. Working late?”
The young guy at the old Smith-Corona glanced up with a lopsided grin, then stood up quickly when he saw who it was. “Miss Durant. I didn’t expect, expect...”
He was one of the writers who had scripted the last two pictures, and here he was hard at work on another. “No apologies, young man. Why aren’t you enjoying yourself on the beach?”
“Gee, Miss Durant, I’m having more fun here. You know what I have?”
“No. What?”
“One hell of a picture, that’s what. This thing has everything. Man, the action... and what damn suspense. All we need now is that eater thing. It’s as exciting trying to write this yarn as it will be to see it on the screen, Miss Durant, that... that eater out there had better be something really out of this world. Nothing else will do. It’s got to be the monster of monsters but how the hell anybody can capture it I can’t figure. Damn, I have just about everything sketched out... except that ending.” The guy paused and sucked in his breath. “It had better be good.”
Where the confidence came from she didn’t know, but Judy said, “It will be.”
He didn’t really believe her, but he smiled anyway. “Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but there’s a leading lady in here I modeled after you.”
“Hey,” she laughed, “you barely know me.”
“I don’t have to. Hell, I’m a writer, not a biographer.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve even worked in a guy like Mako Hooker.”
She felt a blush color her face, but the young guy didn’t notice.
“He was some kind of a cop, you know,” he told her.
She said “Oh” again, asking an unspoken question.
“Being just a plain old writer makes you pretty observant. That guy has all the earmarks of a pro.”
“Who can tell?” Judy shrugged.
“If you get any ideas about the eater, tell me, will you?”
“Can’t you dream something up?”
“Not this big, I can’t. This one has got to be absolutely wild and totally believable. No outer-space junk. Just something we all might face.”
“How about Carcharodon megalodon?” Judy suggested.
His eyes went wide open. “The great great white shark!” Judy simply nodded, her face bland.
“Damn!” he softly exploded.
“You swear too much,” she said, and closed the door.
In her compartment she tucked the tape in the stack of others she had collected, put a sticker on it dated two years ago and left it in plain sight.
Outside she stood on the deck and looked up at the sky. There was no moon out now and the blackness was deep with thousands of star eyes peering out of it. These tiny luminaries would be guiding those fishing boats home and she hoped it would be a fast and safe journey. By now they should be a third of the way to port... but that still left a long way to go. Quickly, she turned and went to the radio room and walked in. The operator knew what she wanted before she said it and told her, “Willie Pender called in fifteen minutes ago. Everything’s going okay.”