Then the young ’tile felt it, a brutal coercion of being watched. That man in black was staring at him. The man’s penetrating gaze had panned over the multitudes of fullgrowns and come to rest upon this single zardplebe. The plebe was overtaken by the most oppressive of sensations. The man and him: Their gazes were locking on, a connection was being fused.
“Ahh!” The young lizard’s mind convulsed. For at that exact moment his brain was flooded with a competing compulsion. A pulling . . . a tugging . . . something dragging him toward Craggy Ridge. The Black Spot! It was summoning him—entreating him to take his rightful place in the Endless Chain. He sought to follow the sacred impulse, to go off as every other one of his kind always had. But he couldn’t. That man’s stare—it held him. It wouldn’t let him go!
“Come in!” the Black Spot demanded. But that blackclad man’s gaze wouldn’t yield. It yanked the zardplebe equally, kept him in his place. “Come in!” The lizard felt as if he were about to break in two.
Then, suddenly, he was free! The man in black broke off the stare, turned and walked away, back toward that small face inside the plane.
“Come in!” the Black Spot called again, and the zardplebe, unencumbered, strode off to obey. Only that ancient, unswaying reflex was inside him now, prescribing the most inexorable of courses. All else melted to air. Off he went, unquestioning, over the Ridge, through forested canyons, up an ever-narrowing river. It was thick and airless there. Jaggedy streaks of light serrated down from a sky dark with more than night. Ominous thumps sounded from behind unknown foliages, taxonomically untitled beasts lurked on overhangs of cliffs, but the zardplebe was not deterred. On he went until he reached the headlands of those waters, the center of the Great Stone, the Black Spot.
It didn’t look like much at first, just a murky, stagnant pool. A roundish well, set naked on an empty stretch, a hundred feet across, a depression filled with liquid pitch set into the mottled limestone. Then he heard that call again. “Come in! Come in!” That urgent invitation issued from the Black Spot itself!
“Leap!” was the immortal auto-command. The youngest zardplebe readied himself. He came to the very lip of the pool, looked in, saw the blackness there. “Leap!” The word thundered in his brain.
He pushed a foreclaw over the ruddy edge. But then: “Hey, gimme a minute here.”
“Leap!”
“But, like . . . it’s so, you know . . . Infinite.”
It was incredible. Faced with the eternal task performed by the untold million links in the unbroken Chain, the youngest zardplebe hemmed and hawed. At the brink of Illumination, he balked.
“Leap!”
And so, finally, he went . . . up and up, higher and higher, to the apex of his leap . . . Only to be freezeframed, for all time, in the hottest of strobes.
* * *
It figured that Komodo would interpret Gojiro’s recurring dream as “a potential central metaphor” in the ongoing attempt to fulfill the Triple Ring Promise. Rubbing his hairless chin, the contemplative former Coma Boy paced the ’cano. “Can it be denied that the Black Spot symbolizes that special Beamic media by which the uninitiate of a prospective Bunch finds his own true Identity within the Evolloo? Is this not the mystic sort of realm we wish to enter? It is my opinion that this vision requires the closest analysis.”
Gojiro scoffed. “Hey, park that Sigmund shit at the door. The whole thing seems pretty cut and fried to me. The Heater crushed Newton’s apple to sauce; a zard went up, he did not come down. Simple as that.”
A light was in Komodo’s eyes. “Exactly my point! In the face of holocaust, axioms cease to function, meaning is exploded, history swallowed, expectation shattered. Yet it is into these zones we must go. Imagine, my own true friend, what might we learn should that youngest zardplebe actually reach the Black Spot.”
“But he doesn’t. It’s the same every time. He never gets there.”
“That is so,” Komodo said gravely and went off to his beakers and bunsens. When he came back, several hours later, he was dragging a large gray box, the first dream printer, prototype of a whole generation of neural periscopes Komodo would develop to see around the corners of Quadcameral plumbing. The plan was to tap into synapsial electricity, render it palpably visual, project it onto a Dishscreen. Noting that “all that separates that youngest zardplebe from Illumination is the thinnest gap of time and space,” Komodo hoped that through manipulation, it would be possible to somehow influence Gojiro’s dream, “change it, so Identity might be revealed.”
Gojiro honked derisively. “Man, you go too far! Dreams exist in their own time. You can’t change a dream!”
Still, the monster agreed, allowed himself to be hooked up to Komodo’s machine. Privacy was not an issue; in those early days, the Quadcameral, everything it thought, was considered communal property on Radioactive Island. So, with the reptile seated ’neath a shocking-pink hair-dryer-type contraption, gator clips hotwired to his every node, they waited for the inevitable return of the Black Spot Dream. It didn’t take long. As soon as Gojiro closed his eyes, his dream was playing out on the screen, as clear as any Filipino soap opera.
