Gargantua

THE TV EVENT OF THE YEAR IS NOW A THRILLING NOVEL!

The sparkling waters around the tropical island of Malau attract surfers, fishermen, and tourists from all around the world. Now they’ve attracted something else. Something
big
. . . and incredibly dangerous.

It begins with an earthquake, and the mysterious deaths of two young women. Local authorities are baffled by the tragedy, until a visiting American scientist realizes that the tremors have driven an unknown creature up from the ocean depths . . . and there may be more than one.

Soon the entire island will tremble beneath the thunderous tread of a gigantic mutated behemoth, the likes of which the world has never seen. No warning, no scientific theory can prepare mankind for the awesome reality of . . .

GARGANTUA

Kikko climbed up behind the abomination.
This is going to be fun.

Then it got dark.

It’s morning. It can’t get dark. And it’s not cloudy.

Realizing he was now in something’s shadow, he turned around.

The sky was blotted out by a ten-foot-long head with two horns on top of it.

Whoa. The big daddy of all abominations.

Kikko screamed.

The head leaned forward. Its teeth were numerous, looked to be razor-sharp, and were heading straight for Kikko.

GARGANTUA

Copyright © 1998 by 20
th
Century Fox Film Corporation

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

Tor Books on the World Wide Web:
http://www.tor.com

Tor ® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

ISBN: 0-812-57098-7

Cover art by Gabriel Galluccio

First edition: May 1998

Printed in the United States of America

For the Geek Patrol—Drewshi, the Hawk Man,

the Lip-Chick, and the Tall Cool One—

for all those Wednesday nights.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
would like to thank Ronald Parker, the writer and producer of
Gargantua,
who went above and beyond the call of duty to help me flesh out his script; Tor Books editor Greg Cox for giving me the assignment in the first place and for generally being a good egg; Greg’s noble assistant Karla Zounek for keeping me up to date; Ms. G.A. DeCandido for invaluable editorial input; Marina Frants, for local color, scuba diving and fish neepery, and general support;
Ocean Realm
magazine, especially the various articles in their Winter 1997/98 issue; Jim Macdonald for invaluable technical expertise; Spiff’s Newt & Salamander web page, which has everything you ever wanted to know about salamanders but were afraid to ask (
http://www.users.interport.net/~spiff/Newt&Salamander.html
); and Key West musician Michael McCloud and the sadly now-defunct Seattle trio Uncle Bonsai for musical inspiration.

PROLOGUE

“C
’mon, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is the best rock and roll song
ever.”

As always, John made that pronouncement at the loudest possible volume. Marina sighed. She’d known John since high school, and he always seemed to subscribe to the theory that whoever spoke loudest had to be right.

Dave, of course, chimed in. He was constitutionally incapable of agreeing with anything John said—not difficult, really, but it was a knee-jerk reaction. “Please. The song sucks. Hell, Robert Plant wrote the goddamn thing, and he doesn’t even have any idea what it means.”

John was in the middle of sipping from his beer bottle, and so couldn’t reply verbally without spilling it.

That left it to John’s fiancée to come to his defense. “What difference does that make?” Laura asked. “I mean, all those stupid Bob Dylan songs you drool over don’t make a lot of sense, either.”

“Look,” John said, having finished his sip and now screwing the bottle down into the sand, “every time radio stations do those best rock songs of all time polls, ‘Stairway to Heaven’
always
wins. Period, end of sentence.”

John also liked to say
period, end of sentence
as if it would actually end the argument. It never did, but he always looked disappointed when someone kept the discussion going anyhow.

Marina turned and gazed out into the ocean as she scrunched sand between her bare toes. The sun had started to set, painting the sky in glorious bursts of red, orange, and purple.
So of course the guys are talking about music,
she thought with an internal sigh.
We travel halfway ’round the world for sun, surf, and scuba diving, and they sit here and have the same stupid conversations they have back home.

Marina and her friends sat in a circle on Malau’s largest beach. A bonfire blazed in the circle’s center, and Marina’s boyfriend Greg was holding a large pan over it by its long handle. Inside the pan was the first batch of fish that the others had caught that day while Marina, Greg, and Dave went diving. The group had decided to escape the latest in a series of brutal Minneapolis winters by taking a tropical vacation in the South Seas. Malau—one of the few local islands whose economy relied more on fishing than tourism—proved the best choice, as they wanted to avoid the usual tourist traps.

