Gargantua Page 2

“It’s the ocean, Greg, things move in it all the time. It’s called an ecosystem.”

  “Hardy-har-har. The fish is just about done.”

  “Haven’t Carol and Marina gotten back yet?”

  “Nah, Marina’s probably drooling over the sunset or something. We won’t see them for ages.”

  “Hey, what about ‘Born to Run’?”

  ONE

  Brandon Ellway stared at the two suitcases, one garment bag, and three duffel bags in the room he and his father were to share during their stay in Malau, trying to figure out which one to unpack first.

  Dad had told Brandon to unpack the luggage and check the two laptops while he went off to supervise the delivery of his specialized equipment. Dad always did that—no matter where they went, he always stood over the people who delivered all his toys to the hotel room.

  Malau had just been the latest stop; Brandon and his father had been on the road for months, travelling to all sorts of interesting places, stopping home only long enough to restock on things like clothes.

  Deciding to get the unpleasantness overwith, Brandon opened up his father’s suitcase. It was, naturally, a disaster area—clothes strewn about, unfolded and disorganized. As usual, Dad just threw stuff into the suitcase without thinking. At least he hadn’t mixed the dirty laundry up with the clean clothes, but that was only because Brandon himself had made sure the laundry was done their last day in Vancouver.

  Sighing, Brandon sorted through Dad’s clothes, folded them, and put them away. Their room had two dressers with three drawers each. The underwear and socks went in the top drawer, shirts in the second, pants and shorts in the third. Then he hung up the garment bag, which contained Dad’s two suits, in the room’s closet.

  That left his own suitcase, which was meticulously organized, just the way Mom had taught him.

  Mom.

  It had been a year since Brandon’s mother’s death. But the twelve-year-old refused to dwell on it. He wasn’t a dumb kid anymore; he wasn’t going to let it get to him. After all, he was Dad’s assistant—or intern, as he called it, but Brandon liked the other word better.

  Even before Mom died, Brandon had been helping out. What was it that guy from that magazine called them? “One big happy science family.” Brandon probably knew enough about marine biology at twelve to qualify for a Bachelor’s Degree in the subject.

  He finished putting away his own clothes, as well as his prize possession: the acid-free box that contained his precious Captain Marvel comics. These were the old Fawcett comics from the 1940s that C.C. Beck and Otto Binder did before the publishers of Superman sued them for infringing on their copyright. Brandon had inherited the comics from his grandfather, and he absolutely loved them. He refused to leave them anywhere; despite the risks, he always had to have the comics with him wherever he went.

  He stowed the comics in the closet, then turned to the two laptops. One was Dad’s, used to construct models, fill in charts, and make notes. The other was Brandon’s, used partly to compile various bits of data that Dad needed, partly to play games (Brandon especially enjoyed a logic game he’d acquired off the Internet), but primarily for his home schooling.

  Home schooling. Yeah, right. Like I’ve got a home. Sure, they technically lived in San Diego, but it wasn’t like Brandon ever spent any time there anymore. Home were these two suitcases, Dad’s all messy and disorganized, Brandon’s neat and pristine, just like Mom’s always was.

  Stop thinking about her. You’re over it, remember?

  Brandon unzipped the case for Dad’s laptop and put it on the desk. As he set it down, he heard a soft clunk from inside one of the flaps. He ripped open the velcro to find a picture frame.

  Mom.

  It was the picture of her that Dad had taken on that boat in Key West—what turned out to be their last trip before Mom was diagnosed with the brain tumor. Brandon hadn’t liked Key West all that much, but the boat trip was fun. Mom looked really cool with the wind blowing her hair all around—kind of like a fashion model, almost.

  I’m not gonna cry. I’m a big kid. Big kids don’t cry.

  He’d been good. He hadn’t thought about Mom in weeks. Not even the last time he unpacked. But that stupid bellhop was talking to that other stupid bellhop about those two people that died on the beach last night, and that reminded Brandon of when Dad first told him about Mom, and—

  Stop thinking about it!

