Shambling Towards Hiroshima Page 4

  “Treason?” I ventured, sipping coffee.

  “Bingo, Mr. Thorley. We could have you hanged.”

  “You don’t say,” I remarked as my stomach paid a second visit to the descending elevator.

  “Last week Commander Quimby informed you that our mission here at China Lake has been to develop a unique variety of biological weapon, in tandem with the Army’s efforts to build a physics bomb,” Dr. Groelish said in his alternately gravelly and squeaky voice. He sounded like a piccolo undergoing puberty. “We shall now show you the fruits of our labors.”

  Two guards detached themselves from their niches and activated a system of pulleys, thus causing a pair of crimson drapes to part and reveal an enormous porthole framed by a riveted brass ring, beyond which stretched the bottommost reaches of the lake. Gasping and gaping, I surveyed the frothy deep with its shoals of tuna, constellations of starfish, swarms of eels, throngs of crabs, and three great underwater mountains. I felt like a guest on Captain Nemo’s Nautilus.

  “I wouldn’t have guessed it’s a saltwater lake,” I said.

  “It’s not,” Admiral Strickland explained. “The Seabees filled the dry bed with brine.”

  “Where are the weapons?” I asked. “Are those tuna about to explode?”

  Dr. Groelish spread his arms in a gesture that encompassed the whole of China Lake and all its imported inhabitants. “And the Voice from the Whirlwind spake unto Job, saying, ‘Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee.’“

  As if on cue, the three mountains trembled — they weren’t mountains at all — stirring up blizzards of silt. What had roused the hellish beasts was not Dr. Groelish’s biblical incantation but a courageous team of twenty Navy frogmen, gingerly approaching from the far shore. Feeding time at the end of the world, or so I surmised from the containers the divers were hauling, three immense steel cages abrim with shimmering fish.

  “Our behemoths don’t look especially ferocious now, but that’s because they’re heavily sedated,” Commander Barzak noted.

  Sedated or not, the monsters were ravenous. Inch by massive inch, yard by formidable yard, they struggled to stand erect, achieving a fully upright posture just as the cages floated within their grasp. The creatures suggested quarter-mile-high tyrannosaurs, but modified for a marine environment — pulsing gill slits, translucent swim fins, webbing between their talons like the vanes of a Spanish fan — and retrofitted with fighting tusks, barbed horns, feelers as long as tentacles, and dorsal plates the size and proportion of fir trees. Their eyes glowed like signal beacons relaying calamitous news. Their tails were reptiles unto themselves, great undulating sea serpents arrayed in thrusting spines. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth crammed their jaws, shimmering through the swirling murk like columns supporting a temple consecrated to some unspeakable Lovecraftian god.

  “The one with the bright red scales, that’s Dagwood,” Dr. Pellegrino informed me. “Beside him you see Blondie, with the blue stripes on her flanks, and over there we have Mr. Dithers, whose barbels are a hundred feet long.”

  “Our biggest challenge was figuring out how to induce accelerated maturation in common desert lizards, so we could breed them as rapidly as fruit flies,” Dr. Groelish said. “Once we’d licked that problem, we knew the weapon would become a reality. Trace our behemoths back fifteen generations, and you’ll encounter three innocuous iguanas.”

  Dagwood was the first to feast, seizing his portion of fish and stuffing the whole arrangement, cage and all, into his maw. As the monster bit down, the steel bars snapped like uncooked spaghetti. Next Blondie devoured her meal in one gulp, after which Mr. Dithers consumed his dragon chow. While the behemoths seemed to relish their lunches, I was on the point of relinquishing mine. There was nothing good about Dr. Groelish’s monsters. These abominations should never have been born — born, synthesized, stitched together, alchemically confected, necromantically conjured, however they’d come into the world.

  “Any one behemoth, acting on his own, could probably destroy a Japanese city in a matter of hours,” Admiral Strickland said. “Just to be on the safe side, we plan to release them in teams of three.”

  “Dr. Groelish informs us that, besides Blondie, Dagwood, and Mr. Dithers, his team has twenty embryonic behemoths in the hatchery,” Commander Barzak said. “There’s never been an arsenal like this. We can thank our lucky stars that Hitler never got the lizard.”

