Kaiju Preservation Society(15)

“Why would they do that?” asked Aparna.

“It looks like food to them.”

“What—” Aparna caught herself, when she remembered Tom wasn’t a scientist. “Go on,” she said, grimly.

Tom nodded. “In May 1951, the U.S. set off a prototype of a hydrogen bomb at a place called Enewetak Atoll. It’s in the Marshall Islands. Two days later, one of the kaiju crossed over at the detonation site.”

“The actual fucking Godzilla,” Kahurangi said.

“Which to be clear looked and acted nothing like the Godzilla of the movies,” Tom said. “It was just huge and hungry and stomped around for a bit looking for something to eat before the U.S. Navy spooked it and it took off into the ocean.”

“Then what happened?”

“It swam away from the navy for three days and then died and sank in the Japanese shipping lanes. That’s why we have Godzilla. Japanese sailors saw the U.S. Navy chasing something big, talked about it when they got back to Japan, and the story found its way to the filmmakers.”

“I’m officially skeptical about this Godzilla origin story,” I said.

“That’s fine,” Tom said. “The thing was, it kept happening. The U.S. had it happen four more times, once in the Nevada desert. The Soviets had it happen at least three times. The French and the United Kingdom at least once each. It was enough of a problem that in 1955 there was a secret meeting of the nuclear powers to try to figure out how to keep it from happening. Their solution was to fund a project that crossed over to here to keep the creatures from trying to come over to our world.”

“The Kaiju Preservation Society,” I said.

“Our predecessor organization, yes. Less concerned about preserving the kaiju than just keeping them on this side of the universal fence until the holes we tore through it with our bombs closed up again.”

“And how would they do that?” Kahurangi asked.

“Lots and lots of daisy cutters, is my understanding,” Tom said.

“We don’t do nuclear testing anymore, though,” I pointed out.

“No, we don’t,” Tom agreed. “And one reason—obviously not in any treaty—is that keeping the kaiju out was more of a hassle than the nuclear powers wanted to deal with. There was also the consid eration that the aftermath of a nuclear exchange would include fifty-story monsters coming through a multidimensional tear to wreak havoc on any survivors of the ICBMs.”

“That’s nice,” Niamh said. “It’s okay if we turned entire cities full of people into nuclear ash, but the idea of monsters having a nibble afterward was just too much.”

“My point is, there’s no threat of the kaiju crossing over today,” I said, and then motioned around. “So why this?”

“Why are we still here, you mean?” Tom said.

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s the science of it, of course.” Tom waved to the rest of the newbies. “Your new friends here are going to be doing work that has never been done before. It’s literally a whole new world, and we’ve just scratched the surface of it. We’re doing things here that no one else gets to do—will never get to do. That’s awesome.”

“But we won’t get to share what we do,” Aparna said. “We’ll be doing science in a vacuum.”

“You get to share it,” Tom said. “Just with a very small number of fellow scientists for now. In the future, that might change. In which case each of you is going to become a rock star in your respective fields. That won’t suck.” He turned back to me. “This is where lots of our funding comes these days, by the way. Governments still fund us, but less so than they used to. But the same billionaires who are racing each other to get to Mars are bankrolling us in the hopes that something we learn here will be applicable back home, in a general this-doesn’t-look-like-it-came-from-another-planet way.”

“Or they’re funding us to have somewhere to go if things go to shit back home,” Niamh suggested.

“I’m sure some of them might have thought about that,” Tom said. “I’m not sure it’s going to work out for them the way they’d planned. They’d be better off with Mars.”

“Why’s that?”

“It has a lot fewer predators, for one.”

“It’s not just the science, though, is it?” I said, bringing the topic back round.

“No,” Tom said. “We’re not called the Kaiju Preservation Society just because it’s a catchy name. It turns out the kaiju really could use some help.”

“What does a creature the size of a small mountain need with humans?” Kahurangi asked.

“I promise you that you will find out,” Tom said. “But what we do is more than keep the kaiju on this side of the fence. We also keep others out.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s like I said, nuclear energy thins the dimensional barrier.” Tom motioned to show off Honda Base. “We keep Camp Century humming along because it’s nicely positioned, for various reasons I don’t understand, to make it easy to open the door between our worlds, and then to close it back up again, each time in a predictable fashion. It and a couple of other sites on the globe, run by the other signatories to the Kaiju Defense and Protection Treaty, are the only official ways in and out of Kaiju Earth. They are tightly controlled and secured. There’s a reason we’ve managed to keep this all a secret for so long.