Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (read people like a book .txt) 📕

if we wait too long—poof. The funding goes away. We’ve already lost pilots and aircraft, and we haven’t even tried to get in yet. Important people are trying to pull the plug. Like your friend Andrews.”

“I understand that,” Nathan said. “But … maybe not there. Maybe not Skull Island. There are too many complicating factors now. The storm. And the entrance, it’s too unstable. I don’t trust it. There’s always Antarctica—”

“Which you said we couldn’t enter. Not with the vehicles we have. Right?”

Nathan nodded. “Yes. But we can improve the planes. I have some ideas.”

“That’s more time and more money,” Dave said. “A lot more money. I’m just doing the math here, brother. It’s now or never.” He put his arm around Nathan’s shoulder. “I believe in you, little brother,” he said. “You’ve got this. Anyway, Mercury, not Apollo, right?”

“You understand what I meant by that?” Nathan asked.

“Yeah,” Dave said. “The first Mercury mission just dipped our toes in space. We didn’t try to go all the way to the Moon. Or even orbit the Earth. Just up and down.”

“So tomorrow…?”

“Wet toes,” Dave said. “No Moon landing. I’ll see what I see, we’ll get better readings, I’ll come back. And next time—we’ll go together. All the way. Now.” He lifted his cup. “Unto the breach,” he said.

Nathan raised his own whisky. “Unto the breach,” he said. “And Sláinte mhath.”

“Fancy,” Dave said. “Where did you learn that?”

“A phrasebook,” Nathan said. “I did a book signing in Glasgow—”

“Just drink,” Dave said.

“Fine.” He drank, then made a face as the stuff went down. “Oh, God,” Nathan said. “What the hell is that?”

“The smokiness? The peat?”

“If by that, you mean acid and dirt,” Nathan said. “Wow. That was awful.”

“Maybe an acquired taste,” Dave said. “I guess you didn’t have any Islay whisky in Glasgow.”

“No,” he admitted. “A beer now and then is more my speed.”

Dave nodded and knocked his knuckles on the table. “What are we going to find down there, Nathan? In Hollow Earth.”

“You’ve read the briefing. And my book, I assume.”

“Yes, well, I’ve also been busy training,” Dave said. “The briefing is boiler-plate nothingspeak, and I haven’t had a chance to read your book. So what do you, the expert, think we’re going to find down there?”

Nathan swallowed again, trying to get the taste of the whisky out of his throat.

“Another world,” he said.

“Godzilla?”

Nathan cocked his head. “Brooks thinks so. He believes the Titans originated from there. And since Godzilla has vanished from sight, maybe that’s where he’s hiding out.”

“And you?”

He knew Dave was probably just trying to mollify him. But it was hard not to get going anyway, especially after spending weeks on a tour where hardly anyone was listening.

“Do you know how many times life on Earth nearly became extinct?” Nathan asked.

“Well, there were the dinosaurs, I guess—”

“Many, many times,” Nathan said. “The end of the Permian was a big one. Ninety percent of everything died. But even earlier—there was a period when the entire planet froze over. We call it Snowball Earth, because that’s what it would have looked like from space. Not a regular ice age, mind you, when you still have liquid surface water in the oceans. I mean totally frozen over. And there were other times, right after we think life formed, that the Earth was pounded with asteroids, covered with volcanic lakes. An inferno. And yet, life kept coming back. Every time. After every massive die-off, something poked its head up and started to evolve, diversify, build an ecosystem.”

He paused, let it sink in a moment.

“You think life hid out down there,” Dave said. “In Hollow Earth. And when the worst of it was over, it just came back out of hiding. But how? Without sunlight—”

“The first life on Earth probably didn’t depend on the sun at all,” Nathan said. “Photosynthetic organisms like cyanobacteria and algae were latecomers to the party. In fact they caused an extinction of their own because of all the oxygen they produced, which was pure poison to the world’s earliest life. Even now, there are plenty of organisms that need neither sunlight nor oxygen. What life does need is some sort of energy source; there are living things that subsist on the heat and chemicals in deep-sea volcanic vents, where no sunlight can penetrate. And I think there is plenty of energy in Hollow Earth. More than we can dream of, maybe. It’s just the form of it that I’m not certain of. But if there is energy, life will find a way to use it, unlock its potential.”

He leaned forward, feeling the whisky in his veins.

“I don’t think life began up here at all,” he confided. “I think it may have originated down there. Made its way up here through volcanic vents and so forth. And yes, when times got tough up here, maybe surface life migrated back down there. Cross-pollination. An exchange that’s been happening for billions of years.” He looked seriously at his brother. “And maybe one of those exchanges included some of our own ancestors. Australopithecines, or Homo habilis, but more likely some form of hominin that we’ve never found fossils of—because they’re down there. Do you know how many human cultures, scattered all over the globe, have legends that their ancestors emerged from the ground? I think when we get down there, we won’t just find the origin of the Titans, but possibly of ourselves.”

“Wow,” Dave said.

“I know, right,” Nathan replied.

“I mean, wow, what a lightweight,” Dave said. “One shot and you’re drunk off your ass.”

Nathan smiled. “Yeah. I’m rambling. Who knows what we’ll find down there? That’s what this is all about, right?”

“Absolutely, brother,” Dave said. “Which reminds me.”

He pulled something out of his pocket and held it in his palm.

Nathan stared at it incredulously. “My spaceman,” he said. “How—”

“My spaceman,” Dave replied. “We made a bet, remember?”

“You cheated,” Nathan said. “You still have that?”

“Sure,” Dave said. “I took it to college with me. To remember my little brother and his crazy ideas. It’s