Monsters in old movies had scales and fangs, and lumbered about squashing cars, picking up trains, and causing heroines to put their hands to their faces and scream. Their modern counterparts symbolized fears of mutant technology more than mutant biology, and consisted, more often than not, of intricate assemblages of machinery and wiring directed by silicon brains that always made the eyes glow a sinister red.
The new Japanese release playing on the big screen in the game room of Hiroyuki's house had both. The big, green, natural, organic monsters had been awakened from dormancy on the ocean bed by nuclear-weapons testing in the Pacific, and "smart" battle machines were taking them onapparently through some instinctual loyalty to their creators that none of the scientists depicted in the movie could explain, but which the scriptwriters evidently considered to be of deep, mystical significance. The heroines were now liberated, of course, and waded in wielding M-16s and Uzis with the best of the guys, thus doggedly emulating what their admirers had been denouncing as the worst of male traits for years. The screaming role had passed to Taki's younger sister, Reiko, and a half dozen other small members of the innumerable relatives watching in total immersion from the couch, the floor, and other seats around the room. Nakisha, in one of the armchairs, stared unblinking, but managed a restrained silence becoming to her sixteen years that showed she was above that kind of thing.
"Hey, look at all the arms on that guy. It's like a mechanical spider."
"It's like some of those miniature robots of Taki's. Is that what it was like, Nakisha? Did it feel like being one of those?"
"Did Taki really put you down next to a slug?"
"Ooooh, yuck! . . ."
"Shut up. It was horrible. I don't want to talk about it."
Kevin sat on a chair by the wall near the glass-paned doors behind them, half watching while he idly practiced materializing a playing card in one hand, then vanishing it again. Doug Corfe had gone for a drive into Seattle to reconnoiter Garsten's office from the outside. Taki had been called away for the moment to give his mother a hand with something. Ohira was on a stool at the back of the room, arms akimbo, hands planted solidly on his knees, watching the movie with a raptness that was unusual. It seemed to have triggered some distant line of thought.
Kevin rather took to the monsters, he decided. It wasn't their fault if they blundered around sinking ships and knocking gaps in city skylines, any more than foxes could help being partial to chickens. It was just the way they were made. He identified with them, he supposed, as another form of life that was misunderstood and looked down onin the monsters' case, metaphoricallyby grownups. There were days when he was sure that he too could find it a great reliever of stresses and tensions to go on a rampage of pulverizing a few downtown high-rises or picking up automobiles filled with the irritating kinds of people who played bullhorn radios in parks and left trash everywhere, and throw them into the harbor. Maybe grownups went out and dropped bombs on each others' cities for the same kind of reason. If that were true, it didn't seem fair that kids should have to be in them too.
Then the thought struck him that perhaps they could build miniature cities for stressed-out adults to crash around in and flatten, using monster-mec bodies designed specially for the purpose. They could even have other peopleperhaps kids who liked being scared by monstersin smaller mecs to run around and provide crowds of panicking inhabitants, making it all the more realistic, and presumably more satisfying. Then, perhaps, there wouldn't be any need for wars.
He was still musing over the thought as surely a touch of genius when Ohira got up from the stool and came over, at the same time making a sign to catch Kevin's attention. Kevin looked up. Ohira motioned with his head to indicate the doors. "I have been thinking. There is something I would like you and Taki to do for me," he said. Kevin held out the card deck that he was still holding in one hand and fanned it in an unspoken invitation. Ohira selected a card and returned it. Kevin shuffled it into the deck, gave the deck to Ohira, and then plucked the card he had chosen out of the air. He made it disappear again, showed his hand to be empty, and produced the card from the other one. "Very good," Ohira complimented. "It seems that everything young people do these days has to have screens and be connected to a nuclear power plant. You don't even need batteries." He waved again toward the door. Kevin got up and followed him out of the room.
The living room outside was bright and spacious, with a floor of gray and white marble squares with fleece rugs. Ohira turned and sat on the arm of a sectional divan filling one of the corners. "How would you like to be a movie director?" he said. "I want you and Taki to make a movie for me."
"So you're the producer?" Kevin said.
"If you like, yes."
It was a typical Ohira approach. He would get to the point eventually in his own time. Kevin, meanwhile, played along in his own typical way. "Aren't we going to talk about percentages, director's fees, contracts, bonuses? . . ."
Ohira's mouth turned upward at the corners briefly, but the rest of his craggy features stayed the same. "You see, always in too much of a hurry. You have all of your lives still before you, and always young people are in a hurry. We have most of ours behind us, yet we don't have to hurry and the things that need to, get done."
"I thought it was supposed to be good business. I was just going by what Hiroyuki says."
"Good business is getting paid what you are worth. A director is paid for his experience. First you get the experience; then you have something to sell. Being paid more than you are worth is bad business. Your customers don't come back again, and then you have no business."
Kevin grinned and put the cards in his shirt pocket. "Okay. So what's this movie about?"
Ohira waved a hand in the direction of the room they had just left. "I was thinking while I watched that movie that the kids in there are looking at, the part where you see the monsters over the trees."
"You mean where those guys with guns are looking for themexcept they don't realize they've grown so much? . . . And then the slithery things come up out of the lake."
"Yes, by the river. I was thinking, suppose those heads looking down over the trees weren't monsters but . . . what do you call those long, thin insects that stand up on end and catch flies in arms that close like nutcrackers? Mantis, is it?"
"Oh, praying mantises."
Ohira nodded. "Yes, that's them. Then those hunters would really have something to hunt, wouldn't they?"
