“Murray! Come here for a minute.”
He was stooped over under a large umbrella that was being held by a much shorter man, Charles Caiman. Both of them looked annoyed by the interruption. Murray waved Audrey over to join them, but she stood her ground. She didn’t want to be anywhere close to the slimy, repellent Caiman—especially since she was wearing his doctored press ID pinned to the lapel of her coat.
“Murray!”
“Not now, Audrey!”
“Yes, Murray, right now.” The power in her voice surprised both men. Reluctantly he asked Caiman to wait for a second while he dealt with the situation.
“What? What do you want?” he asked, joining her under her freshly purloined umbrella.
Audrey smiled her most wicked smile. “I’ve got exclusive footage of other places this thing has attacked, and oodles”—that didn’t sound tough enough—“um, I mean a shitload of background information.”
Suddenly Murray was very interested. “You do? Whose story is this?”
“Mine!” she told him proudly. “All mine!” In addition to her ill-gotten video and the information she’d learned from me, Audrey had gone onto the Internet to see what other stray facts she could find to beef up her already meaty story. The most important discovery she’d made concerned the strange word the Kobayashi Maru’s cook had uttered time and again: Gojira.
She had surfed her way to some obscure corner of the World Wide Web and found an on-line encyclopedia of Oriental mythology. She scanned through page after page until she happened across a brief description of an ancient Japanese sea monster, one that supposedly attacked ships that ventured too far out to sea. This legendary chimera was known by the name of Gojira.
Massively you dwell, O Dragon of the
Triple World,
In the great iron cage of the sea,
[But] When the dead mists of the half-
eaten moon stir the waters
[and] Open your cage, you rise in
effulgent glory,
A great flash of livingness, eye and
wind, tongue [and] water,
To swallow the wayward sailor’s floating
world.
Spare our ship, O dragon, [remain]
embedded in stone,
Humbly [we] speak [your] name, Gojira.
—Sixteenth-century
Japanese sailor’s prayer
“All right, then,” Murray said, “let’s not stand here putzing around. Let’s go have a look at this report.” And the two of them hurried away, leaving Caiman standing there by himself wondering what was going on.
FOUR
Dawn broke reluctantly over New Jersey. The disheartened sun was barely able to force its way through the gunmetal gray rain clouds, which continued to hang like a cast-iron skillet over the entire eastern seaboard. Someone in a seedy hotel room pulled aside a beige curtain just far enough to spy down on the army’s military headquarters.
“Taisez-vous,” said Jean-Claude. He stepped away from the window of their fleabag hotel room, which overlooked the tents of the command center. The team of so-called insurance agents was eating a breakfast of toast and café américain. They must have been in a collectively foul mood after sleeping for only two hours on the lumpy mattress and stained carpet.
“Even the butter is horrible here!” complained one of the Jeans, a paper napkin tucked nerdily into his collar to protect his shirt. The other men grumbled sleepily, agreeing that it tasted funny.
Roaché examined one of the foil-wrapped pats and announced to everyone’s surprise that the butter had been imported from, of all places, France. After that the men ate in silence. In time Roaché shuffled over to the main surveillance console and switched it on to see if the new day had begun inside the command center’s war room. It had.
A major strategy session was just getting under way. It was 7:03 A.M. I remember, because I was late. I’d stopped by the mobile lab to pick up the printed results of the chemical analysis they’d done on the blood sample I’d given them. The report confirmed my suspicions of the night before.
Colonel Hicks was standing at the head of a large square table, explaining, with as much confidence as he could muster, his Plan C. Seated around the table staring back at him skeptically were high-ranking representatives from the nation’s armed services—including General Anderson, who had read him the riot act only moments before the meeting began. He was furious that Hicks had let the situation get so far out of control.
Also present at the meeting were several political figures, most notably Mayor Ebert (who hadn’t slept a wink) and the governor of New York. Elsie and Mendel sat near the head of the table, to Hicks’s immediate left.
When I slipped quietly into the tent, the colonel was standing at a large map of the area explaining to his audience the previous night’s wild chase through Manhattan. Black X’s on the map showed the positions of severely damaged buildings. There were at least forty of these X’s clogging the midtown area. Things weren’t going very well for Hicks. When I entered, he seemed both relieved that I’d made it and angry that I wasn’t on time. I think he was counting on me to help him assure the military brass that everything humanly possible was being done. A Marine Corps general interrupted the presentation as I closed up my bright red umbrella.
“Colonel Hicks, what makes you think another attempt to gun this lizard down is going to be any more successful than the last one? You’ve already done a hell of a lot of damage to the city.”
“Naturally, we want to do as little physical damage to the city as we can.” Hicks went back to his map and pointed to a large green section. “What we’d like to do is lure him out into a more open area, such as this section of Central Park, where we’ll be able to get a clear shot at him and bring him down without damaging any more structures.”
Mayor Ebert grumbled, “Last time you destroyed several historical landmarks and you didn’t even scratch him!”
