Gojiro (28 page)

He figured he might as well reconnoiter the immediate environs so as to better fix Brooks in his habitat. Ardent scholar of Heater-related memorabilia and minutiae that he was, Gojiro had long ago identified the ramshackle complex as the McDonald Ranchette, a foreclosed homesteader spread taken over by the Feds after the decision to use the Encrucijada as the test site. It was here, in the tumbledown stone house that now served as the scientist’s abode and the several outbuildings, that the Bomb was conceived and assembled. The place was indelibly documented in those same eight or ten photos that appeared, over and over again, in every tome ever put out about the Project. The shot of laundry hanging outside the quonset huts; the one of Victor Stiller smiling behind a fake mustache as he sang in what was always described as a “New Year’s Eve bash talent show in the makeshift dance hall”; another of Colonel Grives’s bulk silhouetted against the desert twilight as he examined the tower where the Heater was to be installed; and, of course, the famous picture of Brooks himself carrying the box containing fissionable materials on a Coca-Cola tray, placing it on the back seat of a ’42 Dodge parked at the front gate—these were the official, defining images, the visual record of the Heater’s gestation and birth. No others were ever released. It was all top secret. During the war no one was even supposed to know such a place existed. Then, some years later, came the report that the ranchette buildings had been burned up in a lightning storm, the remains eventually bulldozed flat. Yet here it was, at least some of it, along with its solitary resident. Some way to treat a shrine of the Modern Age, Gojiro snorted, padding about the dilapidated property. What a waste of potential tourism. Where was the line of school buses, the concessionaires hawking “I lived through the Trinity” T-shirts?

One structure in particular drew the monster’s attention. No more than a shed, freestanding behind the collapsed wood barn, the reptile first dismissed the structure as an abandoned outhouse. But why would an old crapper need that kind of security? The splintered door was slapped with at least a dozen heavily oxidized padlocks. Hundreds of nails were driven, scattershot, through haphazardly affixed shutters.

Looks like somebody wanted this place closed up pretty bad, the lizard thought, making his way along the bowed walls of the hut until he found a hole big enough to squeeze through. “Pee-yew!” Filled with swelling cans of army C rations, useless plumbing fixtures, yellowed ledgers and maps, a pile of Jeep distributors, the shed reeked of formic acid and must. Gojiro was about to leave when he noticed a small desk tucked behind sections of a smashed wind gauge. On top of the desk, leaning against the wall behind, was a blackboard.

The shock surged through him, a dorsal undulate from tailpoint to cranial dome. The chalk scrawls on that dusty blackboard, those numbers and letters, vectors and inversions—the monster knew them. By heart. They were blazoned into his brain sure as the Triple Rings were etched onto his chest. That blackboard . . . it was
the
blackboard.

Maybe to some it might have looked like a child’s toy. But as far as Gojiro was concerned, that slate, and the figures written on it, represented the end product of all hominid aspiration. “Their entire history leads there, from Olduvai on!” the monster exclaimed whenever the topic of that blackboard came up. “You see them faraway looks in the faces of the Pekings and the Cro-Mags? You think they’re puzzling the hunt, the gather? No way. Even then, inside those dimmest mentalities, they was figuring how to bombard the nucleus, accelerate the particle. From the start, all their seemingly unrelated eurekas was aimed at a single goal: what’s written on Joe Pro Brooks’s blackboard.”

Szilard blinking in front of that London stoplight, Rutherford and Cavendish, Fermi’s exponentials, Urey’s heavy hydrogen, Bohr, Born, Meitner, Heisenberg and the rest, everything Einstein knew—to Gojiro all of it was nothing but the feverish last lap, concluding linkages in a harrowing chain. But it took Brooks to write it down, to bind the final fusion. The Heater’s recipe!—that’s what was on that blackboard. Gojiro felt weak. How hideous it was to stand before that old slate, that tablet of the New Dark Age.

That night . . .

The reptile often thought of those events as another private nightmare. After all, how could any version of that night—of those final months for that matter—claim to be definitive? The saga of the Heater’s birth—so filled with awe and terror as to be intolerable in the naked realm of fact—had been reimagined so often, from so many points of view, as to scuttle any attempt at universal certainty. The story had escaped to the public domain, that subjectivized zone where each and every one was free to enter a personal relationship with the billowing Cloud. That’s how it is at the moment of holocaust, when meaning is exploded and all expectation shattered: facts become story and stories fact, mix and match, say anything, history’s Play-Doh in our hands.

