Free Beast by Peter Benchley Page A

automatic. Somebody turned it on.”
    “Maybe a ship picked the folks up and they forgot to turn it off.”
    “And nobody bothered to report in to Bermuda?” Darling paused. “Gun to my head, I’d say their boat sank out from under ‘em, and they tossed the raft in the sea and jumped for it and missed and drowned themselves.”
    Mike seemed to like that answer, so Darling didn’t articulate the hazy idea he had of another option. No point in stirring up bad thoughts in Mike. Besides, speculation was usually bullshit.
    “Well, the good news is,” Darling said, “she’s a brand-spanking-new Switlik, worth enough to keep the wolves at bay for a little while.”
    They snagged the raft with a grappling hook, fixed the rope to the block-and-tackle rig on the davit, turned on the winch and hauled it aboard.
    Mike knelt down and poked around, opening the supply box in the bow, feeling under the rubber cells.
    “Best turn off the EPIRB,” Darling said as he removed the hook and coiled the rope. “Don’t want a lot of pilots baffled by emergency signals when they should be caring for their hangovers.”
    Mike flicked the switch on the beacon and pushed the antenna back inside. He stood up. “Nothing. Nothing missing, nothing wrong.”
    “No.” But something was bothering Darling, and he continued to stare at the raft, comparing the inventory of what he saw to what he knew he should be seeing.
    The oar. That was it. There wasn’t any. Every raft carried at least one oar, and this one had been meant to have oars; there were oarlocks. But no oar.
    And then, as the boat shifted slightly, his eye was attracted to sunlight glinting off something on one of the rubber cells. He bent over and put his face close to the rubber. There were scratch marks, as if a knife had cut the rubber but hadn’t gone all the way through, and around each scratch mark, shining in the sun, was a patch of some kind of slime. He touched his fingers to the slime and raised them to his nose.
    “What?” Mike said.
    Darling hesitated, then decided to lie. “Sunburn oil. Poor buggers were worried about their tans.”
    He had no idea what it was. It stank of ammonia.
    Darling called Sharp on the radio and told him he had the raft and intended to keep searching, a bit farther to the north. A person in the water, alive or dead, had no sail area, so he or she wouldn’t have traveled nearly as far as the raft had—might, in fact, have moved in the opposite direction from the raft, depending on the current.
    And so they drove north for an hour—ten miles, more or less—then turned south and began to zigzag from southwest to southeast. Mike stood on the bow, his eyes on the nearby surface and the few feet below it, while Darling scanned the distance from the flying bridge.
    They had just turned eastward, away from the sun, when Mike called out, “There!” and pointed off the port side.
    Twenty or thirty yards away, something big and glisteny was floating in a tangle of sargasso weed.
    Darling slowed and turned toward it. As they closed on it, they saw that the thing, whatever it was, was not man-made. It bobbed slowly and had a wet sheen and quivered like Jell-O.
    “What the hell is that?” said Mike.
    “Looks like a six-foot jellyfish snarled itself in the weed.”
    “Damn! Don’t want to run into him.”
    Darling put the boat in neutral and watched from the flying bridge as the thing slid down the side. It was a huge clear jelly oblong, with a hole in the middle, and it appeared to have some sort of life, for it rotated as if to expose new parts of itself to the sunlight every few seconds.
    Mike said, “No jellyfish I’ve ever seen.”
    “No,” Darling agreed. “Beats me. Spawn of some kind, I guess.”
    “Want to pick some up?”
    “What for?”
    “The aquarium?”
    “No. They never asked me for spawn. If it is spawn, let’s let the critters live, whatever they are.”
    Darling resumed his course to the southeast. By the time they