We landed on the water near a small, very remote fishing village. I noticed electricity and telephone lines connected to the quaint row of waterfront buildings with their picturesque palm frond roofs. On a normal day the population of this village couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred souls. It looked like any number of peaceful little towns I’d visited in other parts of the country. But the morning I arrived was no normal day. Row after row of military vehicles, some Panamanian and some U.S., were parked along the shore, and as we taxied up to a flimsy wooden pier extending out into the water, we were greeted by a horde of news crews. The army had forbidden them from setting up onshore, so they’d rented the local fishing boats and were floating out in the little bay. It was comical watching these citified reporters with their expensive camera equipment trying to keep their balance in the overcrowded boats. They shouted questions to us as we came to the pier, but I couldn’t hear them over the noise of the engines.
We were met by a contingent of Panamanian policemen and U.S. Army officers. The one who seemed to be in charge came forward and introduced himself. He was in his early fifties and had the gruff, sobering look of a human bulldog.
“Dr. Niko Topodopeless?” he asked.
What is so difficult about my name? Why am I constantly having to correct people’s pronunciation? I could understand if it were something exotic like Schweitzerlangen or Capaccione or Xiaoching or Tsiblisian. But it’s not. “Tatopoulos,” I corrected him a little testily, “just like it’s spelled: T-a-t-o-p-o-u-l-o-s.”
“Sorry ’bout that,” he said without really meaning it. “I’m Colonel Alexander Hicks.” The power of his grip when we shook hands threatened to dislocate my second and fifth metacarpal bones. It wasn’t a display of machismo; I think he was simply distracted by all the pressure of the situation. He turned around and barked orders at his men to clear the pier. Some of the more aggressive reporters were clambering off their boats and snapping photos.
“Excuse me,” I said, shaking the numbness out of my right hand, “would you mind explaining to me what the hell I’m doing here? I was in the middle of some very important research work when—”
“Watch your step!” he warned, seizing me by the arm and “facilitating” my passage toward the shore. We hustled past the bobbing boatloads of reporters, who shouted questions at us in Spanish and English. As we bullied our way between them Colonel Hicks smiled. It was one of those frozen, stonewalling smiles that government officials learn to wear when they are under fire.
Once we were on solid ground, we came to a military cordon beyond which policemen were not allowed to pass. We marched up a hill toward a line of trees. At the top of the slope, where he finally relinquished control of my arm, I was treated to a painful sight. From the air, I hadn’t realized that most of the village was built up here, away from the beach. Perhaps the reason I hadn’t noticed was because the entire village was wrecked.
Actually, wrecked isn’t a strong enough word. Obliterated or flattened is probably a more accurate term for what I saw. The houses were broken off cleanly at their foundations, as if a giant wrecking ball had swept past low to the ground. Fragmented walls and the shattered remnants of a water truck lay in pieces at the edge of the clearing. Articles of clothing and most of a canoe hung in branches of the surrounding trees.
“Yowza!” I said, reacting to the devastation. “Looks like there was a pretty powerful explosion here.”
“Something like that,” was all Hicks would say.
I immediately realized I’d been wrong about their reasons for taking me away from my earthworm work. They were bringing me in on some kind of disaster investigation. I was carrying my equipment box, which was rather heavy. Doing my best to keep up, I jog-walked after the colonel, always half a step behind. We continued moving uphill until we came to a plateau. We passed a temporary field headquarters, which had been established under a camouflage fabric roof. It looked as though they had quite a lot of equipment in there, but we weren’t headed in that direction. Our destination seemed to be a ruined church that stood at the crest of the hill. Hicks stopped briefly to growl some orders to a couple of photographers who were snapping off picture after picture of the wreckage. As he spoke to them I realized there were no signs of a fire. It couldn’t have been an explosion.
“What happened here, Colonel? Some kind of spill?”
“Something like that,” he said, taking off again.
Huffing and puffing, I lugged my load up the hill. Behind us there was a spectacular view of the ocean. “Look,” I said hotly, determined to make him listen to me, “if you guys had a spill, that’s terrible. Sorry to hear it. But I can’t help you with that, because I’m just a biologist.”
