Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (8 page)

“I don’t blame you,” Tyson said. “These are people who have brought their extensive knowledge and scientific skills to work for the United States’ ultimate security. They study and develop protocols for things like an alien invasion, like a ‘zombie epidemic’—which would in reality be something along the lines of the flu virus and rabies virus merging to produce a kind of hyper-aggressive, highly contagious state, all too plausible—or a psychic attack.”

“Psychic attack? What in the hell is this?” General Adamson blurted, then reddened and said, “My apologies, Doctor Tyson. Madam President.”

Tyson gave a
very
slight chuckle and said, “No, they are charged with developing the craziest of crazy contingency plans, I admit, but it’s vital work in situations exactly like the one the world just experienced—where an extreme ‘black swan event’ paralyzes action and nearly prevents any thought, since it’s so utterly unprecedented.”

“Like a Superbloop?” Hampton asked.

“Madam President, I’m sorry I even said that. There is no such thing as a ‘Superbloop.’ The Bloop in 1997 was strong and loud but did no damage to anything or anyone. I threw ‘Superbloop’ out there basically as an ‘X’ quantity, a variable to hold the place of something with the power and—if caused by a living thing or group of things—the
will
to bring about such an Event.”

“And what did your scientists tell you?”

“They are, as I am, cleared in cases of national emergency to share highly classified information with relevant members of your Cabinet. So, Jack, this is no breach of security, all right?”

Patterson nodded impatiently, not thrilled by the attention thrown on him again.

“My god,” the President said, “what could they possibly have said?”

“They said—and I apologize for the language, Madam President—‘
We have no fucking idea
.’”

The President smiled ironically at that, but the amused expression soon faded: coming from the greatest minds in the world dedicated to the most outrageous, most infinitesimally possible disasters in the universe,
We have no fucking idea
was chilling indeed. “Did they … well, did they have anything else to say? Something that might be helpful to us in this room as we try to make sense of the greatest tragedy in human history?”

“They did,” Tyson said, looking a little sick. “They said the Event was impossible.”

“Another ‘impossible,’” the President muttered in a defeated sigh. “Jesus Christ.”

“Maybe that’s what it is!” the House Armed Services Committee Chair exclaimed, almost jumping out of his seat. “Maybe
God
caused this!
He
alone can do the impossible!”

“I thought we had ruled out magic,” Nye whispered wryly to Tyson, who only barely kept a smile from forming on his face.

The President put her hand over her eyes and said, “Congressman, if God just killed half a billion human beings, I doubt there’s anything we can do to stop Him from doing it again or worse. In other words, if this is Jesus cracking His holy knuckles for the Apocalypse, we might as well adjourn this meeting and go pray for a swift and merciful end.”

The flabbergasted congressman’s mouth moved, but even with his inability to form actual words, everybody knew that the Gentleman From Texas thought that this was indeed the best course of action anyone could possibly take.

Moving on but reaching the limit of her patience, the President said to the room at large but to Tyson and Nye in particular, “The greatest scientists researching the weirdest contingencies conceivable say it’s impossible. My own top science advisors say it’s impossible. My top spy chief says it’s impossible.
But this happened
, people. It’s not a bomb, it’s not a Superbloop … essentially we’re saying that Lieutenant Berry is right: It’s Cthulhu. It’s a mythical creature living under the sea in a pulp science fiction story. It’s …
Cthulhu
.”

Berry moved to make a slight amendment to her statement, but then realized it was about the worst thing he could do for his future career.

Tyson stepped in to save him. “No, ma’am, we can’t say it’s Cthulhu—or any other specific cause—as yet,” the scientist said soberly. “I mean no disrespect to you when I say this, Congressman—but we must avoid the logical fallacy of the ‘God of the Gaps.’ That’s a situation in which none of the knowledge we have can explain some physical mystery, thus some kind of supernatural entity
must
be the missing explanation. Throughout history, whenever any material conundrum has not been explained by the science of the day, theological sorts have always insisted that ‘it must be God who did it.’ The creation of the universe, the sky being blue, even things like humans’ capacity to read. All were originally credited to the God of the Gaps.”

“That’s what’s so great about this on-the-surface silly Cthulhu idea,” Undersecretary Nye said with his usual warmth so that neither his boss nor any “theological sorts” in the room could take offense, “this—which for lack of a better term I will call the ‘Cthulhu theory’—actually
is
testable with more information. It’s not a ‘God of the Gaps’ cop-out—it’s something we can look at and accept or reject based on data. It’s falsifiable.”

Tyson said, “And there’s another way that this doesn’t resemble a mystery force from the ocean depths, something that can be explained away as caused by a God of the Gaps.”

Nye raised his eyebrows.

“We know a lot more about what H.P. Lovecraft was talking about with Cthulhu than about any other possibility on the table. Or, I should say, any other
impossibility
. Lovecraft, even by coincidence, has given us a starting point to conceptualize our predicament. That’s much more than any other bullet-point explanation.”

“Thank you, Norm and Bob. Now, Lieutenant Berry,” the President said, making the Marine sit up straighter than his already uncomfortable ramrod position next to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “the floor is yours. Please brief us on what we should know about … and I can’t believe I’m saying this … about
Cthulhu
.”

Facepalms spread around the table.

Berry had to fight the urge to freeze under the spotlight attention of the President, standing rigidly and marching stiffly to the dais. He took Nye’s spot and cleared his throat. Then cleared it again.

“Shit or get off the pot, son,” Chairman Adamson barked.

