Gojiro Read Online Free PDF

was. If all the rest was madness, at least this was so.
    What a scene it was, the day Komodo’s tiny boat washed up on the headlands of what would come to be called Past Due Point. It wasn’t much of a place then. This was long before the major flotjet influxes and, of course, before the coming of the Atoms. Right then, Radioactive Island was nothing but the ’cano, an igneous lurch from the roiling petrochemical sea, and even that wasn’t as big as it would later become, after Komodo perfected his vulcanizing techniques. The Cloudcover was a lot thicker, though, a peasoup no laser could split. You couldn’t see a claw in front of your face out there, how dense the viscous draped. Primeval as all get-out, Radioactive Island was an unformed, ground-gurgling world in the midst of being born.
    “Lizard!” Komodo shouted when he reached the beach, still in his hospital gown. “I am here! I am the boy you spoke to. I have come to be your friend!
    “Lizard! I had a good trip. The sharks were no problem after that one time. Please answer, lizard!”
    Gojiro did not answer. He couldn’t. It was all he could do to peek his massive green head out of the ’cano’s crater, squint into the murk.
    “I am that boy!” came Komodo’s voice. “The one you asked to come. To be your friend.”
    Boy?  . . . Asked?  . . . FRIEND? What an oafish Frankenstein he must’ve seemed, mumbling “Friend?,” the words echoing inside the Gothic acoustics of the vast, new-minted Quadcamerality.
    “Lizard!”
    Lizard? The monster huddled within the lavaflows, tried to compute the nature of this invader. Dimly, he recalled forms not unlike this boy. Were there not boys in his dreams, in that lost and fading world that visited him at night? Bipeds. They made sounds like this boy. They threw grass around their scaleless leathers, put bones in their noses, went out to sea squatting in long pieces of wood. There had been reports of them daring to come close to ’tiles, menacing them with sticks. One account actually had them surrounding a solitary basking zard, attacking and killing him. Then they stripped his leathers from his body, threw him in a blackbellied pot, and ate him!
    “Lizard! I have come. I am your friend!”
    What could that boy calling in the fog want? Why didn’t he go away? Stop your calling, the frightened reptile silently beseeched, his head a jumble. Nothing seemed the same. Before, it was all electricity. It buzzed, you did what you did. Now there were these thoughts.
    “Lizard, please, don’t be afraid.”
    Afraid? Gojiro sank lower into the ’cano. Where he came from, there was no such thing as being afraid. Fear had no niche. His kind barely deigned to peer down at the descending links of the food chain. But here—in this place, as this thing he had become? Now every step was fraught with doubt. He’d tried to carry on as before, but the great time-honored reflexes failed him. Only two days earlier he’d spotted a small furry thing running through the smoke-filled forest and set after it. It felt good, engaging the ageless predatory geometry, the ever-tightening circle of the hunt. Even the unease of his solitude gave way for the moment. But it turned to disaster. His instinctuals were unfamiliar with the beast’s behavior. Given its dirt-brown looks, the animal almost certainly should have gone with a camouflage-based defense. For millennia mammals of this apparent type had frozen cigarstore still, hoping stalking zards would mistake them for mossy mounds or outcropping roots; it was an old trick, the best kind. But instead, this individual began rubbing itself against a swatch of luminous shrubbery. Every time it stroked the bush, phosphor came off on its fur, accentuating its presence. Now, of course, the Max Factor factor in the taxonomic flora-fauna relationship between the blacklight plant and Flounce Fox is well documented, but then, back then, it nonplussed Gojiro no end. The fox’s extra legs and