“In the beginning, the kaiju attacks were spaced by twelve months,” Gottlieb was saying. “Then six. Then three. Then every two weeks.” He paused to look down at Herc and Pentecost from the top of the ladder and tap the tip of his chalk hard on the board. Bits of the chalk sprinkled away to the floor near the hazmat tape.
“The most recent one, in Sydney,” Gottlieb said, “was a week.”
He paused to let that sink in. But he was on a roll, the way Herc knew scientists got, and he couldn’t pause for long no matter how much he wanted the dramatic effect.
“In four days, we could be seeing a kaiju every eight hours until they’re coming every four minutes,” Gottlieb continued.
Herc watched Pentecost receive this news. The old soldier took it hard. Some of the tautness, the crusader’s resolve, left his face—only for a moment, but it was a visible moment. Herc wondered, not for the first time, if something was wrong with him. Other than the impending demise of the human race.
“We should witness a double event within seven days,” Gottlieb finished.
“Should?” Pentecost echoed. “I need more than a prediction.”
“He can’t give you anything better than that—” Newt cut in.
Everyone turned to look at him. Whatever Newt had been about to say, the momentum was lost when Gottlieb shot out an accusing finger and said, “No kaiju entrails on my side of the room! You know the rules!”
Edged over the hazmat tape was a gallon-sized jar containing something organic. Newt reached out and slowly pushed it until an imaginary vertical line rising from his side of the hazmat tape would have run parallel to the jar’s edge, at a distance of perhaps one millimeter.
Sensing that the two scientists were moving toward the latest chapter in their saga of bickering and recrimination, Herc said, “On point, gents.”
Both of them looked to Herc. Newt inclined his head. Gottlieb cleared his throat, shot his colleague a disdainful look, and went on.
“Numbers don’t lie, sir. Politics, poetry, promises… those are lies. Numbers are as close as we get to the handwriting of God.”
Muttering just loud enough for everyone but the elevated Gottlieb to hear, Newt said, “You’re officially the most pretentious man I’ve ever met.”
Herc silenced him with a look.
“There will be a double event,” Gottlieb said. “Not might. Will. And then, shortly thereafter, three kaiju and then four and then…” he trailed off.
“We’re dead,” Pentecost finished for him. “I know.”
“Alas,” Gottlieb said.
Apparently his show wasn’t over yet. Out of the corner of his eye, Herc could see that Newt was starting to twitch from the desire to trump Gottlieb and wrench the presentation around so everyone was looking at him.
“This is where the good news comes,” Gottlieb continued, circling the number 4 he’d scrawled on the chalkboard and coming down from the ladder. “This is our window to destroy the Breach.”
He crossed to a holographic model of the Breach, left spawned and running on one of the perfect workstations in his perfect half of the lab.
“Here is our universe,” he said, pointing at the top of the model, “and here is theirs.” He pointed at the bottom.
In between was a narrow passage, represented in oranges and reds.
“And this is what we call ‘The Throat.’ It’s the passage between the Breach and us. Every time a kaiju—or two, or three, or however many —passes through, the Breach remains open for a short time before and after the passage. And there seems to be a correlation between how many kaiju traverse the Breach and how long it stays open before and after they have finished their journey. More precisely, I believe the correlation is between the mass of the kaiju and the length of time the Breach remains open after their transit. Think of the traffic lights at freeway on-ramps. They turn red and green at predictable intervals, but everyone has to stop for a moment. That slows everything up. If the light just stayed green a little longer, two or three or four cars at a time—or one long tractor-trailer truck— could go through with no blink of red in between. A crude example, but it suffices.”
With a fingertip, Gottlieb dragged a tiny avatar representing an explosive device into the Breach.
“I predict the increased traffic, and larger kaiju, will force the Breach to stabilize and remain open long enough to get a device through and break the structure.”
In the hologram, the explosive went off. The blast wave propagated through the Breach and the Throat. They collapsed in a granular spray across the face of Gottlieb’s holo-display, and the two universes were severed from each other. Everyone watched the collapse and imagined what it would mean for human civilization if they could make it happen in the real world.
Herc looked at the faces around him: Newt, sullen and boiling with more intellect than he could handle; Gottlieb, like an oversensitive child needing approval for his brilliance; Pentecost, the one who had to make the decision, resolute but clearly weary. Not the kind of weary you felt when you got a short night’s sleep; the kind you felt when you’d devoted ten years to saving humanity and been thrown aside in the name of cowardice and saving money.
Herc wondered what he looked like to them. Old, probably. Washed up. But he wasn’t done quite yet.
“We have one shot at this,” Pentecost said. “We must be sure.”
That was a problem as far as Herc could see. They’d never seen two kaiju come through, let alone three. How could Gottlieb have modeled that? The kaiju were getting bigger, that was true. Maybe he’d gotten solid data on that, but Herc didn’t care. This was a hell of a flimsy conclusion to base an operation on.
Newt appeared to feel the same way. He’d listened with what passed in him for politeness, but now he could no longer contain himself.
“It’s not enough to know when or for how long the portal will be open,” he said, waving at the holo like it was a third-grade science project. “Anyone can chop the numbers and figure that out. I mean, Hermann’s math is good. It always is. But math isn’t going to win this fight. Understanding the nature of the kaiju will. And on that front, I have a theory.”
Gottlieb, primly offended, sniffed.
“Please. Don’t embarrass yourself.”
To Gottlieb’s visible irritation, Pentecost indicated that Newt should continue.
“Why do we judge kaiju on a category system?” Newt said, adopting the lecturer’s tone. “Because each of them is different from the next. It’s almost as if each of them is an entirely new species. There don’t appear to be any family relationships among individuals that would give us a classification system, so we do it by size and mass instead.”
“Get to your point,” Pentecost said.
Newt stomped through the flotsam on his side of the lab and held up a piece of a dissected kaiju gland—The one, Herc thought, he’d been hacking at when we came in.
“Despite the highly individuated appearance of each kaiju, there are some fundamental structures and systems they all seem to have in common. I’ve noticed the repetition of patterns in certain organs. See? This is a piece I collected from the glands harvested in Sydney.”
Everyone looked. It was a gland, sliced across its crosssection, with a clear pattern to the striations of tissue and patterns of… whatever those dark lines were. Veins? Nerves? Herc wasn’t an anatomist.
Newt placed the gland next to another sample on a tray and shoved tabletop debris away from the tray.