Suffice it to say that the next few weeks were ridiculous. Every auto-suggestion failed, ditto for Komodo’s most ingenious editing schemes. The incident at the Black Spot remained unchanged. In the end, the two friends were reduced to watching the daily rushes of the dream, waiting for the youngest zardplebe to reach the lip of his supposed Identity, then screaming “Leap!” like a pair of demented cheerleaders.
Nothing helped. Immune to their exhortations, the youngest zardplebe leaped, all right, but too late—always too late. Gojiro and Komodo watched the trajectory of his jump, right up to the zenith, only to see the image bleed from the Bomb-whitened screen. “I told you it wouldn’t work!” Gojiro screamed, near hysterics. “You can’t unfreeze a dream.”
“Yes,” Komodo said soberly, looking up at the disappearing image of that tiny lizard. “There is nothing we can do. It appears that there are any number of means by which an entity can be brought face-to-face with his personal moment of Truth; however, it is only that individual who can seize Identity, make it his own. It remains to that youngest zardplebe to unfreeze the dream, him alone.”
Gojiro saw the look of failure on his friend’s face, ripped the wires from his head, stalked off, sat down to watch a hundred hours of sitcoms. What else was he to do? He couldn’t exactly come clean, tell Komodo he hadn’t tried his hardest to make the experiment a success. He couldn’t admit that his whoops of “Leap!” were fake, that he was no more willing to plunge into the Black Spot than that pathetic phantasm in his dream. He couldn’t confess that he was equally afraid, immobilized, full of doubt. That Identity was nothing he craved, that the merest thought of it filled him with terror.
Not that it turned out to matter much. For, soon enough, the Black Spot Dream, like Budd Hazard before it, faded from the Quadcameral, never to return.
* * *
Until that night Sheila Brooks’s letter came.
The dream was the same as ever. A terrible bad penny come back in its entirety, except now it was worse. The passage of time had annotated the vision in a most distressing fashion. That fat, screaming soldier—only a colonel then—was General Grives, the military head of the Project. Gojiro often ran into the general’s porcine image on the Dish, even if they’d recently changed his timeslot from Sunday morning “public affairs” to off-hour religious shows. The dapper one, who else could that have been but Victor Stiller? Stiller: calculating accelerator of particles, the most politic of men, advisor to presidents. He’d given up science, they said, become an owner of things. Maybe he owned everything.
And, of course, the man in black. Joseph Prometheus Brooks.
So it was Brooks all along! Brooks whose steely gaze had panned the Lavarock horizon. Brooks who singled out that youngest zardplebe among the great tangles of ’tiles and turned him stockstill with his deathstabbing stare. “No!” Gojiro called out, once again inside the dream. “No!” he yelled to that zardplebe when Brooks’s stare fell upon him. “Don’t look! Turn away! Don’t let his pestilence into your brain!”
But it was to no avail. The dream kept on, unchanged.
Then there was that other positive ID: the small face in the plane window with the unknown, yet vaguely unnerving expression. Maybe it wouldn’t have held up in court, given that she couldn’t have been more than two or three years old at the time. But Gojiro was sure. It was Sheila Brooks, and on her face was fear—not fear a youngest zardplebe would ever recognize, but the kind Gojiro knew all too well.
“Sheila Brooks—inside my head for years!” the monster screamed in his sleep.
The dream wound on toward its inexorable conclusion. Once again the reptile reached the crucial position, poised on the edge of Identity. Again Gojiro tried to make his mouth move, to summon up a shout, offer heartfelt encouragement. But it came out weak, barely a squeak: “Leap.”
It didn’t help, not at all. The youngest zardplebe hesitated as always, jumped too late . . . too late to avoid the crack of Doom. Up he went into its angry face—only to come
down again
! Yes! The youngest zardplebe hurtled down through that Cloud, saw the taut black surface below, coming up to meet him.
Gojiro heard himself yell as the zardplebe plunged. A bellyflop into the Black Spot! The dream had unfrozen. But why was he surrounded by green, not black? Lime green!
“Ahhhh!” The monster shook himself awake. Lime green . . . that letter! The one from Sheila Brooks! What was Komodo saying about a
new
kind of supplication?
