“My own true friend,” Komodo sobbed, “again my negligence and stupidity cause you pain.”
“Ain’t your doing.”
“But it is! I have played my part! That machine, the one called Crystal Contact Radio . . .”
“Those earmuffs Shig’s selling? What about them?” All at once, it hit the monster. “Wait a minute. It’s them that’s putting those supplications into my head, right?”
Komodo lowered his head. “Yes, I’m afraid you are right.” Eyes downcast, Komodo told what happened. How one night several weeks before, almost without being aware of it, he arose from his lonely bed, walked to his lab, and made the Crystal Contacts.
Now if there’s one thing you got to understand about Komodo’s man-of-science scene, it’s that some things come easy for him and some don’t. Patterning a neon tattoo, punching up a new injector for an electro plasti-car—those were cherrytopped pieces of cake for Komodo. It was only when it came to what he called the Quadcameral communication samples that his method became erratic. That’s when, after weeks of frustration, he’d suddenly find himself sleepwalking to his lab, feel a half-conscious obsession overtake him. More often than not, he’d wake up, feverish and exhausted, on the laboratory floor, his bunsens still roaring their blue-green fire. Then he’d look at what he’d made, shake his head, melt it down, obliterate it from his sight. “This has no business being invented,” he’d cry. “It’s not what I intended at all.”
It was as if the one thing he really wanted to invent, he couldn’t.
To hear Komodo tell it, that was the basic situation that night a few weeks before the 90 Series trouble started up. “As I was working,” Komodo told Gojiro, “I had the strongest sense that I was close, that what I’d been seeking was right there, in my hands. My thoughts skipped with light assurance from point to point, factors coming to me faster than my hands could record them. But then, when I stood back to see what I’d made, I knew it was wrong. As wrong as all the others!”
A mordant look came over Komodo. “If only I had smashed it like the others. Destroyed it as it should have been destroyed. Then he wouldn’t have—”
“Wouldn’t have what?”
Komodo couldn’t speak.
“Don’t tell me,” the monster said with soft resignation. “Shig stole it. He was in there with you, he knew what it was, and he stole it.”
Komodo stood up straight, looked Gojiro in the eye, and bowed sharply from the waist. “It is to my everlasting shame, my own true friend, that I did not tell you this until now.”
Gojiro felt the air go from him. “Oh, boy.”
* * *
The very next morning, Komodo was up on Dead Letter Hill, erecting that spire. He made it from what was left of the Eiffel Towerette that the fifty-thousand-watt TalkRadio Beast wore as a headpiece during Gojiro vs. the Casey Kasem Creature on a Journey to the End of the Dial. At the top of the spire, Komodo installed an advanced-generation Crystal Contact receptor capable of attracting the 90 Series supplications, rerouting the ever-more-urgent pleas from Gojiro’s besieged head.
Tired and worn from his ordeal, it took Gojiro several days to summon the will to even look up Dead Letter Hill. When he did, he couldn’t believe it. The entire cliffside, once teeming with the typically grotesque Radioactive Island flora and fauna, was bald, empty. Around the spire’s base, the soil was bleached a dour white. Every day the blank spot spread. It was an awesome and terrible sight.
“That 90 Series,” Gojiro gasped, unable to turn his eyes away. “It’s sucking life from the ground.”
Komodo nodded grimly.
Suddenly, Gojiro felt a clutch at his heart. “Tell me about this 90 Series. I mean . . . I know it’s Shig’s doing and all, some arbitrary revenge plot. But look at all that . . . pain up there. All that need. Who do you think it’s on?”
“On? I do not understand your meaning, my own true friend.”
“You know, like, who’s got to take the weight? Whose responsibility is it? Anyone’s?”
Komodo rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I think it is on whoever feels it.”
* * *
It started under the guise of an evening constitutional, except that it was after midnight and Gojiro was not in the habit of taking such walks. “Just a little stroll, stretch the old hindquarters,” he said to himself, intending to go by Corvair Bay and skip a couple of recapped tires across the turbid sea. Soon enough, however, he found himself at the base of Dead Letter Hill.
