Kaiju Agonistes

August, 1963—September, 1965

“The skybase race,” the competition to launch permanent anti-monster observation posts into earth orbit, dominates the aerospace rivalry between east and west. Plans to go to the moon are shelved. Everyone makes mistakes in their haste to shove bigger payloads up the gravity well. Flaming rocket parts rain on Florida, Texas, and Kazakhstan.

Messenger re-emerges after five years, now 150 meters long, sporting a gleaming black carapace capable of shrugging off atomic fire as if it were sarcasm. The Second Mid-Pacific Entity War is an even bigger mess than the first. Exclusion zones are a thing of the past. Messenger sinks ships and smashes infrastructure from Yokohama to Singapore, from Adelaide to Auckland, from Rarotonga to Vancouver, moving through the depths at twice the speed of steam and steel. Atomic weapons are hurled in strings across the open sea, chasing Messenger’s wake, signifying nothing except a great many dead fish. Rachel Carson’s 1964 book Hot Water suggests that relentless irradiation of the oceans is probably going to bite everyone in the ass. Nobody pays any attention, except in France, where the book is banned.

The United States, having trouble keeping its logistical chain out of the mouth of a giant radioactive sea monster, withdraws its “advisory forces” from South Vietnam in 1965. President Johnson declares victory, announcing: “Vietnam is ready to take a proud place in the vanguard of the free nations of the world, and stand against communism on its own feet.” About a month later, that week’s president of that month’s junta proudly abandons South Vietnam, ready to take a stand against sobriety somewhere on the French Riviera. Red flags rise over Saigon. President Johnson grapples with a private certainty that he won’t be re-elected in ’68. Somewhere, Richard Nixon has a spring in his step.

Prominent American science fiction writers pen an open letter to the White House, condemning what they call an “epochal failure to attempt meaningful communication with the Mid-Pacific Entities” and “the reckless overuse of nuclear weapons.” An equivalent number of their peers sign a counter-screed, insisting that “soft-headed, idealistic flinching from confrontation is precisely what the Communist Bloc and these hostile entities both desire of us.” At the next World Science Fiction Convention (in Cleveland), Harlan Ellison is arrested for punching Robert Heinlein, who is arrested in turn for knocking Harlan unconscious with a large bag of jelly beans. Nobody pays any attention. That night, Messenger knocks the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco Bay.