Kaiju Agonistes

March, 1956—June, 1958

The First Pacific Entity War (also known as Second Contact or the Marshalls Misconduct) begins with a series of air attacks from United States Navy Task Force 77. While the sight of a Ray Harryhausen creature grappling with a model of a warship might be delightful to movie audiences, the real navy understands that sending its surface combatants into hugging range of MidPac-2 would be a mistake. Naval vessels are bad at hugging. Entity Op Plan Three, prepared in 1955 by the most underappreciated staff weenies in American military history, calls for unrestricted air attacks while the fleet itself masses for a decisive confrontation. No penny-packet approach this time.

The only fault with this sensible course of action is that Messenger can move at forty knots while submerged, at depths of who-the-hell-knows-how-many feet, for hours or days at a time. The humans do not always receive adequate warning of its approach, and Messenger transforms three radar pickets, another submarine, and an Essex-class carrier into war memorials as they might have been designed by Jackson Pollock. It does this despite a constant rain of rockets, torpedoes, and depth charges that barely knock flakes off its carapace.

Britain, Australia, and New Zealand send warships that are grudgingly integrated into Taffy 77. The Soviet Union sends “fishing trawlers” that skirt the exclusion zone, monitoring the vessels desperately shooting and maneuvering inside. The CIA sends “commercial mineral surveyors” that shadow the fishing trawlers. Kim Il-sung announces that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has acquired and trained a Great Beast Entity of Progress many times mightier than the one the imperialists have angered. Nobody pays any attention.

The Marshallese people are once again crated up and involuntarily shipped off to even more obscure corners of the Pacific as their islands and atolls are blasted past usefulness. The president, thinking electorally as well as strategically, authorizes further use of atomic weapons. Several dozen nuclear depth charges are dropped on or near Messenger, glancing blows. Bob Hope jokes that the president’s world-famous Atoms for Peace initiative has been replaced with Atoms for Pisces. Bob Hope and his DC-3 are eaten by the sea monster, which has had a lot of fresh practice throwing things at aircraft, while en route to a USO show in South Korea.

Here we see that even beings as ancient and experienced as the seed-planters are capable, for honorable and optimistic reasons, of initiating a pooch-screw. They, like the majority of the sapient species they have met or observed, are fundamentally cautious in a way that homo sapiens (consider motorcycle racing, sword-swallowing, the running of the bulls, fireworks displays, snake handling, eating fugu) spectacularly isn’t. Messenger has avoided direct communication because the seed-planters prefer to let primitive cultures draw their own inferences from the looming symbolism of an awakened watchseed, but the only inference these idiots keep drawing is that they need to push more buttons.

After two years of shooting, sinking, screaming, and smashing, more atoms are being liberated from captivity in bomb cores than before Messenger first stood up to offer itself for symbolic interpretation. The French accelerate their weapons development program. “Hooray for France, proudly armed with the highest science!” announces General de Gaulle as a mushroom cloud rises over Polynesia. And then another, and another, and another. The anxious British irradiate a few more test sites in the Australian desert. Israeli and Indian physicists begin to share meaningful glances over coffee at international conferences. The Americans, having turned the Marshalls into ghost islands, resort to area bombing with ever-larger thermonuclear devices. Every time they make a hydrogen bang, the Soviets feel compelled to show off an equivalent or larger bang somewhere over Novaya Zemlya. The Chinese are up to something energetic in the deserts of Xinjiang.

The Japanese curse, condemn, and protest all of this through every diplomatic channel available. Nobody pays any attention.

Messenger is perturbed by the evident failure of its program. Battered and irradiated, it willfully retires at last to the black depths, visualizing an even more resilient battle form and wondering how to employ it so this suicidal species will finally take the hint.