“More ’n a bit,” said Brody. He shook his head, as if to reassemble his thoughts and sort out his visions. “I’m still not sure I believe it.” His mind was full of images of a torpedo shape streaking upward in the blackness and tearing Christine Watkins to pieces; of the boy on the raft, unknowing, unsuspecting, until suddenly seized by a nightmare creature; and of the nightmares he knew would come to him, dreams of violence and blood and a woman screaming at him that he killed her son. “You can’t tell me that thing’s a fish,” he said. “It’s more like one of those things they make movies about. You know, the monster from twenty million fathoms.”

“It’s a fish, all right,” said Hooper. He was still visibly excited. “And what a fish! Damn near megalodon.”

“What are you talking about?” said Brody.

“That’s an exaggeration,” said Hooper, “but if there’s something like this swimming around, what’s to say megalodon isn’t? What do you say, Quint?”

“I’d say the sun’s got to you,” said Quint.

“No, really. How big do you think these fish grow?”

“I’m no good at guessing. I’d put that fish at twenty feet, so I’d say they grow to twenty feet. If I see one tomorrow that’s twenty-five feet, I’ll say they grow to twenty-five feet. Guessing is bullshit.”

“How big do they grow?” Brody asked, wishing immediately that he hadn’t said anything. He felt that the question subordinated him to Hooper.

But Hooper was too caught up in the moment, too flushed and happy, to be patronizing. “That’s the point,” he said. “Nobody knows. There was one in Australia that got snarled in some chains and drowned. He was measured at thirty-six feet, or so said the reports.”

“That’s almost twice as big as this one,” said Brody. His mind, barely able to comprehend the fish he had seen, could not grasp the immensity of the one Hooper described.

Hooper nodded. “Generally, people seem to accept thirty feet as a maximum size, but the figure is fancy. It’s like what Quint says. If they see one tomorrow that’s sixty feet, they’ll accept sixty feet. The really terrific thing, the thing that blows your mind, is imagining—and it could be true—that there are great whites way down in the deep that are a hundred feet long.”

“Oh bullshit,” said Quint.

“I’m not saying it’s so,” said Hooper. “I’m saying it could be so.”

“Still bullshit.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They’re six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I’m getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What’s to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there’s enough down there to support whales, there’s enough to support sharks that big. Just because we’ve never seen a hundred-foot white doesn’t mean they couldn’t exist. They’d have no reason to come to the surface. All their food would be way down in the deep. A dead one wouldn’t float to shore, because they don’t have flotation bladders. Can you imagine what a hundred-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?”