"Oh, I see. As mecs, you mean." Kevin pulled a face. "Their guns wouldn't be much use, though."
"The guns weren't much use to them in the movie there either." Ohira waved a hand. "But never mind the guns. You have other weapons anyway. But the point is we can add something extra to Bug Park, for the adventurous souls. Instead of just being tourists, they can go on safari too."
Kevin's brow furrowed for a moment. "You mean hunting bugs?"
"Sure. Why not? Think of the way that you and Taki have talked about some of your own experiences. Well, isn't it the kind of experience that a lot of people would be willing to pay for?" Ohira thought for a second and shrugged. "All the real safari animals are protected these days, anyway. Nobody can go big-game hunting anymore. So, we let them go little-game hunting instead."
Kevin sank onto a chair and stared at him. It seemed so obvious, now Ohira had spelled it out. How could it not have occurred to either him or Taki in all this time?
Ohira studied his face. "So what do you think?"
"I think it's brilliant," Kevin said. "It's got to catch on. . . . And how long would it take before malaria mosquitoes became an endangered species?"
"They couldn't. You'd never even make a difference."
"I was joking."
"And anyway, who'd care if they did?" Ohira raised his hands. "You see, every day we find more possibilities."
"So where does the movie come in?" Kevin asked.
"I want you and Taki to organize some hunting expeditions so we can put a movie together from the monitor videos for me to show to the other Theme Worlds directors. You know the kind of thinglots of towering monsters and gaping jaws; the kind of thing that's making the kids scream next door there." Ohira thought for a moment and held up both hands in front of him, thumbs level as if framing a picture. "And I'd like a good still shot, maybe you two as mecs, posing with your arms folded and a foot each on the body of a dead beetle or somethingyou know, the way they used to with elephants. It would look good on the title page of a proposal."
"Okay, sure," Kevin said. "We've got the holiday weekend coming up. I'll tell Taki about it, and we'll see what we can do."
Kevin's answer had been mechanical. The eagerness with which he would normally have greeted such a suggestion was noticeably absent.
Ohira rubbed below an ear with a finger and contemplated him in silence. "There's something the matter, isn't there?" he said finally.
"What makes you say that?"
"Oh, some of this experience that I have that's worth something, and you don't have yet. You think more than usual, but you say less than usual. For the kind of person you are, that says there's a lot that would like to come out. If you and Taki want to tell me about it, that's all right."
Kevin bit his lip. He wanted to talk, even to somebody that he couldn't immediately see as in a position to be of help . . . but not without Taki around. And even then, the thought of Corfe's likely reaction was enough to make him not want to think further.
"Is it about Eric's company?" Ohira said after a pause. "I know that certain people have been giving him problems lately."
Kevin shook his head. "Thanks. . . . But it's nothing really."
Ohira's wide, strangely flat eyes lingered over him for several seconds longer, giving him the eerie feeling that they were able to read everything for themselves anyway. At length Ohira nodded. "If that is what you wish," he said. "But remember always that you are family here now as much as Taki is, just as your father treats Taki the same as you. And that means you have many friends who are here to help if there is trouble. We Japanese families look after our own."
"I'll remember that," Kevin promised.
Ohira looked at him for a moment longer, then nodded. "So go and make us a good movie, eh?" he said, standing up. "Maybe first we show it to some of that bunch in the next room. Let's see if you can get them really screaming."
Taki reappeared a short while later, and he and Kevin went down to Taki's workshop. As a test, and on the offchance that the time might be right to learn something new, Kevin used the coupler there to see if he could activate the relay that he had concealed in the trunk of the Jaguarwherever it was. The relay responded, and moments later Kevin connected himself to Mr. Toad, one of the two mecs that he had left along with it.
The link functioned just fine. He emerged from the mec box and discerned immediately from the sound and intermittent lurching that the car was moving. Warily, he crossed through the space above the trunk and came up behind the rear seat cushion. The interior of the Jaguar loomed above him in shadow like the Hagia Sophia of Istanbul. Outside, it was dark, with not much in the way of other traffic or street lights. There was nobody in either of the rear seats, just a folded coat and the form of a briefcase, rectangular and clifflike, outlined above him in the gloom. By intensifying his vision, he was able to see sufficiently to follow the base of the seat-back to the corner. From there, using his back and legs like a rock climber negotiating a chimney, he wedged his way up the space between the seat and the car wall to the window ledge. As he gained height, he could see Vanessa in the front seat, driving. She was alone. The same feeling of unreality that had affected him before in the yacht, at "being present" as part of events happening miles away, seized him again. Outside was just darkness, trees rushing through the light from the headlamps. Taki was following on the monitor but not making any inane remarks this time.
Then Kevin felt himself thrown forward, then sideways, as the car slowed and made a turnbarely managing to jam a hand into the crack between the window glass and the sill in time to avoid being dislodged completely. Now there was light ahead, with dark shadows of what looked like trees on both sides. He braced himself more securely and turned toward the glass. Where would he find himself this time? . . .
Then, as the trees opened out, he recognized his own driveway. Harriet's car was parked just ahead, with Batcat coming out from underneath to be let inside the house. And why should he have hoped for anything else? Had he really expected that just when he chose to tune in, something would just happen to be taking place that would give them the great breakthrough? You needed scriptwriters for coincidences like that.
Vanessa turned in her seat, and her arm reached over to retrieve the things from the seat below where Kevin was clinging. He waited for her to leave the car, then returned Mr. Toad to the mec box and deactivated it.
Well, at least the system still worked. And that, he supposed, was something.