Godzilla

by Stephen Molstad

  With the boat listing dangerously to one side, the captain ordered his skipper to override the computer system and throw the ship into full reverse. A moment later the engines growled and the boat jerked backward. Both men were thrown toward the front wall of the bridge, and the attack—by that point they knew it was an attack—came to a temporary halt.

  A check of the sonar screen showed that the shape in the water was gone, suddenly vanished. Moving to the controls, the captain scanned the ocean in all directions. Whatever had torn open the side of the Kobayashi had disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared. The big ship righted itself in the water and everything became quiet again. There was the sound of the rain hitting the front windows, the squeak of the wiper blades, and a calm, cool, computerized voice telling them in Japanese that water was continuing to flood into certain sectors of the ship. The craft had sustained extensive damage but was still a long way from sinking.

  Then, through the noise of the storm raging beyond the plate-glass windows, the captain heard a telltale sound, a plaintive, screeching wail that sounded at once both otherworldly and distinctly familiar. “Sensuikan ni chigainai,” he pleaded, although by then he’d given up any real hope the crisis could be explained away so easily. Besides, submarines don’t howl. He moved to the front of the cabin, pressed his nose to the window, and cupped his hands around his eyes to block the light behind him. Each time the wipers stroked by, he caught a split-second glimpse of the foredeck. Sky and sea were a uniform black mass under the sheeting, wind-whipped rain. Nevertheless, the captain thought he saw something moving in the distance. He was about to mention this fact to his skipper when they both heard the same forlorn wail again. This time it was loud, close by. They looked at each other, alarmed, almost as if they recognized the sound. The captain turned back to the window just in time to see something huge moving toward them. By the time he recognized what it was, it was too late—it had smashed down through the roof of the bridge, killing them both instantly.

  • • •

  That’s where I came into the picture. My own windshield wipers were squeaking back and forth across the window of the van I was driving, but they were so old they merely rearranged the water streaming down outside. The engine kept stalling out, and of course neither the radio nor the cassette player worked at all. I was driving along a rutted road through a gray, highly polluted landscape that was desolate even at the height of summer. Ah, the splendors of Ukraine, heartland of the former Soviet Union!

  I swerved just in time to avoid a roadblock marked with various international warning signs: NUCLEAR RADIATION and NO TRESPASSING. Squinting through the blurred window, I could see the rusting hulk of the damaged Chernobyl nuclear power plant looming straight ahead. I was driving to the very center of the worst accidentally radiation-contaminated site on earth. I pulled off the utility road into a muddy field of dead crabgrass and stepped out into the elements.

  One look at the withered, diseased landscape surrounding the Chernobyl site is enough to convince any sane, impartial observer that radiation is some seriously nasty stuff. Only a few stunted trees punctuated the dreary, lifeless valley. Clearly, we are not ready, technologically or intellectually, to be using this method of power generation. This holds especially true in a place such as the former Soviet Union, where quality workmanship went out of style with the tsars.

  Nevertheless I was in high spirits. Splashing to the rear of the van, I began hauling out my equipment, all of it clearly labeled with big yellow stickers that identified my employer: NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION. The sight of those stickers on my belongings never failed to give me a jolt, a reality check. I’m not going to bore you with my whole life story, but every time I saw those boldly printed words I had to shake my head in disbelief. How did a campus crusader for environmental issues like myself end up working for the biggest, baddest wolf in the ecological forest? Most NRC employees, people who have the facts and should know better, actually believe that nuclear energy is a good thing, in spite of the fact that we still haven’t figured out what to do with the spent plutonium. Little did my coworkers suspect that it was my ultimate goal to bring the entire nuclear industry to its knees. And that is why I was out there on that intemperate afternoon. I was hunting for the evidence I needed.

  I grabbed my conducting rods and speared them into the earth in a big circle, then popped open the hood of the van and hooked them up to the van’s battery. Bzzt! I made a face and shook the electric tingle-burn out of my right hand. I’d been so busy singing, I’d forgotten I was standing in a puddle. Working more carefully, I attached the cable to the positive terminal, then jogged back to the circle of rods and dropped to my knees to watch the magic happen.