Hicks turned his rugged, no-nonsense face toward me and looked me over carefully, as if seeing me for the first time. Worry lines wrinkled his forehead. His jaw pulsed as he gnashed his teeth. After briefly sizing me up, he sniffed and turned away as if taking the time to explain would be a waste of his time. He had bigger fish to fry. “A biologist, huh?” He resumed walking, leading us past some freshly broken trees. Soldiers interrupted their work to salute him as he marched doggedly forward.
“That’s correct. I’m a biologist who happens to be working for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” I told him, “but accidents and spills aren’t my thing. If that’s what happened here, I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong guy.”
As we walked, a new conspiracy theory began to unfold in my mind. It went like this: The army, having caused some horrible ecological disaster, was intent on sweeping the whole matter under the rug. But since there were already reporters sniffing around the area, they couldn’t simply deny that anything at all had happened. They needed a halfway plausible cover story. Furthermore, in order to sell this story to the press, they needed a so-called expert, some stooge with scientific credentials who would stand before the press and tell them the problem wasn’t as severe as early reports seemed to indicate. To this end, they had called upon moi, low man on the NRC totem pole. I suspected that after a quick “tour” of the area, they would present me with some bogus “scientific” report and lean on me to give it my rubber-stamp approval.
But as we came into an open field where soldiers were working in a series of pits, I remembered an important rule of thumb: Never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence. Maybe they really had grabbed the wrong guy. It was time for me to put my foot down.
“Do you guys have any idea who I am? Do you understand that I’m an environmental researcher, with a degree in ecological medicine, conducting research for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Do you realize you just interrupted a three-year study of the Chernobyl earthworm?”
“You implying we picked up the wrong Dr. Nicholas Topopoloss?”
“Tatopoulos!” I steamed. “Niko Tatopoulos.”
He stopped at the top of a makeshift wooden ramp. There were four or five men working in the ditch at the bottom of this ramp. They stopped working to listen to our conversation. “We know who you are. You’re the worm guy.”
I was taken aback. For the second time in as many days someone had called me “the worm guy.” I wasn’t comfortable with that description and hoped it wasn’t going to stick.
“Why not Homo sapiens vermiculum?” I suggested. Of course, he didn’t get it. I realized I was going to have to explain myself in layman’s terms. I followed him down the ramp into the muddy earth of the pit, where one of his lieutenants handed him a clipboard. “Look, Colonel, the radioactive residue around the Chernobyl contamination area has caused this ‘worm guy’s’ worms to undergo genetic mutation, a significant restructuring of their DNA.” I asked him if he had any idea what that meant, and before he could answer I told him. “It means that due to man-made changes in environmental conditions, the course of nature has been radically altered! The Chernobyl earthworms are now over seventeen percent larger than they were before!”
“Seventeen percent la
rger, huh? Sounds big.” He whistled through his teeth. The lieutenant next to him cracked a smirking smile.
I had never dealt with the U.S. Army before. The stereotype I had of them was that they were a bunch of testosterone-heavy dimwits. I thought they weren’t understanding a word I was saying, so I waved my arms in the air to encompass the entire plateau around us, “They’re enormous! But look, Colonel, sir, what I’m telling you is this: I’m a biologist. I take radioactive samples and I study them.”
“Fine,” Hicks said. He pointed to the ground. “Here’s your sample. Study it.” Then he turned and walked away. I had the distinct feeling that, in spite of his serious-as-a-brick way of speaking, he was somehow making a fool of me. A couple of soldiers at the side of the pit snickered before turning back to their work. Something was definitely going on, I decided.
I looked down at the ground, then yelled after the colonel, “What sample?” Hicks didn’t turn back, but the lieutenant he’d left in charge was grinning from ear to ear. Either this man is a simpering idiot, I told myself, or I’m missing something here.
“You’re standing in it.”
I still didn’t see anything. I took a step back. I checked the bottoms of my shoes. And then, slowly, it dawned on me. For the first time I noticed that the pit I was standing in was freshly made. And it wasn’t the only one. A series of identical pits formed a path that ran from the beach through the village and disappeared over the crest of the hills. Some of the trees and buildings around me had been utterly destroyed while others remained undamaged. I realized that something had climbed out of the Pacific and walked—stomped—away over the hills toward the Atlantic.