  “One advantage of this weapon over conventional ordnance is that it doesn’t require a delivery system,” Strickland boasted. “No bombers needed, no rockets, no long-range cannons. We simply have to tow the sedated creature into Japanese coastal waters via submarine. As the tranquilizer wears off, we give the beast a colossal jolt of freedom by abruptly removing its shackles. This chain reaction now combines with the behemoth’s instinctive viciousness to send it swimming to shore and rampaging across the countryside in search of a metropolis to incinerate.”

  “Incinerate?” I said. “They breathe fire?”

  “Of course they breathe fire,” Barzak said. “Why do you think they cost the taxpayers five hundred million dollars?”

  “Next you’ll be telling me they fly,” I said.

  “We looked into that,” Dr. Pellegrino said.

  “Bernoulli’s principle shot us down,” Dr. Groelish said.

  “So, Mr. Thorley, what do you think?” Strickland asked.

  “About what?”

  “The Knickerbocker Project.”

  “You want my honest opinion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gentlemen, you are mad,” I said.

  “When we want your opinion, we’ll ask for it,” Barzak said.

  “You’re really going to set these horrors loose on civilian populations?” I tried to swallow more coffee but merely ended up gargling with it.

  “Evidently you don’t have any younger brothers in the Pacific right now, getting ready to invade Japan,” Barzak said.

  Now my liaison spoke up for the first time. “Personally, I’m glad the weapon makes Syms squeamish,” Joy said. “That means his performance will be all the more sincere.”

  “Here’s the deal, Mr. Thorley,” Strickland said. “This past winter, after the Ardennes counteroffensive fell apart, it became clear that the European War would soon end, and by extension our lizard race with the Nazis. Sensing an opportunity, certain well-meaning biologists attached to the Knickerbocker Project, notably Dr. Groelish, plus a few high-minded Naval officers, notably Admiral Yordan, sent a petition to President Truman. They implored him to forbid biological sneak attacks against the Japanese.”

  “Instead, we advocated demonstrating the new weapon before an enemy delegation,” Yordan said. “These witnesses would then, we hypothesized, convince the Imperial Government in Tokyo that capitulation was the best option.”

  “Sounds logical,” I said.

  “The problem is that Emperor Hirohito has always given his War Minister the last word in every political decision,” Strickland said. “Rather than hand his sword to General MacArthur, General Anami would prefer to see every Nip man, woman, and child go down fighting.”

  “Come, come, Admiral,” Dr. Groelish said. “Tokyo is burning, the Japanese navy’s at the bottom of the sea, the blockade has brought famine, and the Russians are making noises about entering the Pacific Theater. A lizard demonstration should be all that’s needed to make Hirohito stand up to Anami.”

  “A reasonable theory,” I said.

  “I didn’t attend this meeting so I could hear some B-movie hambone give us his views on strategic doctrine,” Barzak said.

  “If it were up to me,” Strickland said, pointing both extended index fingers in my direction like Bob Steele aiming his six-guns, “I’d clobber the enemy with Blondie and Dagwood right now and get it over with. Alas, it’s not up to me. Ten days ago the President, having consulted with the Interim Committee of the Knickerbocker Project, cabled China Lake with his final decision. He wants us to try leveraging an uncond
itional Jap surrender through reptilian intimidation.”

  “Fortunately, we’re prepared to carry out the President’s orders,” Dr. Groelish said. “Twenty-four hours after we mailed the China Lake Petition to Mr. Truman, Dr. Pellegrino and my daughter began laying the groundwork for a dramatic but bloodless behemoth demonstration, so that V-J Day might follow hard on the heels of V-E Day. Operation Fortune Cookie.”

  “Is that the code name,” I asked, “or the code name’s code name?”

  “We already know you’re a weisenheimer, Thorley,” Barzak said. “It’s in your dossier.”

  “We decided that in their present torpid state our mutant iguanas weren’t going to scare anybody,” Dr. Groelish said. “Yes, we could always remove the lizards from the lake and wake them up before a Japanese delegation, but if the animals subsequently went berserk, left the base, and attacked Los Angeles, the enemy would have the last laugh.”

  “Then the professor got a brainstorm,” Yordan said. “Mr. Hilbert, let’s go to the movies.”

  A lanky ensign rose from the briefing table, vanished through the rear door, and returned pushing a library cart holding a loaded Bell & Howell 16mm projector. As Hilbert plugged in the machine, another ensign marched across the room, grabbed a metal loop, and unscrolled a bright beaded screen.

