a38c116d26d24d7ce25bef797114adf1 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

11

Roger Falkenstein stood near the helicopter at the edge of the jungle clearing that passed for the Hollywood liner port, cool and relaxed in the murderous heat as the last batch of Institute recruits, sweating profusely and starting nervously at every crash and thump from the surrounding jungle, were loaded aboard. The ambient temperature was up around 120 degrees and the humidity hovered around its usual 100 percent, but the modified inertia-screen that enclosed his body kept his skin at a nice dry 70 degrees. If forcing us to locate the Institute in this jungle lunatic asylum was really meant as anything more sinister than a joke, it’s been a dismal failure, he thought. The more hostile the natural environment, the better our technology looks, and the security problem is certainly minimized out here two thousand kilometers from anything, surrounded by a godzilla-infested rain forest, where the sparse local population were far too obsessed with producing their endless godzilla epics to give much thought to anything more serious.

Falkenstein boarded the helicopter, nodded to the pilot, and the copter lifted clear of the jungle and headed northwest toward the Institute, about twenty kilometers of impenetrable jungle beyond the bizarre town of Hollywood. Almost at once, they were flying above the peculiar sprawling metropolis itself.

From the air, Hollywood seemed to be a huge city, a vast eclectic smorgasbord of every architectural style ever conceived by the mind of man. Here a few square blocks of Arabian Knights palaces, there the recreated skyscrapers of ancient New York. Medieval terrestrial castles and the glass towers of Heldhime. Downtown Gotham and the legendary Tivoli amusement gardens. The Luxor of the Pharaohs and the Rome of Julius Caesar.

In actuality, the few thousand whackers who inhabited the town lived in a cluster of environment domes at the eastern edge, and all else were flimsy half-scale mock-up shells of exotic buildings which existed in order to be periodically smashed to bits by rampaging godzillas for the benefit of the cameras and the delectation of the galactic audience. Indeed, just below, a fifty-meter green homed colossus and an even larger monstrosity with a huge mouth full of gnashing teeth were rolling about the streets of ancient Babylon, locked in mortal combat as hanging gardens and ziggurats crumbled from random kicks. Even inside the helicopter, the titanic bellowings and gruntings were quite harrowing to the Gothamite recruits.

But not to Falkenstein, who had long since developed a casual indifference to the crazed environment of Godzil-laland, though his first encounter with this unsettling reality had been something else again.

The shuttle from the Heisenberg had landed at the Hollywood liner port with the Institute construction party, and he and Maria had stepped outside into a choking, enervating blast of soggy heat. Immediately before them was a high green wall of trees, vines, and underbrush that gave off an overpowering stench of rank rotting fecundity. Things howled, bellowed, grunted, and crashed in the nearby jungle, sounds of menace almost too horrid to be credible.

“Great suns!” Maria said.

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