I was standing inside of a footprint! It was impossibly large—forty feet wide and six feet deep! Once I knew what I was looking for, it all became so clear: The muddy earth of the plateau had been squashed down by a three-toed creature with pointed, recurving claws and a vestigial hallux (a stubby, rather useless fourth toe like the one found at the back of a chicken’s foot). A chill sense of dread spread over my skin as I tried to imagine what kind of beast had made these mind-boggling tracks. Obviously, it had to be unbelievably large and heavy to leave such deep impressions in the ground. I climbed out of the pit and ran along the trail until I came to the next one. It was the mirror image of the first, made with a left foot. I was in a mild state of shock and stood there for a long time with my mouth hanging open, watching a pair of soldiers using a Geiger counter. They were finding trace amounts of radiation.
This is impossible, I told myself. And although I didn’t want to admit it, I recognized the print at once. Based on the splay of the toes and the distinctive shape of the claws, I knew what kind of animal must have walked past. It was a reptile, but more than 17 percent larger than normal. Suddenly my worms didn’t seem so massive.
After taking a look around, I went off in search of Colonel Hicks. He’d gone back to the camouflage tent pitched alongside the debris of the village. Inside there was all manner of high-tech machinery: computers, radar screens, a videotape setup, a scanner-fax, and a bank of cell phones. I remember thinking that this branch of the army really traveled in style. I found the colonel standing next to that most basic piece of military hardware, the coffee urn. I marched up to him and prepared to make an announcement.
His eyebrows arched under the brim of his field cap. He was waiting for me to speak. I tried. But I was so flabbergasted by what I’d seen, the words wouldn’t come. All I could manage to do was point toward the tracks. “Footprint,” I blurted. “Footprint. That was a footprint!”
Hicks nodded.
“I was standing inside a footprint,” I repeated, hammering on the obvious.
“That’s correct.”
“But there’s no animal in the world that can make a footprint like that,” I declared. “Is there?”
A woman’s sultry voice interrupted. “I told them this isn’t your field, but they never listen to genius.” She was about my age, dressed in a set of tight-fitting camouflage fatigues, with a pair of bifocal glasses perched on the end of her nose, and she had her long red hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. My first thought was that she looked like a sexy jungle librarian.
Hicks did the honors. “Dr. Ta …”
“Tatopoulos,” I coached him.
“… Tatopoulos, this is Dr. Elsie Chapman, chief researcher at the National Institute of Paleontology. She’s your boss.”
She was going to ignore me, but then suddenly she changed her mind and gave me a very warm greeting. Maybe a little too warm. Her firm handshake let me know that Dr. Chapman was a self-assured, professional academic who had risen to the top of her specialty. But her smile suggested that, under the right circumstances, she could be one very naughty kitten. She looked me over carefully from head to toe and seemed pleased with what she saw. “Call me Elsie.”
“Those are footprints, right? Did anyone see what made them?”
“No such luck,” Elsie explained, finally releasing my hand. “Whatever it was, it came through here fast. No one knew what hit them till it was too late. We’re finding signs of radiation, which is why you got picked up.” As she talked she laced her fingers behind her back to stretch out her shoulders. I couldn’t help admiring the way her uniform snugged to her curves. Was she flirting with me?
For several moments no one said a word—although I was trying. I kept looking off in the direction of the footprints, thinking of logical explanations for what could have made them. But each time I turned to the others and went to speak, my mind went blank. I might still be standing there fumbling for words if the Jeep carrying Dr. Craven hadn’t pulled up.
Like most people in the scientific community, I’d known about Mendel Craven for years. I recognized him from the dust jackets of his several books and appearances on shows like Good Morning America. He was a chubby, charming, enthusiastic man who had an endearing way of explaining to television cameras all the frightening ways humanity could be wiped away into extinction. I’d only picked up one of his books, The Ebola Virus and You: Ten Easy Steps to Prevention, but never finished reading it. After a brief struggle to extricate himself from the seat belt on the passenger seat of the Jeep, he came racing toward the tent waving a videocassette in the air.
