White Shark by Peter Benchley Read Free Book Online Page A

had swallowed his anger and kissed some
ass and wangled scholarships to graduate school, and had returned to Waterboro,
with no specific idea about what he wanted to do.   He could teach, or continue to study, but he
was impatient to be free of the classroom and the laboratory; he longed to
learn by doing .   He could apply for a job at Woods Hole or Scripps
or any of the other marine institutes around the country, but he was still a
dissertation shy of his doctorate, and he had no confidence that anyone would
hire him to be anything more than a drone.
    The one certainty in Chase's life was that
he would spend his life in, on, around and under the sea.
    He had loved it from first memory, when
his father had taken him aboard the Miss
Edna on balmy days and let him savor the feel and the sounds and the smells
of the sea.   He had learned affection and
respect, not only for the sea itself but for the creatures that lived in it and
the men who harvested them.
    He had become particularly (perversely,
his father thought) fascinated by sharks.   Sharks seemed to be everywhere in those days — basking on the surface in
the sun, assaulting the nets balled full of thrashing fish, following the
boat's bloody wake as fish were cleaned and their guts tossed overboard.   At first, Simon had been enthralled mostly by
their appearance of relentless menace, but then, as he read more and more about
them, he came to see them as a wonderful representation of natural
continuity:   unchanged for millions of
years, efficient, immune to almost all diseases that affected other animals.   It was as if nature had created them and
thought, Well done.
    He still loved sharks, and though he no
longer feared them, now he feared for them.   Around the world, they were being
slaughtered recklessly, wastefully and ignorantly — some for their fins, which
were sold for soup; some for their meat; some simply because they were
perceived as a nuisance.
    By coincidence, Chase had returned to
Waterboro at precisely the time a small island between Block Island and
Fisher's
Island
had come on the market.   The state of
Connecticut
had taken the island from a
troubled bank and was auctioning it off to collect tax liens.   The thirty-five-acre tract of scrub and ledge
rock was too remote and too unattractive for commercial development and,
because it had no access to municipal services, impractical for subdivision into
private homesites.
    Chase, however, saw tiny
Osprey
Island
as the perfect spot for
oceanographic research.   Armed with the proceeds from the sale of his
parents' house and fishing boat, he put a down payment on the island, financed
the balance and established the Osprey Island Marine Institute.
    He had no trouble finding projects worthy
of study:   dwindling fish stocks,
vanishing marine species, pollution — all demanded attention.   Other groups and institutes were doing
similar work, of course, and Chase tried to complement their work with his,
while always reserving time and what money he could muster for his
specialty:   sharks.
    So now, much as he hated to admit it, at
thirty-four and as director of the Institute, he was a card-carrying member of
the Establishment.   He was attaining a
respectable reputation in the scientific community for his research on sharks;
his papers on their immune systems had been accepted by leading journals and
were received as interesting, if somewhat eccentric.   And he himself was regarded as a scientist
worth watching:   a comer.
    If he were to be caught blowing up a
whale, however, he knew he would be instantly discredited, as well as fined and
probably jailed.
    And so he had opted for compromise.   He had faxed the Environmental Protection
Agency in
Washington
and the state Department
of Environmental Protection in
Hartford
,
requesting emergency permission not to destroy the whale but to move it before
it could wash up on a public beach.   He
had no idea what direction the carcass was moving