“R-Right. I mean, yes, sir.” He cleared his throat again and almost flinched at the look Adamson shot him. “Okay. I’m not saying the cause of the Event is
actually
Cthulhu, who is a fictional creature, of course. But there are some striking, um,
similarities
between the story by Lovecraft and what happened yesterday near Point Nemo. And the Bloop. That is—”

“How do you know all this, anyway, Lieutenant?” the President asked.

“Ma’am! I was always a big reader.” He didn’t do it consciously, but everyone else in the room thought he had just played the “teacher’s pet” card quite brilliantly. “I always loved horror and science fiction, Stephen King and Poe and, y’know, Lovecraft, ma’am. A lot of the guys on the base—and the women, too, of course, ma’am—grew up on these stories and love them just as much today.”

“Don’t the Marines see enough horror?”

Berry smiled. “Ma’am, it’s ironic. The fantasy horror relieves a lot of tension from the real-life horror over there.”

“Madam President,” Adamson butted in on the lovefest, “there are huge economic, military, and scientific concerns to be addressed. Might I suggest we move the literature lesson along so we can get to what we
need
to be doing?”

The President nodded, a bit chastened. “Just give us the bullet points, Lieutenant, if you please.”

So this, in essence, was what Lieutenant Berry (soon to be promoted beyond his wildest imaginings) told the most powerful people in the world—the assembled top brass of every military branch, Chairman Adamson and the Secretary of Defense and other Cabinet members, not to mention the President and Vice President of the United States:

•     
  Cthulhu was introduced in the 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” which first appeared in the fantasy magazine
  Weird Tales
  .
  
•     
  In the story, Cthulhu—an “Old One,” something between an alien being and an actual immortal—rises temporarily from His sunken city of R'lyeh, which Lovecraft established as being near Point Nemo.
  
•     
  He rises on March 23, the same date as the Event. The very date on which they were now speaking.
  
•     
  The Old One’s rising causes visions among sensitive humans such as artists and drives other people mad.
  
•     
  Any outsider who comes somehow to know about the existence of Cthulhu is murdered by a secret worldwide cult spreading from isolated Aleutians in the north to lost tribes in the jungles of Papua New Guinea in the south. The narrator ends the story with the observation that he himself is being followed by a shadowy figure whom he believes will kill him very soon.
  
•     
  The ancient city of R’lyeh—and where Cthulhu rises—is said in the story to be at (Berry looked up the exact numbers later and emailed the information to all parties) coordinates 47.9°S 126.43°W.
  
•     
  The effects of Cthulhu’s rising are felt only as long as He is able to break the waves.
  
•     
  One arm of Cthulhu’s cult is discovered by accident and rounded up by perplexed officers in the Louisiana Bayou, who have never seen a ‘degenerate sacrificial cult’ before. At the scene, a police detective notices an idol of a tentacle-faced giant creature and learns that their belief is that He has been “dead and dreaming” for hundreds of millions of years.
  
•     
  After a short time above the waves, the city sinks again because “the stars aren’t right.”
  
•     
  Cthulhu is destined to retake His planet. Whether it is tomorrow or a million years from now, when the Old One rises for good, all living humans except for those who worship Him will be doomed to insanity and death.
  

“Well,” the President said, “that was cheerful.”

“May I ask,” Secretary Farr said, “why an alien entity would be called ‘He’? We wouldn’t know if genders of this …
species
, I suppose you’d call it, have any relation to our own.”

Berry smiled and said apologetically, “You are quite right, Madam Secretary. All I can say is that the story was written in a much less enlightened time. Lovecraft used that terminology in 1928 and so it has stuck, I suppose.”

“Thank you for the information, Lieutenant. And thank you for the question, Secretary Farr,” the President said with a wry smile. General Adamson didn’t even deign to look at Berry as he retook his seat next to the general. “Now, leaving alien gender identity issues aside for the moment, Doctor Tyson, let’s proceed with the data picked up by our sensors at scientific research stations around the world—”

“If I may, Madam President,” Secretary Farr interjected, was given the go-ahead, and then turned to Berry and said, “Lieutenant, let’s say that this ‘Cthulhu’ or some entity resembling the monster portrayed in that story
is
responsible for the Event. How could a science fiction writer back in the 1920s possibly foresee that any of this would happen?”

Again, all heads turned to Berry, who was starting to wish he had never said a word and had just done his job at the laptop and projector. Not helping was General Adamson’s very loud and impatient exhalation of breath. But duty was duty, so he told the room, “I don’t know if anyone else actually believes this, but there’s a faction of Lovecraft enthusiasts who say that he was … well …
psychic
, and either he didn’t know that’s where his ideas came from, or he did know and couched this knowledge within his fantastic stories. He saw them printed by pulp magazines such as
Weird Tales
, where only the most open-minded readers would encounter the stories and understand what they foretold.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I didn’t use to, Madam Secretary … but I think I might be coming around,” Berry said, and many in the room allowed themselves a snicker.

“Let’s finish this up. I’ve got an address to make to the American people,” President Hampton said to Tyson, and he filled them in on everything the surviving scientists had relayed about the intensity and duration of the Event.

“And what shall I say about the cause?” she asked.

Tyson stood silently at the dais for a moment, then said, “We haven’t the slightest idea, Madam President. As of this moment, we haven’t even developed any theories.”

“Other than Cthulhu,” she said.

Tyson smiled at the comment, but, seeing the serious look on her face, ceased almost immediately. Then he nodded and said, “Yes, Madam President. Other than Cthulhu.”

New York City

Event + 12 hours