“Not unless she goes nuclear herself,” Niamh said. “And there’s no evidence she’s at risk for that.”
“So it would take a nuclear blast, is what you’re saying.”
Niamh thought about it a minute. “No? But effectively yes on this side of the barrier, since we don’t have any concentrated fissionable material over here. But if Bella goes up over here, that will solve your problem entirely. She’s dead and the other kaiju only cross over if the nuclear explosion is on the other side.”
“That’s just weird,” Tipton said, almost muttering to himself.
“What is?” Niamh asked.
“How something over here can sense something back home. How there’s an alternate Earth and the way we discovered it was through nuclear bombs.”
Niamh smiled. “Mate, if you want your noodle really baked, then think about this: Any time we play with nuclear energy, we’re thinning the dimensional barrier not just between our world and this one, but with every potential alternate Earth and our own.”
Tipton frowned. “What?”
“Every single one of them,” Niamh said. “Millions. Billions. Trillions.”
“How do you know that?”
Niamh shrugged “It’s just math.”
“Then why do we only see this one?”
Niamh grinned even more wildly. “You’re going to love this. Because as far as I can tell, it’s because our two Earths are the only ones with nuclear creatures. The kaiju got there naturally. We used our brains.”
“Then why did it take a kaiju coming over for us to realize this world existed?” Sanders asked.
“Because we think we’re smart,” Niamh said.
“Come again?”
“We think we’re smart,” Niamh repeated. “And because we think we’re smart, we only looked at what we wanted to look at and didn’t think to look past it. We were looking at creating nuclear bombs and didn’t think about how nuclear energy might mess with a multiverse. We didn’t consider there was a multiverse. It’s not built into our model.”
“And the kaiju did consider this,” Sanders said, skeptically.
“Of course not,” Niamh said, the “I can’t believe I have to say this” tone returning. “They didn’t consider anything like that. It never occurred to them to create a model of a universe where alternate worlds would or wouldn’t exist. They just acted intelligently, within the context of their needs. They sensed a food source and they moved toward it. They didn’t consider that it was across a dimensional barrier. They came through to our world because it never occurred to them that they couldn’t.”
CHAPTER
19
“I have a couple of questions for you, if you don’t mind,” Brynn MacDonald said to General Tipton, after Niamh had finished their presentation and headed out, and we were coming to the close of our meeting schedule.
“Of course, Dr. MacDonald,” Tipton said.
“I was curious what your takeaway is and what you’ll be reporting back, for a start.”
Tipton glanced over at Sanders. “I think it’s clear your people know their stuff,” he said. “This wasn’t really in doubt; KPS always finds good people. But this is an unusual event, and you can understand why back in the real world we would have some concerns. It’s been decades since a kaiju came through, and the world has changed in the interim. To have one just sitting on a barrier? It’s a security issue, or so it would seem, at first.”
“And you think it’s less of one now,” Tom Stevens said.
“I do.” Tipton pointed. “Let me be clear that these presentations need to be backed up with data that I can share with my scientists back home. If they come to different conclusions from the data, I will let you know, and, bluntly, I’m not going to be happy about it. But you’ve never fudged the data before. I’m not sure why you would start now.”
“Thank you for the compliment, General.”
“You’re welcome. Of course, Dr. MacDonald, you would do us all a favor if you could find some way of getting Bella to move, so that breach can seal up entirely. Spray her with some pheromones or something. You do that sort of thing all the time.”
“We thought about it,” Tom said. “But since she’s not in danger of crossing over we decided it’s not an issue. Also, brooding kaiju are touchy.”
“Touchy?” Sanders asked.