The monster thrashed out of his burrow, lurched toward Komodo’s desk. What was Sheila Brooks doing sending in a supplication? He grabbed the letter, held it up to the Dishscreen light, read through. It was exactly as Komodo said, except for the end—the part he never got to. There, written in a hand that might have belonged to a nine-year-old, was “Come in, Gojiro. Please come in, Gojiro,
BRIDGER OF GAPS, LINKER OF LINES, NEXUS OF BEAM AND BUNCH, DEFENDER OF THE EVOLLOO
. Please come in, please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
Gojiro read this and fainted dead away.
Through the Cloudcover
I
T WAS NEAR DAWN WHEN THEY LEFT
their island. In the metallic sky above, the stretched-canvas moon creaked down on pulleys and out came the sun they’d made.
The sun was their first great public-works project. The idea for it began in something Komodo once said, about how even though those Okinawa whitecoats always referred to that dank hospital ward as “his” room, he never got to fix it up the way he wanted. It made Gojiro mad, hearing that. Everyone should get to fix up his room how he wanted, the reptile declared, and, since Radioactive Island was their room, sort of, they ought to get cracking. A sun would be the place to start, Komodo suggested. That way they’d be able to tell night from day.
At first Gojiro protested. “Later for the ‘let there be light.’ Let’s live by night, slither surreptitious on a roulette wheel of life. Each to his own Eden, I say.” But, after stubbing his toeclaws on steel-drum boulders a couple hundred times, the reptile agreed that they had to have a sun.
They used a wrecker’s ball for the core, discarded beach reflectors and shards of broken bottles from the top of sugar-plantation walls to make it shine. Gojiro forged the sphere with his Radi-Breath, sealed it with his spit, then shotputted it up into the dull sky. But it didn’t stick. It tumbled like a junkyard meteor into the sea, sending up a steamy fog that took three days to clear.
“Now we’ll never have a sun,” the monster said dejectedly. “How we gonna hang it?”
Komodo rubbed his hairless chin. “On a hook,” he said.
“On a
sky
hook?” Gojiro smirked. “Hey, you can’t fool me, there ain’t no such thing as skyhooks.”
But Komodo was right. They searched the forlorn firmaments of their world and, sure enough, in the gritty air above Asbestos Wood, suspended over the razortipped treeline, they found a skyhook. “Only here,” Gojiro muttered as he launched the sun into the sky once more. On the twenty-fifth try, it stuck.
Still it wasn’t right. “It’s so small,” the reptile moaned. “It looks like a manhole cover up there, a medallion round a record producer’s neck. You can barely see it.”
Nodding grimly, Komodo went to work with his beakers and bunsens, whipping up a multiglassed optical that when accurately adjusted afforded their sun its proper prominence.
Together they stood on the rapidly growing beach at Corvair Bay and marveled at what they had made. “We have a sun,” Komodo said, staring into the dazzling disk, “a center to our sky.”
“Yeah,” Gojiro replied. Then he told Komodo to stand back.
“What are you going to do?”
“Just stand back,” Gojiro repeated, and with one great whooshing leap he catapulted his massive body upward until he hovered face to face with the gleaming globe. He grabbed the sphere and held it tightly to his chest. Komodo had to shield his eyes from the ensuing explosion, but when he looked again, he saw that their molten sun was now embossed with three concentric circles.
“Now it’s really ours,” the monster said, thumping back to land. “I always wanted to carve my name in the sun.”
* * *
They’d hoped for so much new under their sun! A Bunch! A Beam! The founding of a longest Line! But now, backpaddling toward the Cloudcover, Komodo resting on the monster’s belly, it seemed to Gojiro that their sun radiated all the majesty of a fifteen-watt bulb hanging naked in the hallway of a new but already shabby housing project. How pitiful that it should have to peer down on such a sorry state of affairs: the two of them, skulking away without even saying goodbye.
But what other course of action was there, after Gojiro awoke from that Black Spot Dream and read Sheila Brooks’s letter? None. None at all.
“Okay!” the monster had screamed to the still sleeping Komodo. “I give in. Let’s go to America, let’s see this Sheila Brooks—but we got to go now! Tonight!”
An hour later, carrying a sack not much bigger than the one Komodo held when he first arrived on the Island, the monster and his friend were tiptoeing across the bleached beach beyond Radon Seep. They couldn’t chance running into Shig. You never could tell when the severe post-teenager would turn up, peering from the synthetic thicket, the day-for-night glinting off the sheer drop of his no-eye shades. Be seen by him and there would be explanations to make, incurring who knew how much guilt.
