“What’s that?” Tipton asked.
“‘Stay the hell away.’”
“And what happens if she does get up?” Tipton asked Niamh, in the third briefing of the day, this one updating the two of them about current physics work at the site.
“You mean, is she coming through to our Earth?”
“That is the concern, yes.”
“Well, even if she could, and I’ll get to that in a moment, the question is: Why would she?”
“Because she’s a stupid animal that might lean in the wrong direction getting up?” Sanders said.
“She’s not a stupid animal, first off,” Niamh said. “None of these creatures are.”
“They’re not intelligent.”
“Of course they are,” Niamh said, in a tone that expressed disappointment that something so obvious had to be said. “You don’t think of Bella as intelligent because she’s not playing the stock market or some other utterly irrelevant standard. But in fact, she’s a perfectly intelligent creature, within the context of being driven by her own needs. Right now, her need is to stay in one place and squirt out eggs. She has no need to get up, and the only way she will get up is if something bothers her. And anyway, if she does get up, it’ll be to respond to something on this side of the barrier, like another kaiju crashing into her territory. The moment that happens, your barrier problem is on its way to being solved.”
“That,” Tipton said suddenly, and pointed at Niamh. “That’s what I need to know. Explain this to me.”
“The barrier got torn when the other kaiju blew up,” Niamh said. “It’s just part of the release of that much nuclear energy. The thing is, no matter how large a hole you punch in a dimensional barrier, it immediately starts to heal up.”
“Why does it do that?” Sanders asked.
“Because the release of nuclear energy that thinned it out stops, and the surrounding nuclear activity starts to decay away. The barrier heals up in a predictable manner tied to the ambient nuclear activity in the area. Unless more energy is added, it will eventually close up entirely.”
“But this one’s not closing,” Tipton said.
“Right, because you have a big damn living, breathing nuclear reactor sitting right on it,” Niamh said. “Bella’s nuclear powered, and that energy is keeping the barrier thin. Or at least, thinner than it would be. But the moment she moves—”
“Then her energy moves away with her.”
Niamh nodded at Tipton. “And even now, the amount of energy she’s adding into the mix isn’t enough at this point to let her punch through. Maybe it was in the first few days, when the ambient radiation levels at the site were still high enough. But it’s been weeks, and those levels are way down. She’s keeping the barrier thin, but not enough for her or any other kaiju to get through on their own.”
“But what about that flash?” Sanders asked.
“See, that’s really interesting,” Niamh said, animatedly. “I thought the flash was a brief tear between our worlds where something might get through. But then we got some instruments in there. Turns out that what’s happening is that as she sits there, feeding energy into the barrier, something akin to a static charge is building up. And at some point, something happens to agitate it, and all that static energy just goes pop, and it discharges on both sides of the barrier.”
Sanders paused at this. “It’s static electricity?”
“No, it’s something much weirder,” Niamh said. “We’ve never seen it before because we’ve never had a kaiju sit still near a nuclear site long enough to have it happen. And since I am the first to describe its nature, I am calling it the Healy effect, and one day when I can actually publish about it, I will get a Nobel Prize, and all the other physics postdocs at Trinity will just have to suck it.”
“That was quite a journey you just took us on,” Sanders said, smirking.
“Let me have my moment, please,” Niamh replied.
“I want to make sure I understand you,” Tipton said. “The barrier between our worlds right now is thin, and this kaiju is feeding energy into it, but it’s not thin enough for this or any other kaiju to get through, and if any other kaiju comes along, she will move to fight it and in doing so remove the energy that’s keeping the barrier thin.”
“That’s right.”
“But could it open up again?” Sanders asked. “Enough to let her through?”