That’s when he heard the whimper. A murmur, a small whine fighting to distinguish itself from the swash of nightsounds. Better check it out, he thought, and he started to climb. It didn’t take long, maybe three or four upward strides until the spire came into view. By then, though, the whine had turned to a wail, a million blaring sirens. Those supplicants! Howling in the night!
The monster withered ’neath the din. At the outset of the 90 Series, he’d tried to convince himself that it was all a hoax, that the supplicants never really existed, even that they were being generated by Shig himself, product of some offshore ventriloquism. Now this notion seemed impossible; these screams could not be counterfeit. Building, ever building, they became a mother’s cry to a lost child down an empty stairwell, an urgent shout that gains in wretched authority with every unreturned echo until it becomes the terror of every mother searching for every child everywhere, the shriek of the wildebeest staring into the hyena’s bloody jaws on the Serengeti, the moan of monkeys seeing their offspring fitted for an organ grinder’s costume and cup. It was insane, standing there, feeling those pulsations swirl about that spire as if it were a maypole of despair. Gojiro stepped back, aghast. Could all that have once been inside his head, all that need, all those unanswered prayers?
Gojiro fell to his knees and began to weep. “I’m sorry!” he screamed into the agitated air. “But it ain’t me! I ain’t the one you want! You got to believe that.” His voice rose, became just another supplication in the seething darkness.
Then he heard that tick. It wasn’t loud, but just as a gouge in vinyl cuts across two hundred years of time to truncate Beethoven’s fury, it soon became all Gojiro could hear. He went forward ’til he found the sound. It was coming from a large plastic box attached by a heavy cable to the bottom of the spire. Inside were numerous tape decks, all turning, hundreds of cassettes. They’d run to the end, then—tick—turn around, go the other way. Each tape bore some sort of recorded message, Gojiro could tell, but it was hard to make out any single one amid the bawl. Right then, however, enough of the tapes tracked simultaneously for the reptile to hear “Yo, this is Gojiro! I am sorry, I cannot come to the Crystal Contact Receptor right now. I am still in the terrible grip of that Narcolepto Opposer. But have no fear, I will return your supplication. I will return all supplications! I will fulfill the 90 Series! Have faith in that, loyal zardpards!” It was the same pathetic imitation Shig had used on that movie trailer.
“Bastard!” Full of frustration and wrath, the monster cogwheeled his every appendage through the pandemonic atmosphere. In his rage, he never noticed how close he was to the spire until his great tail clashed against its base and held there.
Gojiro jerked at his posterior peninsula, but it seemed welded in place. “Shit!” Years ago, he assumed, he possessed tail-detachment capability. But now, likely still another product of his unfortunate encounter with Joseph Prometheus Brooks’s nucleus-smashing brainchild, the lizard’s backdragger was fixed solid. It stayed glued to the spire. A dull vibration was creeping up his dorsal ridges, vertebra by vertebra, nerve ending by nerve ending. Soon it was in his neck, an inch from his head. Physical contact with the spire load allowed those 90 Series supplications to surge back into him.
Just stay perfectly still, he told himself. Don’t say a word. Stonewall. That was the key. Komodo said as much during that conversation they’d had about where the weight of the 90 Series fell. “Perhaps,” Komodo said, “it is like a glance across a crowded room that is nev
er seen and therefore cannot be returned. No love can grow from that.” When the impulse came, though, it wasn’t like before. There weren’t thousands of supplications, no graspy horde, no inconsolable throng. There was only one, a single supplicant: Billy Snickman.
How, out of all the teratogenic syndromics, the run-of-the-mill victims of divorce, and the sad ones who keep their sadness hid, how in the world did Gojiro choose Billy Snickman? Or was it how did Billy Snickman choose him?
Truth was, at the outset, Gojiro figured being transported into Billy Snickman’s skin wasn’t all that bad. Not that the kid’s life had been free of violin music. As Gojiro whizzed through the pathetic pages of the thirteen-year-old’s luckless dossier, the usual hurt and heartache ruled. His father was a black-lunger, sixth generation in a Kentucky mine. The bosses made everyone sign a release the day before the full extent of the epidemic became known, then moved the company to Atlanta, diversified to textiles and poultry. A month later Billy’s dad got shot in a bumper-pool dispute. His mom took him out west, but the car broke down in Arkansas, where they hitched along the road until the wrong pickup stopped. They found her body in a drainage gully, and Billy began his career in foster care. Sixteen families in three years. He was withdrawn, they said, a retard. Billy didn’t mind the labels. He made up little poems about those sixteen families and sang them to himself. The one he liked the best was called “Forget That House.” It went “Forget that house, forget that door, tomorrow it’ll be another color, not there no more.”