Then there were the Atoms. A gaggle of those grinning spasticates could stumble from the steel-trunked forest at any moment, nipping at Gojiro’s pedal extremities, whining for him to put them up on his shoulders for a dragon ride. So many evenings he’d endured that humiliation, being made to jump over the counterfeit moon like a common cud chewer. News of their departure could not be broken to those wretched kids in any civil fashion. Hideous tantrums would ensue, the more epileptic Atoms spincycling into most soulrenderingest of thrashes. Komodo wouldn’t be able to take it. He’d seek to soften the pain of parting with a splash of pageantry, organize some brass-band Busby-Berkeley-goes-to-the-Special-Olympics bon voyage extravaganza that would involve at least two weeks of rehearsals and wind up, without doubt, in the anarchy of pointed heads being shoved into the bells of tubas. It was a vicious thing to do, Gojiro knew, stealing into those Atoms’ funksmelling dormitory, lacing their nightly IVs with an extra helping of Thorazine, but he saw no other way. Without immediate action, there would be no action at all. Inertia-city. Now was the time. If all went well they would be in Hollywood in a week.
* * *
“Bridger of Gaps! Linker of Lines! Nexus of Beam and Bunch!
Defender of the Evolloo!
”—again and again those horrid locutions swarmed inside the monster’s head, contrails of gluey semiology, spinning their Sargasso-like net. It didn’t take any elementary Watson to figure who the weaver of that web was. It was like one of those turgid 1950s teleplays where the private eye gets all pent-up about a particular murder only to find every clue pointing to the shaving mirror.
“The chickens,” Gojiro anguished to himself as he swam through the murk, “have come home to broast.”
The 90 Series! That was the fate-sealing blow, the self-starter for this most forbidding journey. What a horrorshow it was that first night as the monster, his mood mean and desolate, reeled about the ’cano under the influence of rotgut 238, and then, resounding in the Quadcam: “Gojiro . . . Please come in, Gojiro. Please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
“Huh?”
“Gojiro, come in, man. This is Tyrone Everett of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Be waiting on the 90 Series! You got to give it up, that 90 Series! And, by the way, I be needing some transportation, okay? And none of that ten-speed shit. One of them mountain bikes! Please come in, Gojiro.”
The sound slapped the reptile end over end. What was a supplication doing inside his head? “Known I shouldn’t have messed with that 238,” he croaked to himself. “Swill pulls the cruelest of coats!”
But it came again. “Gojiro, come in! This still Tyrone! Telling you, man, you got to reveal it! You got to reveal it now! The 90 Series!”
Then: “Whoa!”
Like teleportation, Gojiro wasn’t down the ’cano looking to lick the last cranny of a microwave anymore. He was in a small, unhappy room in the south section of Philadelphia decorated with torn Earth, Wind, and Fire posters. He wasn’t inside his own body either, he was a small-for-his-age nine-year-old black kid wearing high-top Cons. He saw a woman, his mother, cowering by the cold radiator. Then there were footsteps on a staircase, a door smashing open. “Jimmy!” his mother screamed, terror in her eyes. “You get away, don’t be coming back here. I’m calling the police!” Much as he wanted to turn away before Jimmy’s fist hit his mother’s mouth, he didn’t. Instead he rushed toward Jimmy, trying to strike him, to rip his eyes out of his head, anything to keep him from hitting his mother again. He knocked the big man sideways for a minute, then saw him scowl, lash out. The pain from where Jimmy smacked him across the face was terrific. It was the first time he’d ever felt
physical
pain like that.
Then, like nothing, Gojiro was back inside that vulcanized volcano again. A moment passed, and the voice returned. It was quieter now, full of sobs. “Gojiro . . . Come in, Gojiro. Please heed this humble servant’s plea. Be Tyrone again. I don’t mean to bother you all the time. I mean, I know you got all them other supplications on your desk too. But I
got
to have that 90 Series. Just got to! Please!”
Gojiro stayed very still. In a low, disguised tone he said, “You got the wrong number, man. Sorry.” After a distant whimper, he heard a click and Tyrone Everett of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was gone.
Gojiro lay down on the ’cano floor, drained. But there was no rest. More came. First it was a trickle, then a flood, a hundred shrieking state hospitals inside his Quadcameral brain, all of them wanting the 90 Series. “Gojiro,” they called, “come in. Please heed this humble servant’s plea! Wake up! Reveal the 90 Series now!”
It seemed like his body was fractioned out in a billion slivers. Just as he’d been instantaneously set down in Philadelphia, he was in Guatemala, in a dark jungle. Soldiers were dragging away his family, shooting them before his eyes. Then he was in Cambodia, in a barbed-wire-fenced pit, given a bowl of rice swarming with maggots to eat. And then, in the Sudan, he was an eight-year-old carrying an AK-47. And in Beirut, stealing food from pockets of the dead and decomposing. And in Winnetka, Illinois, they wouldn’t let him borrow the car.
