Godzilla Returns by Marc Cerasini Page B

was a little shorter than regulation length.
    They had met Emiko - Lieutenant Takado - that morning, when she arrived at INN headquarters. She'd been sent by Dr. Nobeyama to brief them on theories concerning the origin and physiology of Godzilla.
    Yoshi, especially, had been surprised to see that Dr. Nobeyama's assistant was a member of Japan's Self-Defense Force - and a woman at that. The Japanese military was not as open to female recruits as the armies of many other countries. She must be a very remarkable woman , he thought with admiration.
    Yoshi suddenly realized that the lieutenant had caught him staring at her. He turned his head away shyly.
    Emiko's expression remained fixed, but she smiled to herself behind the mirrored sunglasses.
    The noise, and the shaking of the chopper, made it next to impossible for Brian to read Stephen Martin's account of the destruction of Tokyo. The copy of This Is Tokyo his uncle had sent him was a recent edition, reprinted after Martin's death in 1994. Unfortunately, Brian hadn't even finished reading the in-depth introduction by Carl Sagan.
    He sighed, stretched, and shut the book. He tucked it into a travel bag and settled back into the metal-and-canvas chair. As the military helicopter raced over the Sea of Japan, Brian closed his eyes and let his mind drift back to the briefing that morning.
    * * *
    "Godzilla first appeared off the shore of Oto Island in August 1954," Lieutenant Takado had said that morning, as a grainy black-and-white photo flashed onto the white projection screen. It was a picture of Godzilla, his head and much of his torso peeking over a hill. In the foreground of the photograph, Brian noticed several humans, fleeing in panic.
    It's a cliche , he thought, but they look like ants.
    Brian looked away from the screen and scanned the other faces in the room.
    Nick Gordon, Yoshi Masahara, and May McGovern sat around a huge table in the INN conference room. Their eyes were glued to the screen at the front of the room. Each member of the INN team had a folder open in front of them. It was filled with dozens of pages of text, mathematical formulas, graphs, and diagrams.
    "The creature's origin is still a mystery." Lieutenant Takado continued. "But the nuclear physicists Dr. Edward Teller and Albert Einstein formulated the most likely theory..."
    She clicked a remote control she held, and the image on the screen changed. An even grainier, and very blurry, photograph of a large reptile walking near a line of palm trees flashed onto the screen.
    "In the 1940's, during the closing days of World War II, a mysterious species of reptile was reported by Japanese troops stationed in the Marshall Islands, a chain of small islands and atolls southwest of Hawaii.
    "This photograph was taken in 1944 by a platoon of Japanese soldiers - none of whom survived the war, unfortunately. For years this photo was discounted as a hoax, or as wartime propaganda - until the appearance of Godzilla in 1954.
    "Dr. Teller postulated that this animal, or another member of the species, was exposed to massive amounts of radiation from the first hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll. The creature absorbed the radiation, and that caused it to mutate into the monster the western press calls Godzilla -"
    "Excuse me... what do you mean by 'the western press'?" Nick interrupted.
    Lieutenant Takado turned to Nick. "The Oto Islanders have a legend about a sea monster called Gojira. The word Gojira , translated into English, literally means 'whale ape' - or, more precisely, 'whale that walks upright like an ape.'
    "When the mutation arrived on their shores in 1954, the islanders naturally mistook the radioactive monster for their mythical Gojira.
    "It was the American journalist Stephen Martin who mistranslated the name into English as Godzilla. That name was adopted worldwide, though in Japan we still call the monster Gojira. There is, of course, a Latin name -"
    "Spare us!" Nick cried with a dismissive wave. Brian