When he was twelve, Billy ran away again, but is it really running away when they don’t chase you? His big break came while hiding inside the trunk of a Buick about to cross the California line. He coughed at the fruit-inspection stop and was found out. The driver smacked Billy around, accused him of trying to steal spare tires, but his clubfoot won him sympathy. The local paper ran a story; the driver, a feed and pesticide dealer looking to make a name in local politics, made a show of adopting Billy. After that he lived in a raised ranch house, eating wordless dinners under a cut-glass chandelier with his new parents, who, until him, were childless. He got his own room. It wasn’t until the feed dealer, in the midst of his campaign for county clerk, broke Billy’s withered arm with a hard hit in a father-son touch football game and screamed at him, “Get up and walk it off, you pansy,” that Billy ran away again, this time to craggy mountains in back of Barstow where he lived like a wild wolf child, sleeping in interstate rest stops, stealing food from motel dumpsters, singing his poem-songs in the sunbaked arroyos.
It was a typical enough catalog of woe: a drag, but no Ethiopia. And after living Billy Snickman’s life along with him, Gojiro readied himself for what he knew would come next. What would this Billy Snickman want? An organ transplant for the wheezing dog he found that night in Needles? What would this bottomfeeder of the genophenic pool request—a request that would never be answered, or fulfilled.
“Come in, Gojiro. Please heed this humble servant’s plea,” Billy Snickman rasped. “I only got one question.”
Gojiro swallowed hard. This wasn’t going to be so easy, after all. To deny a million supplicants, that was a breeze. You could look into a million needy pairs of eyes and they’d never lay a glove on you. Numbers like that added up to an administrative problem, nothing more. Maybe that’s how those men in that B-29 approached their mission, thousands of feet of air between them and eternal pain. Gojiro wondered: Suppose the only way to detonate an A-bomb was to strap it to a soldier’s body on a time release, send him to the center of the town, make him walk around, eat in the greasy spoon, take a book out of the library. Then would there have ever been a Bomb?
“I need to know this one thing,” Billy Snickman said. Gojiro girded himself. It was strange; usually the supplication was blurted out, a slurred invocation followed rapidly by a behest for the monster to come step on wildeyed drinking parents, or to blow dry rot from decaying bones, or to provide a life’s supply of Mars bars. But this Billy Snickman was deliberate, careful.
Finally, the boy said, “I need to know—who are you?”
After that, it was pretty much a blur, a smear of lurching emotions. First came the schizoshock of hearing his own voice say, “I am Gojiro, Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines, Nexus of Beam and Bunch, Defender of the Evolloo.” That was followed, almost immediately, by the panic of trying to deny that he had said it. Not that it mattered. Billy Snickman was gone. Gojiro could not raise him again.
Then came the worst of it, the way Gojiro went running to Komodo, screaming that the spire was defective and more drastic methods had to be taken to banish the 90 Series from his brain. “You got to cut it out,” the monster screamed, “whatever part of the Quadcameral that takes in the supplications! Cut it out or I’m gonna die!”
“But . . . what happened?” Komodo was stunned, horrified.
“Don’t matter, just do it. Please!”
Two hours later, Komodo was climbing up a ladder he’d leaned against the monster’s massive noggin. Toolbox in hand, white smock over his black pajamas, miner’s lantern strapped to his forehead, he began his forced entry of the parietal. It was a terrible thing, Gojiro knew, demanding his friend pierce the parietal loam and descend, bootfirst, into the fourth chamber of the Quadcameral. Insisting Komodo make that obscene incision, defile what he held Sacred, knowing his friend would never deny his request—it was the king of sins! But what else could the monster do? He couldn’t let Billy Snickman come back into his head, not with what that boy knew.
“Whatever happens,” Komodo said before he began the surgery, “might not be reversible.” One false move, he pointed out, one mistaken slice with his garden shears, and they might be saying goodbye to each other for all times.
