His swift attack had eased the harpoon point more deeply into his side. He was driven by the festering wound to seek cold water; spurred, too, by currents in an ocean of thought that very few men knew.

He passed the houngan standing on the beach at Masthead Light and swam out Masthead Cut. Ten miles east of land he slowed the stroking of his tail. He circled, as if he had a rendezvous.

The harpoon point in his side was working its way into muscle and cartilage and sending waves of pain throughout his body, but it only angered him. It had not weakened him at all.

Of all the creatures of the ocean, he was best adapted to his environment, molded exquisitely by the aeons for destruction of the slow and the weak.

He was a tool of evolution. Hardly a single species that swam the seas or flew above them had not benefited throughout the ages from his winnowing of the losers.

Without him and other lesser predators, the oceanic chain of feeding would lose its balance; he was an equalizer, a dealer in elemental, primordial justice, without preference or favoritism. If something moved, he struck it. If a pelican dived inexpertly and did not recover quickly, the pelican was finished, and all of its future progeny too.

If a baby seal had not the intelligence, or the timidity, to stay with its mother, it died, before its simple-minded genes diluted the colony further.

The great white was exactly what three hundred million years of selection had distilled him to be: a perfect angel of death.

Now something foreign lay in the ocean a mile ahead. He sensed that it was the boat that had caused him his distress. He had begun to close on it when it was five miles out from Masthead Point. Now, when its engine grew silent, he drifted, listening with his tiny ears, sensing with his lateral canals, smelling, tasting, all without effort or intention.

There were creakings and groanings that man's wooden creatures made when they were thought to be most silent, and for a while he homed in on these. Then, very faintly, he heard, as he had before, the booming of his own heart a mile away.

Its rhythm still excited him, and he swam faster toward the source.

***

Ellen Brody had tried the radio, and though she could hear distant voices on some of the channels, she got no answer when she broadcast her cry for help.

Finally she gave up. The boom... boom... boom from the speakers seemed louder.

She heard thunder to the north. The seas were growing calm before the storm.

She stepped on deck to check the squall. It was closer.

From the deckhouse the booming seemed louder.

She found herself losing her grip again.

"Leave us alone," she whispered, and suddenly she was screaming, "Leave us alone! Leave us alone! Leave us—"