“NOOOOO!” he screamed, rolling around, holding his head.
Komodo came immediately. “My own true friend! What is happening to you?”
“There’s millions of them! Inside! Wanting me!”
“Try to speak, to tell me what you feel.”
Gojiro started to answer but another wave came through, wrenching him everywhichway.
“Beat it!” he screamed at an unseen assailant. “Don’t touch me with those wires . . . I didn’t shoplift that candy bar . . . Don’t take my mother away, she didn’t mean what she said about the government . . . But all the other kids have one . . . You mean I’ll never walk again?
“THIS FREAKING 90 Series, WHATEVER IT IS, IT’S KILLING ME!”
In lieu of more precise information, Komodo did what he thought best. He pulled out emergency medicinals from the pocket of his black pajamas and rammed half of Pakistan through Gojiro’s parietal. And soon the voices in the monster’s mind merged to a faraway clamor, then to the wash of the local news, street noise, easy to ignore.
It wasn’t until a week later, while watching the late-night Dish, that Gojiro and Komodo found out anything about the 90 Series.
“It’s me!” the monster shouted, looking at the fuzzy transmission. He was standing on the parched beachfront of Corvair Bay, all the Atoms looking up at him, their goony eyes swirling counterclockwise. Gojiro recognized the footage immediately. Komodo had shot it at one of the misfit kids’ birthdays, years ago, when the monster would still turn out for those things.
“Hola, zardpards! Yo, yo ho, and hi-ho!” Gojiro listened to that image of himself say. “Calling all Green Scene fiends! Check this out, ’tile-o-files! Talk is not for me, you know. I don’t like talk at all—action is the louder thing. But now I have no choice. So listen up.”
“What the hell is this?” Gojiro stormed. “That ain’t my voice. It’s . . .”
Komodo swallowed hard but was silent.
“It’s Shig! Putting on some crazy accent. Making me sound like a mush-mouthed Chinese waiter!”
On the screen Gojiro’s picture kept talking. “Loyal zardpard fans, do you possess some wonderment why there have been no new exciting, ultrafantastic adventures of your favorite King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms lately? Could others of you, collectors of the very philosophic Gojiro Crystal Communications who have had much edification from numbers 1 through 89, say: why? Why, after 89: none other? Never 90? Never 91? 92? Well, I say to you it is not because I do not love you anymore, or that I am too much partying down with my swinging Radioactive Island joyboys and galpals. Actually I am in grave danger! It has been with great risk that I even send you this message.”
“What is this crap? What’s he trying to pull?”
“Shhh,” Komodo motioned, his attention on the screen.
That voice Shig put into Gojiro’s mouth went on. “I have been placed into that most terrible spell by the evil zombie see-zombie do Opposer. Yes! That same pencilneck geekster I personally refried in that cool cooking adventure
Gojiro vs. the Depthless Society Beast in the Achromatic Casino
. Can you believe it, ’tile-o-files? That crumbum came back! He sneaked up on me when I was playing poker with my monster friends and used his Stultifying Art Ray on me. I had two aces looking up and two eights turned down too!
“Zardpards! This ever-bad Opposer has caused me to fall into a deep trance. I cannot wake up. And I must. I must awake and give you the 90 Series! Listen now, this is the important thing: The 90 Series is everything!
It is all that counts!
I must reveal it to you so we all will be saved!
It is the only way.
“But there is trickiness. The 90 Series is a hidden thing. No one knows it except yours trulyest. Except I forgot. This evil ray has made it fly from me. You must help me remember! Only by hearing the 90 Series from
my own lips
will I be awakened.
Help me to know what I know so I can tell you!
“Yes,
you
, Timmy and Tommy,
you
Billy and Bernice,
you
Debbie and Dwayne! Only you can do it! But there is only one way to reach me. You must supplicate for the 90 Series through a Gojiro Crystal Contact Radio!”
Then, in some real cheesy “trick” photography, a pair of what looked like plastic earmuffs appeared on the head of that phony Gojiro. “Save me! Save yourself!” the dubbed dummy implored. “Supplicate for the 90 Series! Get your Gojiro Crystal Contact Radio today! Only five dollars!”
The screen went blank, and Shig, in his normal voice, said, “For your special Save Gojiro, Save Yourself offer, send five dollars, plus postage and shipping.” He gave a post office box number somewhere in Fiji.