  He booted up Dad’s laptop, then set the picture down next to the bed closest to the door. That was going to be Dad’s bed, since Brandon preferred to sleep near the window, and Dad always let him. Then he unloaded his own laptop and booted it up.

  While he waited for them to go through their startup routines, Brandon looked out the window. Though given the highfalutin’ name of the Hotel Ritz, their lodgings were, in fact, in a fairly ramshackle one-story wooden building that made the average Motel 6 back home look like the Plaza. Brandon’s first thought upon seeing it was that they were reliving the youth of Abraham Lincoln in his log cabin.

  Still, they did have a view of the beach where, according to Dad, they’d probably do most of their work. Unlike the beaches back home in San Diego, this place was gorgeous. In all the time he’d been helping his parents out, Brandon had never seen water quite this blue before. Unspoiled was the word Dad had used, and from the way he described it, Brandon was worried that this island would be full of natives in grass skirts who used barter for trade.

  Based on what he’d seen so far, this wasn’t the case. Even this rinky-dink hotel had air conditioning, everyone spoke better English than Brandon did, and there wasn’t a grass skirt in sight.

  A yawn crept up on him, then seemed to wash over his entire body as his mouth opened wide and he stretched his arms out. This place may be nice, but it sure is far away from everywhere else. The flight had taken hours, and with all the switching around and the dinky planes they had to take on the last leg of the trip, it felt like it took longer to fly from Manila to Malau than it did the much longer distance from Vancouver to Manila. Brandon had slept as much as he could on the various flights, but he still wanted some time to relax, maybe take a nap. Hope Dad feels the same.

  A clicking noise brought Brandon’s attention away from the splendid view and to the door, through which walked his father.

  Weirdly, Dad came in alone.

  “Where’s all the stuff, Dad?”

  Dad smiled. “The ‘stuff’ is out on the beach, which is where we’re gonna be in a few minutes. How’re Jack and Jill doing?”

  Brandon rolled his eyes. He never understood why Dad had to name the computers, and always after some kind of duo. The previous two laptops, before they upgraded to the latest notebooks, were called Thelma and Louise.

  In answer to Dad’s question, he said, “They’re booting up now. But we’re all unpacked and everything. Do we have to go out to the beach right away?”

  Dad nodded. “ ’Fraid so.”

  “Can’t you start without me?” Brandon asked, thinking once more of naps.

  Putting his hand to his chest, Dad got all sarcastic. “What? Start without my loyal intern?”

  “Assistant.”

  “Fine, assistant. Either way, you know I need you down there.” He smiled. “C’mon, finish up with the machines, then put on your bathing suit.”

  Brandon frowned. “Bathing suit?”

  Dad laughed as he unbuttoned his shirt. “Or shorts, I don’t care. But we’re on a tropical island now. We go out like this, we’ll suffocate.”

  Brandon looked down at his own outfit: a long-sleeved Polo shirt and jeans. Fine for Vancouver, but not so much for here. “Yeah, okay,” he said, pulling the Polo shirt over his head, then moving over to the dresser to pull out a T-shirt and a pair of shorts.

  After both Brandon and his father had changed, the boy checked out the laptops. “Everything looks cool, Dad. No error messages or viruses or anything. Want me to run the applications?”

  “Nah. And don’
t bother bringing them down—don’t wanna get sand in ’em. We’re just doing the basic stuff today, water temperature and the like. So bring a paper notebook.”

  Brandon nodded and grabbed a legal pad and pen from one of the duffels. “Let’s go to work, Dad.”

  “Look, Kal, it’s my front page. All you gotta do is print it . . . No, I didn’t clear it with Manny, why the hell should I? . . . Look, Manny believes in freedom of the press just like me, so . . . c’mon, Kal, it’s not like this is a big secret or anything, especially the way that John Dovrojer guy is carrying on at the top of his lungs . . . Kal, this ain’t a discussion, all right? It’s my paper, and I’m tellin’ you that that picture of those two girls is goin’ on the front page . . . All right, then . . . ’bye.”

  Paul Bateman sighed as he hung up the phone. Kal had never given him this kind of hard time before. But then, Paul had never printed the story of two tourist corpses on his front page before, either.