“That’s not entirely true. Our worm guy—excuse me, I mean Dr. Tatopoulos here—found blood. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”
Every eye in the room turned to me. I could tell Hicks was hoping I’d help get him off the hook. I tried to break the bad news slowly. “Well, yes. Yes, I did find blood.” It just wasn’t the kind of blood they thought.
“So you see,” the colonel interrupted me, “we did more than scratch him. And now that we understand what we’re up against, all we have to do is lure him into open terrain and use weapons that don’t rely on heat-seeking technology. I spoke to Fort Bragg this morning and they’re sending up—”
“Um, excuse me, sir,” I interrupted his interruption, “but despite the very fine job the army did last night, the situation has gotten to be a wee bit more complicated. You see, the blood I recovered after the creature left the square reveals that it is either about to lay eggs or already has.”
The governor of the great state of New York arched an eyebrow. “Are you trying to tell us there’s another one of these things out there? Or maybe a whole population of them? And if so, where are they all hiding?”
“No, sir. I don’t think that’s the case. I think he’s the only one.”
“Then how the hell can it be pregnant?” Mayor Ebert demanded loudly. His aide, Gene, quickly whispered something in his ear. “Right. What is this thing, the virgin lizard?”
His remark caused a smattering of laughter from the military bigwigs. And Mendel found it pretty entertaining as well. He tried to share a laugh with Elsie, but she looked away from him, disgusted. I hadn’t had a chance to share my findings with them before the meeting. I knew that no one at the conference table would be laughing once they understood the full implications of my discovery. If I was right, we were staring down the barrel of a worldwide catastrophe much worse than the human race had ever faced before. The writing on the wall seemed to spell out our own annihilation as the dominant species on earth. I explained.
“Actually, Mr. Mayor, there’s some truth to your jo
ke. I believe this is a virgin lizard, which makes the situation a whole lot more dangerous. From what I can gather, the creature, like some amphibians, reproduces asexually. That’s why it is absolutely imperative that we find the nest as quickly as possible. If we don’t get there in time, as many as ten to twelve more of these creatures could be born. And each of them will, in turn, be capable of laying ten to twelve of its own eggs.” At the time I thought these numbers were slightly inflated because they didn’t take into account the large number of losses reptile broods typically experience, but since I needed to convince the generals that this was no laughing matter, I let the exaggeration stand. “Because the creature has no natural enemies except us, its population could increase at a geometric rate. In a matter of only a few years, we could find ourselves facing an enormous number of these animals.”
This news hit Hicks like a punch in the gut. He let out a long sigh, then reached up and rubbed the dark circles under his eyes. It was clear he hadn’t slept the night before, and he was looking the worse for wear. After a moment of contemplation he announced a slight modification to his Plan C. “We go after the creature. We kill it. Then we begin hunting for the nest.”
I shook my head. “By then it may be too late. These eggs are going to hatch very quickly.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Mendel asked, ready to debunk my theory.
“I was going to ask that same question,” said General Anderson, highly dubious.
The answer was simple. “The fish. The fish we found down in the subway. He’s not gathering all that food just for himself. He’s stockpiling it, preparing to feed his young.”
There was a long pause around the conference table while the idea sank in. We were having a devil of a time dealing with just one of these reptiles. What were we going to do with ten or twelve of them?
Of course, none of us sitting under the green tarpaulin roof of the command center had the slightest suspicion that the place was bugged or that the whole conversation was being monitored by a group of nondescript foreign men who claimed to be insurance adjusters. As we sat there discussing these highly classified subjects, a man in a nearby seedy hotel room was handing another man a dossier. The documents and photographs inside this folder concerned a certain American biologist whose name he couldn’t quite pronounce. “Tatata … Topopup … Je ne sais quoi!”
The man with the salt-and-pepper beard, who accepted the dossier, studied the name carefully before examining the file. “Tatopoulos.”
Inside, there were photographs of me along with a complete record of my employment history. They even had my college transcripts!
The conference inside the command center broke down into several private discussions. Half the people in the room seemed not to believe what I was telling them. In the middle of the confusion, one of the governor’s aides entered the tent and whispered something into his boss’s ear. The governor listened and nodded.
Hicks stood at the head of the table and called for everyone’s attention. As soon as he had it, he began explaining Plan D. “If Dr. Tatopoulos is right, we must act quickly before this situation escalates beyond our control. We can send Divisions A, C, and F”—he indicated their current positions on the map—“down into the subways to begin a thorough sweep. Meanwhile—”
General Anderson, who had been scowling in disbelief the whole time, leaned across the table and cut the colonel off with a venomous hiss. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Colonel Hicks, but you seem to be suggesting we divide our efforts and open up a whole new front based solely on some wild theory.”
“Nick has come through for us before,” Hicks replied. “I have every confidence in him, and if he feels strongly—”
Anderson interrupted again, this time venting all his pent-up frustration. “Come through for you? Colonel, maybe you need another cup of coffee. Your whole campaign has been one disaster after another. You weren’t even able to prevent this thing from coming to Manhattan!”
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” the governor interjected diplomatically.
“Ahem,” Elsie coughed.
“Gentlemen and Dr. Chapman, my assistant has just informed me there’s a news report I think we should see.”