  Almost immediately they came wriggling up to the surface: earthworms, terrestrial annelids of the class Oligochaeta and the family Lumbricidae. They were the reason I had endured three years of struggle with the post-Soviet bureaucracy. I was there to collect specimens of these creatures living at the epicenter of the contamination caused by the Chernobyl accident back in ’86. They came to the surface by the handful, racing to escape the electrical charge of the conducting rods. I watched their segmented bodies squirming like so many hermaphroditic Gene Kellys—minus raincoats and umbrellas—and felt compelled to sing.

  With a terpsichorean grace of my own, I waltzed to my kit box and lifted the lid. As I fell to one knee and reached dramatically for a glass specimen jar, I saw something that yanked most of the sunshine out of my heart: Audrey. Beautiful Audrey, my darling earthbound angel, staring up at me with that impish grin of hers. She’d been my college sweetheart and—I might as well admit it—the only woman I’d ever truly loved. It had been a long time, eight years, since I’d seen her in person, and I wondered about keeping those photos of her taped to the inside of the kit. At what point does enduring love turn into an inability to let go of the past?

  Oh, Audrey! I bit my lip the way she was doing in one of the photos and wished she could have been there with me at that moment. I sensed that I was on the verge of making a breakthrough discovery and would have liked very much for her to witness my moment of personal triumph. But then I remembered why we’d gone our separate ways. Or perhaps I should say why I thought we’d gone our separate ways, since I never actually got the chance to ask her. Unlike me, she found no particular fascination in things that slithered, crawled, and carried their sex organs in their heads. Groady, repulsive, and icky were all words she’d used at one time or another to describe my research. I glanced up at the dirty, wet landscape and the oppressive dome of the rusting reactor. Nope, I told myself, Audrey definitely wouldn’t like it here. I took a deep breath and forced myself to sing. I wasn’t going to let anything ruin this day for me. Turning my attention back to the dancing worms, I started depositing them one by one into my sample jars.

  I’m singin’ in the mud,

  just scooping up my worms,

  You’ll be sliced up in the lab,

  not eaten by birds.

  They were huge, positively titanic. Some stretched out to an awe-inspiring thirteen inches. Can you imagine that? Earthworms twelve and thirteen inches long? This highly abnormal finding, I was convinced, was the smoking gun, the piece of evidence I needed to stop the worldwide madness of the nuclear power industry. I held one of my foot-long champions in the air between my fingers, allowing him/her to dance to the last bars of the song. Sotto voce I improvised some more new lyrics:

  You’re very, very large,

  Gonna have to name ya Marge.

  You’re proof of what I been statin’,

  You worms are all mutatin’!

  Or something like that. Somehow I failed to notice the dark shape looming over my shoulder until it was almost directly on top of me.

  A large, drab Russian helicopter set down next to my van, and several military men, Russian or Ukrainian soldiers—I couldn’t tell the difference—hurried toward me. I was sure they were going to tell me the facility was off-li
mits and try to kick me out. Like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, I hid some of the evidence, stashing a fistful of worms into the pocket of my raincoat. It took me a second to remember that I was there with official permission. I stood up and pulled out my wallet.

  “Dobryi den!” I called out. I’d picked up a few words of Russian during my travels, but not enough. I did my best to tell them I was engaged in legal, government-authorized research. “Ia dzes … uh, razresheniem. U menia … permit. How do you say permit?”

  To my horror, they ignored my feeble attempts to speak their language, marched right past me, and began gathering up my equipment.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” I stepped right in front of one of them, momentarily blocking his path. The muscular, square-jawed man stared down at me with expressionless eyes. Only then did I realize how large he and his trench-coat-clad, jackbooted comrades were. I grinned and let him pass. As he began pulling up my conducting rods I sloshed over to the officer who seemed to be in charge and explained, “U menia … permitski! Understand? Documenti okayski!”