“Tape’s in! The Fr—ah-choo,” he sneezed. “The French finally released it.”
Both Hicks and Chapman reached for the tape, but Craven tucked it under his arm like a fullback and straight-armed his way past them until he arrived at the VCR and slammed the cassette into the machine.
“The French? The tape?” I was confused.
Hicks thought he was filling me in when he said, “A Japanese cannery ship was attacked and sunk last night in the South Pacific, near French Polynesia.” But I didn’t see any immediate connection between a set of oversized animal tracks in Central America and some fishing boat being torpedoed near Tahiti. Then I heard Elsie’s voice in my right ear. She’d come up behind me and practically set her chin down on my shoulder. I could feel her uniform brushing against my back.
“We’re pretty sure there’s a connection,” she whispered before stepping around me. “Dr. Craven, have you met Nick? He’s our worm guy.” The way she said those words, “worm guy,” seemed to suggest a double entendre.
Craven covered his mouth and sneezed again. The handshake would have to wait. “Sorry. Summer cold. Weird, huh?” After flashing me a so-very-glad-to-meet-you smile, he whipped back around and hit play. On the television monitor we saw men moving around a hospital bed speaking in French. One of them leaned down and began speaking French-accented Japanese to the patient.
“Why is that man smoking in a hospital room?” I asked. Everyone shushed me. Then we watched as the man with the cigarette leaned in and worked his sinister magic with his lighter. We heard the old sailor chant the mysterious word Gojira, then we heard him scream it over and over until orderlies rushed in and held him down.
We all turned and looked at one another, wonder
ing the same thing: What the hell is a Gojira? But there wasn’t much time to contemplate this issue, because a few minutes later news arrived of another encounter several hundred miles to the northwest.
As we left Panama and headed for the Caribbean, it began raining in New York City. An early summer storm had gathered in the Gulf of Mexico before pushing north toward New England. I checked the National Weather Service’s user-friendly Web page and learned that the average precipitation in the New York metropolitan region for a seven-day period in early summer is a scant 0.7 inches. The all-time record had been 11.98 inches of rain, set way back in 1889. And that was for an entire month. We surpassed that mark in one week, suffering through an astounding 23.78 inches of rain.
Understandably, people became suspicious. Could it be a mere coincidence, they asked, that the creature arrived during a period of freakish, unprecedented weather? Were the two somehow connected?
My answer is yes, they were. But not in the way many nonscientists are currently claiming they were. In the rush to find comforting explanations, many people have retreated from rational explanations and fallen back on superstitious mumbo-jumbo. This rash of irrationality has been fueled by those unscrupulous snake-oil salesmen known as local TV weatherpersons. Willing to say or do just about anything to improve ratings, these pseudoscientists have invented a voodoo meteorology claiming either that the great quantity of rain caused the creature to erupt out of the bowels of the earth or, just as preposterously, that the creature somehow conjured the rainstorms. Both ideas are ridiculous.
Nevertheless, I believe there is a connection: Our own rampant pollution of the earth caused both the creature and the rain.
Allow me to elaborate. The first law of environmental science is that all parts of an ecosystem, in this case the global biosphere, are interconnected. Changes in one part of the system can trigger unforeseen consequences in another. I have already explained my belief that exposure to the radiation spread by the atomic testing in French Polynesia gave rise to the creature. Likewise, I think a different sort of pollution is responsible for the unseasonable weather that gripped the Northeast. Two little words: global warming. In our lust for burning fossil fuels, those syrupy remains of dinosaurs and ancient plants, we are also burning away the earth’s protective ozone layer and making the planet a hotter place to live. My tour of the National Weather Service’s Web page turned up another startling piece of information: Over the last forty years, the average global temperature has increased from 76 to 76.7 degrees! That might not seem very dramatic, but it means that more and more of the world is becoming tropical. Consequently, weather patterns are changing. If we don’t begin taking action soon, we might be looking at the end of seasonal patterns altogether!
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