Greg got into the act now: “What about ‘Layla’?”

John got his disappointed look. “That isn’t a song, it’s two separate songs that have nothing to do with each other.”

Marina sighed again. She had been hoping that her boyfriend would stay out of it, but no such luck.

“Yeah, but ‘Layla’ has the hook—the guitar riff. I mean,
everybody
knows that guitar riff. Name me
one
riff from ‘Stairway to Heaven’.”

Marina suddenly stood up. “Guys, I’m gonna take a walk, okay?”

Various murmurs of “yeah,” “okay,” and “whatever” came from the group. Greg said, “The first batch of fish is almost ready, hon.”

“I’m not really hungry,” Marina said, which was a lie. She just hated eating newly captured fish. She knew it wasn’t rational—back home, she would gleefully sink her teeth into fried shrimp or smoked salmon—but here, in a place where fish were primarily a subject for her underwater photography, eating them seemed wrong somehow.

Carol also rose. “I’ll go with you,” she said.

At first Marina was going to object, but then she nodded. She didn’t really know Carol very well. Marina had been friends with the others since either high school or college, but Carol was just the girlfriend Dave happened to have on this particular trip. He went through about four a year, and indeed had been dating a woman named Kim when they first planned the trip.
But hey, maybe this’ll give me the chance to get to know her better,
Marina thought.

She looked out again at the colors of the sky. The purple was starting to overtake the red and orange.
Besides, I have to share this sunset with
someone.

They started to walk down the beach quietly at first. A warm breeze wafted gently through Marina’s hair as she watched the colorburst that was the South Seas sky. Sometimes she wondered why she stayed in so cold and bitter a place as Minneapolis when places like this existed. Right now, she felt like she would have been content to spend her entire life just sitting with her eyes closed and letting this amazing breeze caress her face.

This place is magic,
she thought, not for the first time. At sunset, the sky had more colors than a Monet painting. At night, the stars came out in numbers she never would have believed possible growing up as a city girl. And during the day, the water was a deep, pure blue.

“Marina?” Carol asked, startling her—she had temporarily forgotten the other woman’s presence.

“Yeah?”

“Do you have
any
idea what they’re talking about?”

Marina couldn’t help laughing, as she forced herself back to the real world. “Music—rock and roll songs.”

“Oh, okay.”

Marina stared at her companion in something like shock. “You date Dave and you don’t listen to rock and roll?”

Carol shrugged and folded her arms in order to rub them. Marina noticed goosebumps on the other woman’s arms, which surprised her—while it was cooler than the one hundred degrees it had been that afternoon, it was still quite warm out.

“He tried to get me to listen to some stuff, but—I dunno, it’s just noise, y’know?” Carol’s voice suddenly grew distant. “That is
so
beautiful.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m ever going to get tired of the sunsets here.”

“Hm? Oh, I meant the music those guys are playing over there.
That’s
real music, y’know?”

Marina blinked. She had noticed the music playing, of course—the drums sometimes threatened to drown out everyone except John—but hadn’t paid it much heed. About thirty feet from where she and her friends had set up their bonfire, a bunch of locals had gotten together for a kind of jam session—in fact, their playing was what prompted the discussion of which rock and roll song was the greatest in the first place. Marina had the tinnest of tin ears, and so had no idea what kind of music they played, nor whether it was any good. It was heavy on percussion, a steady, rhythmic, loud beat. Certainly the people dancing to the music seemed to think it was worth bopping around to. They all had huge smiles on their faces. Marina couldn’t help but compare them to the people dancing at her uncle’s wedding the previous summer; they had smiled, too, but they were the plastered-on smiles of the terminally-polite-but-not-really-caring-that-much. These people were genuinely enjoying themselves, as enchanted by the music they danced to as Marina was by the setting she walked in.
But then, that could just be the native spirit of happiness.

Good God,
she thought, aghast,
listen to me—I sound like some kind of British colonel in a pith helmet travelling to the dark continent for the first time.
But it was hard not to think of the Malauans as anything but congenial and happy with life. The unconditional friendliness with which the locals treated everyone—even a bunch of loud, obnoxious tourists from Minnesota—truly delighted Marina, and just added to the magic.