Beast by Peter Benchley

on a foot. They were down there on the stern assembling their diving gear—compasses, knives, computers, octopus regulators, buoyancy vests, still cameras, video cameras— good God, they had enough gear to equip an astronaut for a month on the back side of the moon.
    They had said they were expert divers, had insisted on showing him their Advanced Open-Water cards. But in Lucas’s mind, people who decked themselves out in all that machinery weren’t divers, they were shoppers. Sure, diving could be complicated, if you wanted to mess with all that chemistry, but it didn’t have to be. A savvy person made it simple: Wear a bathing suit so nothing grabs you by the balls, flippers for your motor, a mask so you can see, a tank of air to breathe, a few pounds of lead to keep you down, a depth gauge in case you get absentminded.
    Besides, that girl, Susie, looked like she didn’t need gear—she had a set of lungs on her that should take her to a thousand feet on a single breath. Gear just spoiled the picture, covered up all the golden-brown skin, the mane of yellow hair that when he first saw it had made him catch his breath. She was a prime candidate for that Sports Illustrated special issue.
    But they were high-tekkies, these two. Like most everybody these days, they relied on electronic doodads to do their work for them. Common sense and gut instincts were becoming a thing of the past.
    Well, he hoped one of them, the boy or the girl, still had a ration of common sense, because where they were going, the only thing the costly toys might do was provide a record for the coroner.
    That thought brought Lucas another fit of anger. Maybe he’d pay someone to remove his vocal cords.
    His first mistake had been to go to the Hog Penny Pub for his five o’clock smile. He never went to any of the tourist bars on Front Street: The drinks were overpriced and undergenerous. But a pretty girl had stopped on her motorbike to ask him directions, and she’d said she went to the Hog Penny every day, and why didn’t he come by for a drink later on, and so he’d shaved his face and changed his shirt and dropped by. Naturally, the girl never did.
    His second mistake had been to hang around long enough to destroy a twenty-dollar bill, because even at tourist prices, twenty dollars bought him enough fuel to generate heat in his belly and tamp down his native quietness.
    His third—and by far most serious—mistake had been to put his mouth where it didn’t belong, into a conversation between two young people he didn’t know.
    He’d been dazzled by the girl from the moment he saw her, but he had no ambitions about her because the boy she was with was just as good-looking as she was, in his way, just as tall and blond and tan. Lucas imagined them to be a matched pair from some scientific stud farm, programmed to breed a race of beauties. They looked so much alike, they could have been brother and sister …
    … which, he later learned, was exactly what they were: twins, just out of college, down here staying in their parents’ house out by the Mid-Ocean Club. He gathered that their father was some big-shot tycoon in the broadcast business up in the States.
    Because Dr. Smirnoff had Lucas well in tow by now and was deluding him that he was as smooth as Tom Cruise, Lucas began to fancy that he might actually have a chance with this heart-stopper. Her getup alone should have been warning enough: No girl with a real-gold Rolex watch, a gold pinky ring and one of those five-dollar golf shirts with the fifty-dollar polo player on it—let alone the satin skin and teeth as perfect as piano keys—was likely to give a thought to some scraunchy, ragged-haired boat-jockey in tattered jeans. But Dr. Smirnoff was driving.
    They were consulting a set of decompression tables, wondering aloud if they should have decompressed after their last dive and planning how deep they could go on tomorrow’s dives—all of which should have rung alarm bells in Lucas’s