Greg Cox - Godzilla - The Official Movie Novelization

“Doctor Serizawa,” the admiral greeted him. “William Stenz. We’re glad to have you aboard.”

Serizawa accepted Stenz’s hand and bowed slightly. He spied Graham beckoning to him from the open hatchway to the command center. He had dispatched her earlier to examine Joe Brody’s findings. He nodded back to her in acknowledgment. He was anxious to hear what she had to say.

“Will you excuse me, Admiral?”

Joe Brody’s face looked more at peace than it had been for at least fifteen years. His eyes were closed forever, seeing only the next world. Ford could only hope that, whatever had become of his father’s tortured spirit, somewhere Joe was gazing on his wife’s beloved face once more.

Ford stood by numbly in the Saratoga ’s well-equipped medical bay as the body bag holding his father’s remains was zipped shut. A medic offered him a sympathetic look, but Ford was too stunned to respond. The tears would come in time, he hoped, but right now he just felt drained and lost. San Francisco seemed more than a world away. He wondered how he was going to break this news to Sam. The boy had never really known his grandfather. Would he even understand that now he never would?

“Lieutenant Brody, sir?”

A young petty officer intruded on Ford’s grief, as gently as he could. His voice held a distinctly Midwestern accent.

“Would you please come with me?”

Serizawa and his team had been assigned guest quarters upon the Saratoga. Even on a ship as large as the super-carrier, space was at a premium so the cramped cabin was a tight squeeze, but they were making do. Monarch scientists worked beside Navy technicians, monitoring data feeds at various workstations, even as he and Graham each spoke urgently on their respective phones.

“Yes,” he reported in Japanese, “the patterns match, but I can’t crack the significance.”

Joe Brody’s antique zip disks, rescued from the M.U.T.O. base, were stacked on a desk beside Serizawa’s research materials. Scattered photos and reports held fragments of a history that began years before Serizawa was born: grainy images of a gargantuan creature rising from the sea six decades ago, archive photos of an atomic bomb blast on a remote Pacific atoll, shots from the Philippine mine disaster, reports on the Janjira nuclear plant disaster, and updates on the singular cocoon found on the site afterwards.

It appeared that he and Brody had been colleagues of a sort, pursuing similar lines of investigation all these years.

What a pity , he reflected, that we never knew each other existed.

He overheard Graham dealing with the public-relations issue. “Yes, sir,” she said into her phone. “Media is reporting an earthquake. The cover’s holding for now, but if it—”

A knock at the hatchway interrupted both phone calls. Graham went to answer it.

“Dr. Serizawa?” Petty Officer Thatch stood in the doorway. He had Ford Brody with him, still wearing part of a rundown radiation suit that had seen better days. The man’s wrist was chafed, but his handcuffs had been removed en route to the carrier. Serizawa nodded at Thatch that it was all right for him to leave Ford with them. Ford’s passport had been found among his belongings; a quick investigation had confirmed that he was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, currently on leave. Thatch departed and Graham escorted Ford into the room.

Ford, who looked more than a little shell-shocked, approached the desk warily. His eyes widened as he spotted the photos spread out across the desk, which Serizawa made no effort to conceal. Ford was visibly taken aback by the startling images. Serizawa sympathized; what these pictures displayed would be shocking to the young man, who had just lost his father as well. His entire world had changed overnight.

“Mr. Brody, my condolences,” Serizawa said.

Ford stared at them. Pain, anger, and confusion all seemed to simmer inside the unfortunate young man, who was understandably overwhelmed by recent events. Powerful emotions played across Ford’s face, while his body language was tense. Serizawa began to fear that the grieving lieutenant would be of little use to their investigation. Judging from his reaction to the photos, Ford was apparently not fully conversant with his father’s theories.

Graham tried to secure Ford’s cooperation anyway. “We’re deeply sorry for your loss, Lieutenant. But I’m afraid we need your help. Your father’s data—”

“No, you first,” he snapped. His nerves and temper were obviously at the breaking point. “Who are you people?”

Graham shot a questioning look at Serizawa, letting him make the call. He nodded, regarding Ford with sympathy. This man had been through so much already. He deserved to know what his father had given his life for.

“Come in please, Mr. Brody. Come in and we will show you.”

Ford stepped deeper into the cabin. Graham shut the door behind him.

Flickering images played upon the wall of the cabin. Hooked into Graham’s laptop, a portable digital projector provided relevant visuals as Serizawa attempted to explain.

“In 1954,” he began, “the first time a nuclear submarine ever reached the lowest depths, it awakened something.”

“The Americans first thought it was the Russians,” Graham added. “The Russians thought that it was the Americans. All those nuclear tests in the Pacific? Not tests…”

“They were trying to kill it.” Serizawa indicated the ancient film footage from the 1950s. “Him.”

Ford’s jaw dropped. Breaking eye contact with Serizawa, he looked more closely at the projected images of the 1954 A-bomb detonation, the bomb with the cartoon lizard inscribed on its cone, a mushroom cloud rising over the once-tranquil Pacific Ocean, and, finally, impossibly, the grainy silhouette of a titanic beast rising up from the sea, a row of jagged fins dimly visible along its spine.

“An ancient alpha predator,” Serizawa explained.

“Millions of years older than mankind,” Graham said, “from a time when the Earth was ten times more radioactive than it is today. The animal — and others like it— consumed that radiation as a food source. But as radiation levels on the surface naturally subsided, these creatures adapted to live deeper in the oceans, farther underground, absorbing radiation from the planet’s core. The organization we work for, Monarch, was established in the wake of this discovery. A multinational organization, formed in secrecy, to search for him, study him, learn everything we could.”

Ford stared at the footage. The images were blurry, but the creature’s gargantuan proportions and general outline were clear.

“We call him Godzilla ,” Serizawa said.

The name was derived from a legend of the islands: a mythical king of monsters known as Gojira . The name had been Americanized by the U.S. Military during their initial attempts to bomb the newly discovered behemoth out of existence.

“The top of a primordial ecosystem,” Graham elaborated. “A god for all intents and purposes.”

Ford gaped at the images, struggling to process what he was hearing and seeing. “Monsters…”

“That is one word for them,” Serizawa agreed. He used a handheld remote to call up images of the “cavern” in the Philippines. “Fifteen years ago, we found the fossil of another giant animal in the Philippines. Like Godzilla, but this creature died long ago, killed by these…” Close-ups of the MUTO spores appeared on the wall.

“Parasitic organisms,” Graham said. “One dormant, but the other hatched. Catalyzed when a mining company unknowingly drilled into its tomb. The hatchling burrowed straight for the nearest source of radiation, your father’s power plant in Janjira, and cocooned there. Absorbing the radioactive fuel to gestate, grow.”