Gargantua (12 page)

Jack frowned. “Kinda like an expressway that’s suddenly developed an off-ramp.”

Hale laughed. “Whoa, Jack, these technical terms are makin’ me dizzy.”

Returning the laugh, Jack said, “Sorry—force of habit when your assistant is twelve.” He shifted the photos and looked again at the map. “I wonder if our amphibian friend was travelling along the ridge and decided to try the scenic route.”

“How ’bout taking a dive and lookin’ around?”

Jack blinked. Hale had mentioned that he, like Jack, was a certified scuba diver. But diving into a deep undersea ridge like Iozima with just a divesuit for protection against the pressure was not particularly realistic, and he said so.

“That’s not the sort of diving I mean,” Hale said with a smile. “The Institute has a titanium submersible.”

For what seemed like the millionth time since meeting Hale, Jack felt a pang of envy. There were only a handful of such submersibles in the world. Jack fondly remembered seeing the demonstration of Graham Hawkes’s submersible
Deep Flight
in Monterey, but he never dreamed he’d get the opportunity to ride in one. “You famous scientists get all the good toys.”

“Stop complaining—it’s not like they’d trust
me
with a tranq rifle.”

“Good point,” Jack said with a grin, then looked at his watch. “How soon can you get it over here?”

“Depends on who’s usin’ it right now,” Hale said, bending over to rummage through the detritus from the dining room table, eventually liberating his cordless phone. “Worst case, we won’t get it till morning.” He pushed the phone’s
TALK
button and then dialed a sequence of numbers. “Hello, Josie, it’s Ralph . . . I’m doin’ just fine, darlin’. Listen, who’s got the
Scorpion Fish?
. . . All right, can you patch me through to him? . . . Beauty . . . Yes, I’ll hold.”

Hale put his hand over the mouthpiece and looked at Jack. “Grant Wilhoite’s one of my bright boys. I got him studyin’ geothermal—” He cut himself off, taking his hand off the mouthpiece. “Grant? . . . Grant, it’s Ralph . . . Ralph
Hale,
your boss . . . That’s right, mate. Listen, I need you to fetch the
Scorp
down to me on Malau . . . What do you . . . yes, I know, Grant, I’m the one who
gave
you that deadline, so I don’t mind if you blow it. It’s for a good cause. Now—what? . . . Look, mate, I know the project’s important, but I’ve got a lizard here out of a Ray Harryhausen movie, three dead people, and one injured copper. That takes precedent, okay? . . . Glad you think so. So get your arse down here . . . Right, I’ll see you first thing in the morning.”

As Hale pushed the
END
button and put the cordless down on the table, Jack smiled. “
Scorpion Fish,
huh?”

“Trust me, when you see the thing, you’ll know why.”

“I don’t doubt it.” He leaned over the table, moving the satellite photos off the maps. “Okay, since we’re going to
have
a submersible, we should figure out where we’re going to take it.”

Later on, Jack left Hale to his afternoon nap and went to pick Brandon up from the
Malau Weekly News
offices.

“He didn’t ask too many annoying questions, did he?” Jack asked the reporter with a grin.

“Nah, I’d say I won the Annoying Questions Derby,” Paul replied.

Brandon nodded emphatically. “Big time. But I know how to use Quark now.”

Jack frowned. “I assume that isn’t a subatomic particle?”

Paul laughed. “A computer program. It’s what I use to lay out the paper. So where you guys off to?”

“Feeding time at the zoo,” Jack said. “Our overgrown newt out there should be awake enough to feel peckish.”

“Sounds like fun. Oh, hey, listen—”

“Yeah?” Jack said.

“Don’t let Derek get to you. I mean, he’s a complete and total asshole, no question. We’ve sorta gotten used to him. He keeps catching good fish, and we let him be a total asshole, and generally completely ignore him.” Paul scratched his cheek. “I guess what I’m saying is, he isn’t worth getting worked up over. No one around here takes him seriously—no reason why you should.”

Jack smiled ruefully. He
had
let Derek get to him, to a manner Jack wouldn’t have believed possible. “Thanks. C’mon, humble assistant, let’s go do some work.”

Brandon grinned. “Okay, Dad.”

As they walked toward the beach, Brandon asked, “So what’d you and Doc Hale do all day?”