  “My idea was to breed a miniature form of the weapon,” Dr. Groelish said. “With such a creature in hand, we could invite the enemy delegation into this room and show them Blondie, Dagwood, and Mr. Dithers. Later that same day, we would take the emissaries to Laboratory B and let them see our dwarf behemoths. The delegation’s final stop would be an airplane hangar containing an elaborate scale model of an idealized Japanese city, which our most aggressive dwarf would proceed to stomp and burn before their eyes.”

  “One can easily imagine the psychological impact of such a demonstration,” Dr. Pellegrino said. “The emissaries will go running to Hirohito, fall on their knees, and beg him to keep Japan from becoming the first casualty of the Lizard Age.”

  “Or so you imagine,” Barzak said.

  Ensign Hilbert switched on the projector, and a black-and-white image flickered across the screen: Joy standing in a gulch next to a dwarf behemoth. The creature was a perfect facsimile of Dagwood, with two nontrivial differences. He was barely a foot taller than Joy, and there was nothing remotely intimidating about him. This lizard could not have demoralized a kitten or frightened a squirrel up a tree, much less given a Japanese diplomat the fantods. Just as the shot ended, the dwarf licked Joy’s cheek with his long moist tongue.

  “I named him Rex,” she said.

  “As you can see, the Midget Lizard Initiative was a disaster,” Dr. Groelish said. “For reasons we don’t yet understand, any juvenile version of a bipedal mutant iguana is completely docile.”

  Jump-cut to Joy throwing a beach ball to another dwarf behemoth. The monster bounced the ball off his knee, then allowed it to settle on his snout. A circus seal could not have performed the trick with greater dexterity.

  “Her name is Evelyn,” Joy said.

  “Of course, we’re still free to display our three midget lizards to the enemy delegation,” Dr. Groelish said, “provided we bend the truth a bit and insist that they’re torpid because they’ve been tranquilized — a safety precaution, we’ll call it — thus masking their congenital meekness.”

  “This is where you come in,” Yordan said, fixing me with his solitary eye. “In order for the Jap emissaries to end up witnessing a fire-breathing lizard wrecking our scale-model city, we’ll have to use an actor in a suit. If you can convince the delegation that you’re midget lizard number four — that is, a real, live, unsedated dwarf behemoth — and if you can destroy the model with credible savagery, then we might, just might, pull this bunny out of the bonnet.”

  I clicked my fingers nervously against my empty coffee mug, producing a series of brittle pings. “Performance as persuasion,” I muttered.

  “Exactly,” Dr. Groelish said.

  Jump-cut to yet another dwarf behemoth, paddling merrily across China Lake, Joy mounted on his back. “We call him Oswald,” she said.

  “One complicating factor is that on Saturday the New Mexico team got some bad news,” Yordan said. “There won’t be enough weapons-grade uranium on the planet for at least a year.”

  “No physics bomb?” I asked.

  Yordan nodded and said, “The President must now put all his eggs in the behemoth basket.”

  “Naturally we hope Operation Fortune Cookie gets the Japs crapping in their kimonos, but if it fails” — a Lugosian gleam entered both of Strickland’s eyes — “Truman will have no choice but to deploy the lizards strategically.”

  “We don’t want to put too much pressure on you, but it’s essential that you understand the stakes,” Yordan said. “Turn in a masterful performance, and the Pacific War may end happily.”

  “Screw it up, and we’ll be forced to bust a Jap city or two,” Strickland added.

  Beads of sweat burst from my brow. Blood thumped in my ears. My breathing grew labored, as if I were back in my Flesh of Iron robot costume.

  “I can’t do it,” I said.

  “Of course you can,” Yordan insisted.

  “Don’t be silly,” Dr. Groelish chided me.

  “We’re counting on you,” Dr. Pellegrino averred.

  “You signed a contract,” Strickland noted.

  “I can’t do it,” I said again.

  “Syms needs some fresh air,” Joy told Strickland. “Let me take him topside. Once he clears the smoke out of his head, I’m sure he’ll play ball.”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “Syms, dear, we need to talk,” Joy said. “I can’t do it.”