So, write in on boxtops if you know better, about that night.

Tell if the Reich, its every chinstrap in place, every boot shined, wasn’t marching across the land. Tell if Civilization’s supposed last, best chance didn’t rest in the hands of a cabal of vague longhairs, feyish Jews and worse, watched by uniformed keepers who had no choice but to trust them. Except it wasn’t going good. The gadget stood inert, stalled in Fate’s midstream.

Say if it wasn’t then, with the sun disappearing behind those red cliffs, that Brooks put down his clarinet and told them all to get out—that he, and he alone, would forge the Thing. That he would do it that night, be finished before dawn. Impossible, the chorus rose, no one could encompass the Big Idea all by himself, certainly not in a single night.

Go ahead, swear that Brooks didn’t face them and then say he would do it by himself because that’s what he was
born
to do.

Say if it’s not so: that Joseph and Leona Brooks didn’t walk off together at nightfall, go deep into the Encrucijada, not to return until well past midnight. Tell if Brooks didn’t then walk into that very shed where Gojiro now stood, and, before the sun rose again, set down on that blackboard the sum total of all his kind had ever known. And tell if, exactly nine months later, the Loom was not upon the land.

Joseph Prometheus Brooks’s blackboard . . . the monster took a deep breath. Once, in a perverse moment, he’d urged Komodo to stick a “fabulous production number” into one of those cheesy movies. “Line up ten rows of Atoms, ten abreast, all in black, give each one a pointer, stand them in front of a chalkboard scribbled with the fateful formula. Then I’ll come out, in tie and tails, announce the show—‘Ladies and gentlemen: 100 Brookses! 100 blackboards! Come on, worldshatterers! Go into your dance!’ ”

Now, however, face-to-face with Brooks’s real blackboard, the monster could only cower. Indeed, it was only his application to his fieldworking tasks that kept him from cutting and running, scuttling back to the White Light Chamber, lighting up a heebiejeebie-quieting hunk of the hardcuttin’ 235.

He was trying to calm down when he saw those paintings. They were stacked face-down, twenty canvases, maybe more, on an old workbench. Snout-flipping the top one over, the lizard did a double take. It was all there: the X-ray style, that peculiar depthlessness, as if the paintings weren’t on canvas at all, but rather petrogylphs on a cave wall. The technique was so similar, there could not be any doubt—whoever painted these pictures was also responsible for the portrait Joseph Prometheus Brooks was aping even then, right outside that very shed.

But that wasn’t what got to the monster, not first at least. It was the mastodon. That mastodon on a savannah, and the first time you look you think everything’s fine, the wooly thing is just grazing—but then you see the gash on the side of his leg, the rip in the belly. And the sabertooth, off to the side, waiting.

“I seen that mastodon before . . .”

Fainting, the lizard fell off the table, knocking the paintings onto the packed dirt floor as he went. They piled down on top of him, a rain of oversized playing cards. That’s when he saw the T-Rex. The same T-Rex, towering above the jungle canopy, and on its majestic face—that first hint of fear. There could be no mistake. It was the same T-Rex he’d seen inside that Beam!

“Wait a minute!” Feverish, the reptile clawed through the paintings. There they were, the giant shrews, the needlenosed fish with the quizzical looks . . . and that giant stone, hurtling down from the sky! What was going on? There wasn’t a single one of those pictures the monster hadn’t seen before, hadn’t lived through in that retrorunning influx. Each one was signed Leona Ross Brooks, dated 1934. The same year she painted that portrait of Brooks . . . three years before she was to have first laid eyes on the man.

It was insane. How could Sheila Brooks’s mother paint a
Beam
? None of it made sense, but right then the monster didn’t care. If Leona Brooks saw everything else, then maybe she saw . . .

“Mom!” Desperately, he cast aside one familiar scene after another. Depictions of mountains rising and falling flew left and right. “Mom!”