Jack gave his son a précis of what he and Hale learned. “So we’ll be going out in the submersible tomorrow morning when Hale’s man gets it here.” He hesitated.
How do I tell him? Oh, hell, just come out and say it.
Speaking the words quickly, he said, “It’ll just be the two of us. I really wish I could take you along, but it’s just too dangerous. I can’t put you at risk like that—”

“That’s okay,” Brandon said with a shrug. “I understand.”

“You do?” Jack was stunned.
An alien came down and replaced my son with a pod person.
Brandon
hated
being left out of things. “You’re not upset?”

“Nah, I got plenty of stuff to do around here.”

Jack marvelled at the resiliency of the preadolescent boy. Two days ago, Brandon was throwing a hissy fit because Jack wouldn’t take him out in Hale’s seaplane, requiring bribery and paternal convincing. Now, Jack wasn’t entirely sure he’d have been able to talk Brandon into
coming
on the
Scorpion Fish.

Kids,
he thought,
go figure.

“Got enough time in your busy schedule to help me feed Superlizard?”

“Oh, sure,” Brandon said agreeably.

“Good. Salamanders are big on invertebrates, so I figure we can start with that. Having sampled the local mud crabs, I can’t imagine that our boy won’t go for them.”

“Maybe,” Brandon said.

Within a half-hour, they had gathered a bucketful of mollusks and mud crabs. Brandon had seemed less than enthusiastic about the choice of food, which Jack thought odd.

“What if he doesn’t like this stuff?” he asked.

Jack smiled. “Oh, I think he will.”

“Yeah, but what if he doesn’t?”

He should know this as well as I do,
Jack thought, confused.
Hell, sometimes I think he knows it better. If you don’t know the species of what you’re feeding, try the food of the animal’s closest analogue. Well, the thing only has a miniscule resemblance to a salamander, but that’s a miniscule more than it resembles anything else outside of
Jurassic Park.
So we start with aquatic salamander food.

Aloud, he said, “I’ll switch from an aquatic diet to a terrestrial one. You know, bugs, leaves, that kind of thing.”

“And if he doesn’t like that?”

“We start from scratch.”

Brandon nodded, then continued gathering invertebrates in silence. After a moment, Jack said, “Brandon—the past year, all the running around we’ve done . . . has it been okay for you?”

Shrugging, Brandon said, “Yeah.”

“I mean, it’s been—fun, hasn’t it?” Jack struggled with the words.

Another shrug. “Sure.”

Dammit, Brandon, I’m not looking for polite answers here.
“I mean, it’s a lot better than sitting around and feeling sorry for ourselves, right?”

Yet another shrug. “Right.” Brandon held up his bucket. “I’m full up.”

Jack sighed. Obviously, Brandon didn’t want to talk about whatever it was that seemed to be bothering him.
Maybe I’m imagining it.

They went to the pier and dropped the various fish over the top of the cage. It fell into the water with a
plop!

And then it stayed there. Superlizard recoiled from the food, then simply stared at it.

Dammit.

“See?” Brandon said, sounding entirely too self-satisfied. “He doesn’t like it.”

Jack looked more closely at the beast. He stared at Jack and Brandon as much—no, more than he did at the food. “I think we’re making him uptight. Let’s leave him alone. He’ll eat, I’m sure of it,” he said, more for Brandon’s benefit, since in fact he wasn’t at all sure.

I’ll come back in an hour with some bugs and leaves, and take it from there,
he decided.

“C’mon,” he said, “let’s get some dinner. Dr. Hale told me about a Japanese place on the other side of the island, and I could go for some tempura right about now.”

“Yeah, okay.” Brandon seemed less than enthused, even though he loved Japanese food.
What is with him?
he wondered.

Diane would know what was wrong,
he thought, then quashed it. This was no time to get maudlin.

We’ll have a nice dinner, then try to feed the big lizard. Tomorrow, Hale and I will explore, and maybe get to the bottom of this little mystery.

He focused on that. It was easier than trying to figure out his son.

SIX

M
alau Police Chief Joseph Movita hated hospitals. If you were in a hospital, it meant something had gone wrong, that somebody had screwed up. One of the reasons Joe became a police officer was so that he would be in a position to keep things from going wrong and people from screwing up. So a visit to Doctor Hart’s clinic was not something he especially wanted to do, since it made it feel like he hadn’t done his job.

But he hadn’t much of a choice. Jimmy was convalescing here, and he wouldn’t be much of a boss if he didn’t visit a subordinate who’d been injured in the line of duty.