A soldier turned on the television set, and we saw the WIDF ActionNews logo appear on the screen. It was replaced a moment later by the image of an elderly Japanese man in a hospital bed screaming, “Gojira! Gojira!” The image froze, allowing us to study the terror that filled the old man’s eyes.
Right away I knew something was horribly wrong.
A moment later anchorman Charles Caiman’s surgically enhanced face replaced the sailor’s. “From an old Japanese sailor’s song called ‘Godzilla’ ”—I have no idea how he mangled the pronunciation so badly—“a mythological sea dragon who attacked ancient sailors, to our own modern day terror. Who is this Godzilla? Where did he come from? And why has he come here? Find out in my special report.”
(As I would learn much later, Audrey and Animal were at that very moment watching the same televised report in a crowded bar less than a mile from the command center. When she realized what was happening, that Caiman had stolen her story, Audrey began cursing him wildly and throwing handfuls of pretzels at the television screen. As an embarrassed Animal dragged her kicking and screaming out of the bar, she yelled at the smugly grinning image of Caiman, “And it’s Gojira, you moron!”)
In the command center, all attention was on the television screen and WIDF’s report. A series of computerized maps popped up, giving the story a visual component. “A direct path can be traced backward from Manhattan to Jamaica to Panama and eventually all the way back to French Polynesia, where the French government has been conducting nuclear tests for many years.”
It quickly became clear that someone close to the military effort, someone on the inside, had leaked this information to the press. I heard a pencil snap in two and glanced over at Hicks, who was bright red, burning with anger and embarrassment.
“A member of the expert scientific team the army has assembled to deal with this unprecedented situation, Dr. Nick Padapadamus, believes the creature is nesting, using Manhattan’s towering skyscrapers and deep subway tunnels as ground zero for the cultivation of an entirely new species.”
The moment he heard my name, General Anderson swiveled around in his chair and exploded. “You went to the press with this?”
I was stunned. “No, no, I didn’t … I-I didn’t talk to anyone.”
“They mentioned you by name!”
“Yes, yes, they did. But no, no, I didn’t … I didn’t go to them.”
Calmly, far too calmly, Hicks asked me whether I’d given my copy of the videotape to anyone.
“No, no,” I assured him, “it’s still in my tent.” I knew exactly where I’d left it, right on top of the … and then it dawned on me what must have happened. “Oh, God, she took it.”
Everyone around the table stared at me in disbelief, thinking I had betrayed them. I knew it wasn’t going to do any good trying to defend myself, so I didn’t even try to explain the whole thing about running into Audrey and how I hadn’t seen her for so many years and why I’d invited her past the military cordon. So I just stared straight ahead and waited for what I knew was coming next.
“Pack up your stuff, Doctor,” General Anderson growled as he glowered at me, “and get the hell out. You are officially off this project as of now!”
It was the worst hour of my life. I was humiliated, deeply embarrassed, angry with myself that I’d let everyone down, worried about what this might mean for my future, and deeply wounded by Audrey. I didn’t understand how she could do such a thing—it felt as though she’d swooped down out of the blue just long enough to rip my heart out. General Anderson had given me half an hour to pack all my equipment and personal effects. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I ran over the deadline, so after hastily packing up my scientific instruments, I literally threw my other possessions into my duffle ba
g just as two soldiers arrived to escort me off the grounds.
Elsie came into the tent as I was preparing to leave. “I’m sorry about all this.”
“I really didn’t give that tape to anyone.”
“I believe you,” she said. I think she meant it.
“Look, Elsie, make sure Hicks finds that nest before it’s too late.”
“I’ll try,” she said, extending a hand. “Bye, worm guy.”
It was still raining as if it would never end when I walked outside. About five minutes earlier I’d realized the army wasn’t going to provide any transportation. They were going to toss me and my bags out the front gate. After that I’d be on my own. I called a cab company, but the dispatcher told me I might have to wait for quite a while, even after I explained that it was an emergency. So I was surprised and relieved to see a yellow taxicab parked right outside my tent.
“You got here awfully fast,” I said.
The driver rolled down his window a quarter of an inch. “Where to?” he asked in a nondescript foreign accent.
“Newark Airport. I’ve got a lot of luggage back here.” I was hinting that he might want to come around back and give me a hand. Instead, the trunk popped open automatically and the driver rolled up his window. I hate this town, I thought.
And as I was loading my rain-soaked possessions into the trunk, who should come jogging up to me but Ms. Audrey Timmonds, reporter at large.
“You’re leaving? Why?” She seemed so authentically surprised that it was almost possible to believe her innocent-little-Audrey act. But I ignored her and kept packing. I was convinced she was no longer the wide-eyed apple-pie girl next door she once had been. Now it was only a sham, a way to sink her claws deeper into a story. “Is this because of me? Because of the story?”
“Well, what did you think was going to happen?” I snarled.
She looked at the ground. “You never said it was off the record.”
What nerve! I came very close to losing my temper. “I shouldn’t have to, Miss Big Shot Reporter. You were supposed to be my friend. I trusted you.”
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