But he never got to her. He never got past that Echo Man, that Indian, the one he’d seen on television. Nelson Monongae, who said his Clan—
the Lizard Clan
—owned the Encrucijada and everything in it. They were talking about him again the other night, on one of those funky Philcos Komodo had switched over to outside reception. The Echo Man was missing, they said, he’d disappeared right in the middle of the trial proceedings, hadn’t been seen for days. A search was on, in every flophouse from Gallup to Grants, up to Shiprock and down to Socorro. The Indian’s fancy lawyers denied their client was “off drunk,” instead claiming he was engaged in a secret religious ritual sacred to the Monongae Clan. They asked for a continuance on that basis. The State protested, said their anthropologists knew of no such ceremony. The judge looked tough. “Find the man,” he decreed.

Now, there he was, that same Echo Man, in an X-ray painting by Leona Ross Brooks. But he wasn’t that wizened toothless man from the TV screen. This was a young Echo Man, a teenager, strong and straight, dressed in an elaborate costume. And around his neck, that vial. The same vial he wore around his neck the other night, on television. There was something about that black vial!

“Come in!”

The monster looked around. “Who said that?”

“Please come in!”

“Oh!” Suddenly Gojiro was traveling again, whooshing away. Except it didn’t feel like that Beam. No, it was more like . . . “Oh shit!” . . . that 90 Series!

He went like he’d gone to Tyrone of Philly, to Abdul of Beirut, to Billy Snickman. He went the way he always went, before he forced Komodo into the Quadcameral, demanded that his great friend short-circuit whatever wiring brought those clutching supplications into his harried head.

And, just as he’d inhabited the souls of all the others, Gojiro became Nelson Monongae—a young Nelson Monongae, no more than twelve, at the edge of puberty, sitting inside his father’s hogan, with stretched skins all around, cracked and tearing. Outside he could see the drawn faces. People hungry, dying. In here, surrounded by somber elders, his father was chanting, trying to rouse the spirit. Praying to a Beast—a magnificent Beast who once upon a time set a world in motion, but had long since withdrawn, his memory fading from the minds of men, save a few. It was the job of these men to petition the Beast, to beg its return so the world might begin again.

“Come in,” they summoned, Nelson’s father leading the prayer. “Come in!” They called the Beast to rise from the earth, which is where He lived, deep in slumber.

Then they were dressing him, decking him with leathers. Off came his loincloths, the bands around his waist and arms. On went the scaly headdress, a great ridge of dorsal fringe down to the ground. When they were done, he looked into his father’s face, so sick and worn—the greatest shaman of the Clan, dying before forty. “You will be the Echo Man, you will awake the Beast,” his father said. Then he reached up behind his head, pulled, broke a cord. The vial! The father took it from his own neck, tied it around his son’s. “Blood from underground.
His
blood,” the dying man said. “Take it, bring Him back to us.” That’s when, reflected in a piece of polished silver, Gojiro caught sight of himself, how it looked to be young Nelson Monongae at that moment. He saw those snaking dorsals, reddish comb on top, the glittering eyes: the image of a great zard so much like himself, yet with a critical, indefinable difference. Instinctively, the reptile knew: Here, in this place, in the body of that boyish Echo Man, he was looking at a true vision of the Varanidid.

In the hogan the grave men were chanting again. “Come in! Please come in!” Except that youngest Echo Man wasn’t there. He was outside, in the night air, scanning the dark shadows of the surrounding hills. Gojiro scoped the Encrucijada geography immediately. That campfire was burning in the same spot where Joseph Prometheus Brooks would come to stand all those years in the future.

Then there was a noise. Someone was coming out of the dark, climbing down from the hills—a young girl. A young white girl in an odd billowing dress. She was coming down from the red-rimmed hills, walking right toward him. Closer. Gojiro blinked inside that Varanidid costume the Echo Man wore. Those eyes! He’d heard Komodo talk of those eyes. Verdant, like an isle of pines, he’d said, describing Sheila Brooks’s eyes. But it wasn’t Sheila Brooks coming toward him.

What had Zeber said about Sheila’s mother—that she chose the Encrucijada as the site for the Heater’s debut because she’d been there before? Been there before she ever met Joseph Brooks? The monster was trying to figure it when he felt that Echo Man begin to move toward Leona.

And the way he went: it was as if he saw her and a million more like her. A billion more, as many as could be seen in as many opposing mirrors, an unbroken chain of her, a snaking double file of her, queued to infinity.
The pheromone!
That’s what drove that Echo Man toward Leona Brooks right then.