Kaiju Agonistes

August, 1971—October, 1972

When Messenger reappears, it isn’t a pretty scene. Tokyo is mauled, Vladivostok is flattened, Seattle and Valparaiso and Brisbane are forcibly redecorated. Singapore takes a haircut, Brunei is stomped, Taipei and Manila are turned upside down. As each attack unfolds, Messenger broadcasts telepathic messages in the local languages, urging survivors to pressure their leaders, to demand atomic disarmament and international unity, but inasmuch as the huge creature has a heart (it has five circulatory centers), that heart is beginning to ache with something like a traumatized sense of futility. How many cities must it destroy in order to convince these young thinkers to prevent the destruction of their cities? The seed-planters do not program their watchseeds to give up, but neither do they prevent them from learning. From the natives of this planet, Messenger has finally learned how to be depressed. It ceases attacks for a month or two and drifts quietly somewhere in the midnight zone, three thousand meters down. Bioluminescent things flash little blue-green lights at it, and Messenger flashes back. This is relaxing. Alone in the dark, it makes a pocket inside itself containing manipulators and optical stalks. At last, it begins to examine the materials Eugenia Aldrich-Haines threw at it.

Economic turmoil reigns on the surface. In the United States, massive disinvestment in coastal regions and the displacement of millions of people are sharpening intolerance. Shipping and ocean drilling are bottomed out; railways and coal are roaring like the clock has been turned back a century. Production of nuclear weapons is up 250 percent, and Richard Nixon is polling at an all-time high. “DRAGONSLAYER DICK,” say the buttons handed out by the thousands at the Republican National Convention. “Not a penny for tribute!” he proclaims in his stump speech. He’s the guy who told that moralizing space monster where to stick it, the guy who’ll lead the world in showing that thing it can have our planet when it pries it from our cold, dead, irradiated hands!

He hasn’t been able to do a damn thing to stop it, of course, but in the end he’s applied some of that crazy woman’s advice after all. Managing the monster—but in his own way. Sure, things are a bit of a mess, and the riots are getting a little out of hand, but what’s important is that George McGovern is absolutely going to eat a dogshit popsicle on November 7th.

Then one morning he finds Eugenia Aldrich-Haines sitting in his office again.