  I held my papers up for his inspection. He gave me a superior grin and ignored my papers. Another man came trotting from the helicopter wearing civilian clothes. He flashed me a fast, fake smile and asked me if I was Dr. Nick Topapopolosis, which sounded like some kind of communicable disease.

  “It’s Tatopoulos,” I corrected him.

  “Right, I know all about you. You’re the worm guy, aren’t you?” He had an American accent and a dismissive edge to his manner. At that point my hand was still hiding in my coat pocket. I could feel my little friends squirming between my muddy fingers. “The name’s Terrington,” he said gruffly, offering to shake my hand as if he were doing me some kind of favor. “I’m with the U.S. State Department. Glad to meet you, worm guy.”

  I couldn’t help it. All smiles, I reached out and firmly gripped his hand. “Glad to meet you, too, state department guy.”

  The soldiers were packing up my equipment and loading most of it into the helicopter. As one of them marched past me with my toolbox I yanked it out of his hands. “What’s going on here?” I yelled at the American guy. “What are you guys doing? I’m working here with permission!”

  Terrington was wiping his hand clean with a handkerchief. The way he looked up at me told me I hadn’t made a new friend. “You’ve been reassigned.”

  “What? That’s impossible! On whose orders?” He didn’t answer. He and the Russian officer walked back to the helicopter, leaving me standing there in the downpour.

  A chill rose up my spine, literally raising my hackles. I knew in a flash that this was the beginning of one of those byzantine government cover-ups. Someone somewhere had reviewed my experiments and figured out the staggering logical consequences of my research. The Chernobyl earthworms were a full 17 percent too large. Because they reproduce asexually, they are the ideal species with which to measure the gene-altering effects of exposure to radiation. Once the scientific community got a whiff of my findings, their heads would clear as though they’d been given a stiff dose of smelling salts. They would rouse from their collective slumber and demand an end to the madness of the current nuclear power industry. And so these menacing soldiers had been sent to keep me from completing my work.

  Wanting no part of their conspiracy, I stood my ground and called after the retreating officials that I wasn’t going to be a pawn in their ugly little game, that under no circumstances was I coming with them. But when a couple of the soldiers drove away with my van, I was forced to change my tactics. I marched angrily toward the helicopter, shouting something about how they wouldn’t be able to stop science and the great march of knowledge.

  Just about the time I was in Kiev boarding a jet that would take me seven thousand miles to the southwest, events important to this story were taking place in a small hospital six thousand miles to the southeast.

  Dusk had settled like a golden glass bowl over Papeete, Tahiti, the end of another balmy, eighty-degree day in Polynesia, when a herd of black Lexus SUVs hissed up and left unsightly skid marks outside the main entrance to Papeete Municipal Hospital, the island’s most modern health facility. A slew of Caucasian men who looked like they probably worked for a government threw open the doors and prepared to enter the building. But they lingered, waiting for their leader, who stepped, at some leisure, from the back of his Lexus and lit a cigarette. Smoking is a disgusting habit to begin with, but to light up as you’re preparing to enter a hospital betrays a monumental arrogance, a disdain for the conventions of common decency. It announces you as someone who is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

  Such a man was Phillipe Roaché. He was in his forties, with a salt-and-pepper grizzle of beard and dark, heavy eyes that made him look droll in a continental sort of way. He was intense and alert. He was clever and unpredictable. And, suspiciously, he was French. He sucked hard at his filterless Gauloise, then led his henchmen inside, where they fanned out and quickly located the French doctor who had called the case in to Paris. Of course, their whole conversation would have been en français, a language everyone says is beautiful to the ears but which has always sounded to me like someone trying to speak through a mouthful of yogurt. I will translate what I imagine they must have said to one another.

  The young doctor (we’ll call him Jean-Jacques): “Finally, you have arrived! The Americans have exerted much pressure upon us to tell them if there were any survivors.”