  Prior to Paul setting up the Malau Weekly News, Kal’s clientele at his print shop had consisted primarily of signs, pamphlets, and booklets—barely enough for him to stay in business. He also used equipment that was top of the line when he got it in 1978. The revenue from printing a weekly paper allowed him to upgrade—to Paul’s extreme gratitude, since his journalism training at the University of California at Berkeley hadn’t included cut-and-paste layout, but that was all Kal could handle initially—to a Power Mac with the latest version of Quark and a printing press that wasn’t half the size of the island.

  Paul turned to the monitor on his own computer and stared at the headline, TOURISTS FOUND DEAD ON BEACH. He shuddered. When he first arrived on Malau years earlier, he had been a tourist, on vacation after graduating from Berkeley and before hitting the job market. He wound up staying and running the island’s first “hometown” newspaper since being liberated from the Japanese and gaining independence after World War II.

  What didn’t make sense was how the two women died. The official cause of death was drowning, but they only drowned because they got tangled in a fishing net. According to the people they travelled with, one of them was an experienced scuba diver and swimmer. It didn’t make sense that she and her friend had gotten so thoroughly tangled up in a net that, from all accounts, was just sitting there, moored into the sand.

  The question now is, do we have the budget for a special followup edition? he thought. No way do I wanna wait a week before doing the next one if something breaks. Paul had wanted the paper to be daily in the first place, but the startup costs on a weekly were steep enough, and while he had the moral and legal support of the Malau government to produce a paper, he was on his own as far as funding went. He had only just paid off the initial loan, and—while pretty much the entire Malau population subscribed and ad revenues had increased steadily since he started—he barely broke even on a weekly, once you subtracted living expenses.

  But then, how often do tourists die on the beach?

  “Mail call!”

  Paul started, then looked up to see Mak, Malau’s lone postal employee, walking into Paul’s office. “Oh, yipee,” he said without enthusiasm. The vast majority of his posted mail consisted of junk or bills. On-island mail—in other words, the interesting stuff—generally came via fax or e-mail or was delivered in person.

  “Actually,” Mak said, dropping the rubber-banded bundle he held in his left hand into the wire in-box on Paul’s desk, “there’s one thing here you might like. From the States in a handwritten envelope.”

  Paul blinked. “Really? Where from?”

  “I told you, the States.”

  “Geez, Mak, don’t they teach you guys geography here?”

  Mak looked mildly wounded. “Hey, I know all fifty states in the Union. What I don’t know is what all those stupid two-letter codes mean. Dunno why they can’t just write out the state names like sensible people. That entire country of yours is lazy.”

  Paul chuckled. “Yeah, yeah,” he said as he grabbed the bundle, undid the rubber band and sifted through, looking for the mysterious envelope.

  “Hey, you gonna write about those two girls that died?”

  Nodding, Paul said, “Tonight’s front page, actually.”

  “Yeah?”

  Paul found what had to be the envelope, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it came from his college roommate, Kwame. “Yeah, well, it’s news, y’know? And, by the way, for future reference, ‘CA’ is for California.”

  Mak smiled. “Right. Hey, when you gonna come over for dinner again? It’s been over a month since the baby threw up on you. She misses it.”

  Laughing, Paul remembered playing with Mak’s one-year-old girl and getting kid barf on his favorite T-shirt to show for it. But he also remembered Mak’s amazing chili.

  “Next week, okay?”

  “Okay.” Mak waved goodbye and went back to his appointed rounds.

  Paul ripped open the letter from Kwame. Dear Crazy Person, it started, and Paul laughed. Kwame Davies had been a fellow Berkeley journalism student, and he and Paul had shared a room their final two years, graduating with visions of the L.A. Times dancing in their heads. Kwame had repeatedly told Paul that he was crazy to stay in “a third-world country” and that he was wasting his talents. However, he had limited those complaints of late to occasional jabs like letter greetings.

  The missive itself brought Paul up to date on Kwame’s life. Among other things, he had gotten a new apartment, a two-bedroom in Sherman Oaks, which he shared with a freelance photographer.