“Chance we got to take,” the lizard shot back. “Cut it out!”
Then Komodo was inside Gojiro’s brain, and there was the sound of something popping, a wire being cut. This was followed by a soft sob, and the track of a single tear from Komodo’s eye, falling through that Quadcameral, from the tortured realm where the 90 Series had been to the highlands of the Neo-Cort, down through the muddy flats of his limbics, tumbling like a solitary silver pearl of dew from leaf to leaf until it was lost among the dense mists of so long ago.
* * *
These were the recollections Gojiro carried with him as he and Komodo reached the edge of the Cloudcover and looked for the exit that would take them through to another world. Komodo never asked why Gojiro changed his mind concerning Sheila Brooks’s letter, nor did he inquire further about the strange supplication scrawled at the bottom of it. For that the monster felt relief. How could he explain? Was there any explanation? Why did he answer Billy Snickman’s question as he did? How had that reply wound up in Sheila Brooks’s maniacal invitation for them to make Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision? The monster didn’t know, didn’t want to know, but there was no denying it. This was one supplication that had to be answered.
“Steady as we go, keep starboard-bound,” Komodo, the able mariner, said, gentle in the monster’s ear.
It would be no easy trick, escaping the Cloudcover, that grayish Astrodome that encased their world like a tarnished platter surrounds a cooked goose. It was nothing solid, no jut of geology with weight and properties. Instead, it was an angry wall of heat, a sheer blare, a space-age Styx. So much had come through that fevered curtain, but nothing had ever gotten out.
The warp. Komodo kept talking about the warp. It was there, he said without apparent sentiment, he’d seen it all those years ago, the only other time they’d been out this far, the only other time they’d sought to escape their land. Gojiro closed his eyes. He had no desire to see that scene of still another of his crimes, where those waters once raged, the spot where the swirling death-pool dragged Komodo’s beloved down.
“There!” Komodo screamed, gesturing left toward that growling tunnel. “Go there!”
The monster clenched his jaw, sprang ahead. “Hang on! We�
��re going through!”
Then there was no horizontal, no vertical; all plain geometry was out the window. The churn shook them like fries in overheated oil. Then the sea went flat, an eerie calm, only to shatter out again, a spew of watery shards.
“It’s like trying to crawl out of a drain!”
“I’m slipping,” Komodo cried, the tiller rope bucking madly in his bleeding hands. He tried to dig his heels into Gojiro’s drenched leathers, but they were too slick.
“Hold on,” Gojiro called, craning his neck to snatch his friend up safely in his mouth.
Again the ocean exploded. “We’re going over!”
Over and over they tumbled, a great log cascading down the most slicked of shoots. And when they stopped, they were right-side up on the most tranquil of seas.
·Part Two·
The Hermit Pandora
KOMODO TRAVELED AS PROFESSOR TAKAMOTO, a visiting lecturer from the Herpetoholographic Institute of New Chiba-chrome City. Gojiro, shot up with a special shrinkage potion that contracted him to a mere nine inches, stayed inside Komodo’s carry-on bag, posing as a specimen. In this fashion, they made their way across the Pacific, hopscotching from a Caroline to a Gilbert to a Hebride. Before long they were circling the smogsky over LAX.
“Who can tell,” Komodo sighed as he peered through the plasticine window down to the El Segundo tract houses below, “what this world will hold for us, my own true friend?” Gojiro didn’t know, couldn’t say. He couldn’t say anything. Over Hawaii, he’d devoured Komodo’s in-flight chicken cordon bleu, gotten sick, and been swimming in his own juices ever since.
Some hairiness ensued at the airport. Waiting in the customs line, forcing near face-breaking smiles to each passerby, Komodo noticed a sign referring to animal quarantine.
“What’s that mean?” Gojiro asked with alarm as he peeked from the bag. “They gonna stick me in a pound?”
Unsure of the answer to his friend’s question, Komodo moved quickly. He broke off a section of an emergency shrink pill and crammed it into Gojiro’s mouth. Then, with the monster further diminished to less than an inch, Komodo stuck him on the front of his shirt. The customs inspector, clearly no expert when it came to reptilia, knew nothing of the morphologic dissimilarities between the alligator and monitor types and waved Komodo through as if he were just another Izod wearer.
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