  Phillipe Roaché: “What have you told them so far?”

  Jean-Jacques: “Nothing as of yet.”

  Roaché: “Very good. Where is this survivor, the fisherman?”

  Jean-Jacques: “Here, sir. Directly behind this door. He is indeed very lucky to be alive!”

  At that point the young doctor would have pushed open the door to reveal, in the corner of the darkened room, an elderly Japanese curled into the fetal position on his bed. A couple of nurses puttered nearby, offering whatever mercies they could to their traumatized patient, the sole survivor of the Kobayashi Maru. Before leading the way into the room, the doctor, Jean-Jacques, would have glanced down at the burning cigarette and reminded the visitor, “Of course, smoking is not allowed.”

  “Get them out of here,” Roaché growled, probably waving his cancer stick in the air for dramatic effect as he shooed the medical staff away like so many houseflies. Once they were gone, he signaled his men to set up the video camera they would use to record the interview.

  Moving to the side of the bed, Roaché squatted down and examined the sailor through the metal side rails. It was the same man, the Kobayashi’s cook. The old man’s eyes were open but stared straight ahead vacantly. He appeared to be lost inside some private nightmare only he could see as he rocked himself back and forth, arms locked tight around his knees, whimpering softly.

  “Get over here and ask him what happened,” Roaché demanded brusquely of one of his agents. “We need to know if he saw anything.” And another Frenchman, let’s call him Jean-Luc, approached the bed and spoke in passable Japanese to the shellshocked mariner, asking him several questions. He received no reply.

  “It’s no use. Whatever happened to him on that ship, it put him into a complete state of shock. I don’t think he knows we are here.”

  Roaché, resourceful to a fault, rummaged through his pockets and found his platinum lighter. He ignited it at its highest setting, then brought it dangerously close to the patient’s face. “What did you see, old man?” he asked in a throaty whisper. “What did you see out there?”

  The old cook began to tremble slightly. The faraway look of shock that had frozen itself on his face changed to one of all-too-present horror. The flame of the lighter was melting his calm, transporting him back to the frigid sea and the terror he’d experienced there.

  “Gojira,” he mumbled. “Gojira.”

  Roaché glanced up for a translation, but Jean-Luc only shrugged to show he didn’t understand.

  “Gojira … Gojira!” The
old man began repeating the sound over and over, each time with increasing power, until he was screaming at the top of his lungs and had to be restrained. “Go-ji-ra!”

  I catnapped most of the way between Kiev and our destination, which was good because I was going to need the rest. It’s never a pleasant experience being kidnapped and dragged halfway around the world by people you believe to be part of a multinational paramilitary quasi-govemmental conspiracy bent on suppressing your research. It was a long flight, and each time I woke up I argued with Terrington, demanding to be told why I was being abducted and where we were going. The only information I could wring from him was that there was some sort of emergency that required my attention. I was really upset and didn’t care who knew it. My mood lightened somewhat when I realized where we were headed. They were taking me to Panama, one of my favorite places on earth. I’d been there twice before, mixing scientific business with vacation pleasure. The people are friendly, the scenery is breathtaking, and the dollar goes a long way. This trip, however, was going to be all work and no play.

  By the way, the name Panamá, in the language of the indigenous people, means “an abundance of fish.” Think about it.

  We landed in the capital, Panama City, then transferred to an amphibious seaplane and headed north toward the Golfo de San Miguel. I’d never been to this area, a part of the country I’d been wanting to visit for years. The view from the open doors of our plane was magnificent. We scared up huge flocks of birds as we skimmed over the treetops of the endless green jungle, the northernmost reaches of the great tropical rain forest that extends down into South America. Did you know that the biological diversity of this primeval jungle is unmatched on the planet? Or that the forest’s lush plant life is responsible for filtering and generating a vast quantity of the fresh air we breath? I’m very tempted to interrupt the story again and explain all the horrors being wrought by the logging industry down there, but I’ll save that for another book.