Joe had been born on the very day that the United States Marine Corps liberated the island—which, if nothing else, made it very easy for people to remember his birthday. His mother had been with a group of Malauans who had hidden in the jungle—his father had been killed six months previously by Japanese soldiers after he protested the living conditions on Malau since the war started. A Marine named Joseph Toriccelli had found Tara Movita and the others in the jungle and stayed with them in case any Japanese soldiers happened upon them to try to get in one final shot before the USMC nailed them. In the middle of this, his mother went into labor. Private Toriccelli knew almost nothing about how to deliver a baby beyond a half-remembered training film, but somehow he managed to do it in the middle of a humid jungle. In his honor, the boy was named Joseph Toriccelli Movita, and the private made his godfather.

Chief Movita had only met the man who delivered him once, but he didn’t remember it. He was only three at the time, and the newly promoted Sergeant Toriccelli had made good on a promise to visit his godson on the island he helped liberate. Shortly afterward, he was assigned to the fighting in Korea, and was killed.

A father killed for trying to make people’s lives easier; a godfather who was a soldier killed in the line of duty. No wonder he became Malau’s “top cop.”

Jimmy lay on one of the clinic’s flat, uncomfortable-looking beds, reading a motorcycle magazine. Bandages covered several parts of his chest and arms and an IV drip lead to a vein in his arm.

“How’s it going, Jimmy?”

The young cop looked up and smiled at Joe. “Not too bad, Chief. It only hurts when I breathe.” He set the magazine aside. Joe saw that he was reading about a new Suzuki model, and remembered that Jimmy had been saving up to buy a Suzuki.

The chief smiled. “Well, the doc says you should be all right in a couple of weeks.”

“So,” Jimmy said after a moment, “what’d you do with the body?”

Joe’s smile fell into a frown. “Body?”

“Y’know, T. rex out there. Did you chop it up into cutlets for Manny or what? Hope you didn’t try blowing it up. There were these people in the States that tried that, and they got whale guts all over—” Jimmy cut himself off, looking at Joe.

The chief closed his eyes for a moment. Obviously Jimmy read Joe’s expression.

Before Joe could say anything, Jimmy said, “That goddamn thing’s still alive, isn’t it?”

“For the time being, yeah.”

“But—”

“The order came straight from Manny,” Joe said before Jimmy could say any more. “Look, we don’t know what the thing is, and we have to—”

“We know
exactly
what it is, Chief!” Jimmy said, shouting now. “It’s a killer! It got those two women and Dak, and it would’ve killed me!”

Probably at the sound of her patient shouting, Doctor Hart came dashing into the room. “What’s going on?”

Jimmy was trying to sit up now. “Chief, you gotta kill that thing!”

The doctor put her hands on Jimmy’s shoulders, gently guiding him back into a prone position. “Take it easy,” she said.

“It’s caged up, Jimmy,” Joe said. “It can’t harm anyone right now.”

“But what if there’re more of ’em? Jesus, Chief, it—”

Doctor Hart spoke more forcefully this time: “I said take it easy, Jimmy.”

Jimmy closed his eyes and took a breath. Then he opened them again and looked at Joe. “You gotta promise me, Chief—if that thing gets loose, you’ll take it down.”

Joe Movita thought about the father he never met. When the war started, the Japanese administrators—who had always been viewed as authoritarian but fair—were recalled and replaced with a military government, led by a unpleasant colonel named Takeshewada, who turned the island into a police state. When Kile Movita tried to object to the conditions, tried to buck the authority on the island, Colonel Takeshewada had him killed.

Joe wondered, if it came to that, if he could do the same in order to fulfill a promise to one of his people.

“I’ll do what I can,” was what he finally said.

Then he turned on his heel and walked out of the clinic.

As soon as Dad was out of sight of Manny’s—having gone off to meet Doctor Hale at the pier for their little underwater trip—Brandon gulped down the rest of his orange juice, took a final bite of scrambled egg, and dashed out of the restaurant. (Dad had already covered the tab.)

On his way to the lagoon, he passed a candy store, and decided to splurge and get himself a bag of cheese puffs. He just had to remember to wash his hands when he was done, so Dad wouldn’t notice the orange residue on his fingers. Dad hated it when Brandon had cheese puffs right after breakfast, but to the boy’s mind it was one of the essentials in life.