  Paul set the letter down and looked out his office window at the clear blue sky, trees swaying in the gentle breeze. He thought about the three-bedroom house that he rented for a price that was less than half of Kwame’s share of a no doubt cramped two-bedroom apartment. He thought about the fact that got to be his own editor, publisher, photographer, and reporter, responsible to no one but himself.

  No regrets here, he decided, as he decided every day that he looked out over Malau.

  He stored the file on his computer—third-world countries don’t have Power Macs, he thought toward his friend thousands of miles away—and decided to go out for a walk on the beach, leaving the day’s mail unread for once. The day of a new edition was always a slow one—he had dropped the disk containing the week’s issue with Kal first thing in the morning; the paper would hit the stands by sunset—and Paul liked to spend it walking along the beach. Today was a particularly nice day for it.

  He locked the office up and walked down to the nearest stretch of beach, removing his mocassins and holding them. Growing up in Los Angeles, he’d spent most of his life on beaches, but the nicest Malibu beach couldn’t hold a candle to the crummiest one on Malau. Less crap in the sand, more blue in the water, less smog in the air.

  Within fifteen minutes, he found himself not too far from where Marina Greenberg and Carol Franz met their deaths, and he shuddered.

  Then his eye caught something interesting: an array of boxes and cases that looked more or less completely out of place on a beach. A little kid was rummaging through one of them, finally taking out something that looked like a tube. There was something that Paul was pretty sure was a tranquilizer gun strapped to the inside of the lid.

  Either that kid is a thief, or he’s got more aptitude than most ten-year-olds, Paul thought. Whichever, this smells like news to me.

  The kid ran out toward the ocean, sloshing through the surf, and handed the tube thing to a tall man.

  “Thanks,” the man said without looking at the item, taking it with his left hand while holding some other kind of gadget in his right. The gadget took his attention for another couple of seconds before he finally looked at the tube the kid had given him. “Brandon, I said I wanted to measure water temperature—how do I do it with this?” The words were accompanied by a smile; a mild reprimand with no anger behind it. Paul noted that.

  Brandon, for his part, didn’t seem very reprimanded, so the light tone was just as well. He shrug
ged and said, “I goofed. Shoot me.”

  The man laughed, handing the tube back. “You’re some assistant, pal.”

  “You get what you pay for, Dad.”

  A-ha, Paul thought, a father-and-son team. He walked toward the adult as Brandon dashed back to the boxes.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out what you’re doing, but I give up,” he said.

  The man didn’t even turn to look at him. “Measuring water temperature.”

  “Interesting hobby,” Paul said by way of a prompt.

  Now the man turned to him. “I’m a marine biologist,” he said with a smile.

  “Oh, hey, sorry,” Paul said, in case he had given offense with his hobby line. The wheels turned in his head. “Listen, how about giving me an interview?”

  “You work for the local newspaper?”

  Paul laughed. “I am the local newspaper.” He extended his right hand. “Paul Bateman.”

  “Jack Ellway,” the man said, returning the handshake. “This is my son, Brandon.”

  Paul turned around to see that Brandon had returned, this time holding something that, Paul assumed, would properly measure water temperature. Seeing that Brandon held the thing in his right hand, Paul switched his mocassins from his left hand and extended it for a handshake. “I’m Paul. How you doin’?”

  As expected, Brandon had the weaker handshake one expected from the young—quick, light, and eager to be broken, not through any malice, but through wariness of strange adults. Probably healthy, Paul thought.

  “Doin’ okay,” Brandon said, and handed the equipment to his father.

  “Brandon’s my intern,” Jack said.

  The kid seemed to wince, then gave Paul an almost conspiratorial look. “Intern means slave,” he explained.

  Paul couldn’t help but laugh. He rembered his own internship in the summer between junior and senior years at Berkeley with a local magazine. Sometimes he felt that a slave would’ve been better off.

  Brandon wandered away, and Paul turned to Jack. “What brings you to Malau?”

  “The recent seismic activity. I want to study its effects on the area’s marine life.”