  By the time we’d finished the day’s second elevator ride and stepped into the blaze of the Mojave sun, Joy had convinced me that I could do it — or, rather, that I must do it, because what other choice was there? Beyond Operation Fortune Cookie lay only two alternatives, both horrible: either a conventional invasion of the Japanese homeland, with innumerable casualties on both sides, or a full-scale behemoth attack on that same nation, with countless innocent civilians suffering immolation.

  Admiral Yordan, Commander Barzak, and Dr. Groelish soon joined us on the broiling sands. “Mr. Thorley has seen the light,” Joy told them.

  “Up to a point, Admiral Strickland will be pleased,” Barzak said, making an about-face and heading back to the briefing bunker.

  Yordan guided us toward his staff car, where an acne-mottled sailor sat behind the wheel, looking eager to chauffeur his boss almost anywhere that wasn’t the Pacific Theater.

  “I’m confused,” I said as we scrambled into the vehicle. “If the lizard demonstration comes a cropper, hasn’t the United States lost the element of surprise?”

  “That’s a risk we’re all happy to take,” Dr. Groelish said.

  “No, professor, it’s a lesser evil we’re all willing to tolerate,” Yordan said.

  “No, Admiral, it’s a lesser evil you’re willing to tolerate,” Joy said. “You heard Strickland. He’s hoping Truman will change his mind and unleash Blondie on Kyoto tomorrow.”

  Dr. Groelish told Yordan he needed to administer some nutrients to the twenty embryonic behemoths, and so our first stop become the main Knickerbocker laboratory, an imposing installation comprising a dozen interconnected domes rising from the sand like enormous beehives. A lurid billboard stood outside the facility, reminding the civilian scientists that academic freedom was not the norm at China Lake.

  WHAT YOU SEE HERE

  WHAT YOU HEAR HERE

  WHAT YOU DO HERE

  LET IT STAY HERE

  We dropped off the mild-mannered monster-maker and continued our journey, speeding west past ranks of cacti and stands of acacia, eventually reaching an immense aluminum building labeled Naval Ordnance Test Station: Hangar A. Until six months ago, Yordan explained, the facility had been used to store and service Grumman F8F Be
arcats and Consolidated PB4Y Privateers, but the Seabees had renovated the place top to bottom. Cecil B. DeMille, I decided, had nothing on the Pentagon. If the Navy wanted to transform an airplane hangar into a coliseum, put on a single apocalyptic matinee, then change the place back into a hangar, that’s precisely what would happen.

  The instant I stepped into the hot, cavernous structure, I felt right at home, for it immediately evoked a Monogram sound stage, though much bigger, large enough to accommodate not only a miniature facsimile of a major Japanese city sprawling across a raised platform — Shirazuka, Island of Honshu, according to the placard — but also a maze of catwalks outfitted with klieg lights and, suspended directly above the great model, a tier of stadium seating. Glass panels enclosed the posh balcony, presumably so the delegation would be spared the smoke, heat, and noise of Operation Fortune Cookie. For a full minute I simply stood and stared, wonderstruck at the hypothetical metropolis. Still under construction, it was easily the most astonishing objet d’art I’d ever seen, a sprawling expanse of factories, government buildings, office complexes, hotels, theaters, stores, apartments, temples, gardens, parks, and bridges, all decorated with signs and billboards beautifully lettered in kanji. Swathed in artificial clouds, a range of snow-capped peaks rose in the distance, the highest surmounted by the Imperial Palace. This was the sort of electric train set God’s favorite cherubs got to play with — and among its marvels, in fact, was an O-gauge steam engine hauling a dozen coaches along a trestle-borne route running between the city and the hills. Besides the passenger train, the layout featured several locomotives pulling long strands of freight cars, plus an elaborate trolley system whisking its commuting patrons through downtown Shirazuka. Tiny barges plied the river. Toy merchant ships navigated the bay. Destroyers, cruisers, carriers, and a dreadnought lay moored in the harbor.

  My awe was diminished only by the scores of craftsmen tiptoeing through the little city, their outsized bodies adding a touch of comical incongruity. A necessary invasion, for there were still many jobs to accomplish in the remaining weeks: painting buildings, paving roads, planting trees, hanging clouds, stringing telephone lines — each such operation being directed with great élan by a lively civilian foreman wearing jodhpurs and wielding a megaphone. How gratifying to see these legions of skilled Hollywood artisans in the Navy’s gainful employ, especially since, owing to the carpenters’ strike, most of them could no longer find paid work back at the studios.