Kaiju Preservation Society(55)

“And this differs from our Earth how?” Tipton asked.

Kahurangi grinned. “Volume, mostly. Everything is shouting here.”

“So, how do we shout back?” Sanders asked.

“We don’t shout back, we shout what they’re already saying. I don’t know if you’ve ever done any work on the jungle floor—”

“Not yet,” Sanders said, dryly. Yep, he’d definitely recovered from his earlier moment.

“—but one of the things we do is use scents and pheromones that mimic kaiju parasites, so everything will give us a wide berth.”

“We were told by your associate Dr. Chowdhury that there are things here that kill the parasites, not run from them,” Tipton said.

“She wasn’t lying to you,” Kahurangi said. “But just like home, there are qualifications for that. Some creatures are prey to those parasites. They’ll run away. Some want to prey on the parasite, and they’ll come for a look. But like all predators, they’ll size up the situation. If it’s too much trouble, they’ll leave us alone. We try to make it too much trouble. But it’s not perfect.” He motioned to me. “Jamie here just had a mission where a predator took its chance.”

“We heard something along that line.” Tipton turned to me. “How did that go?”

“Jamie shot it in the face,” Kahurangi said, proudly, before I could answer.

Tipton looked me over, reassessing. “You don’t look like the face-shooting type.”

“We all have hidden depths,” I said.

“So, if we have the right chemicals, we can control these things,” Sanders said, bringing things back around to the subject at hand.

“Control? No,” Kahurangi replied. “We don’t talk in terms of control.”

“Why not?”

“Because these aren’t people, and we’re not talking to them. When these things smell the pheromones or scents, it’s not like they’re getting orders. They’re getting suggestions. If we have a pheromone that’s designed to invoke a fight-or-flight response, we want them to flee, and ninety percent of the time, they will. But then there’s that other ten percent of the time where they want to fight.”

“And you can’t perfect this any.”

“Not really,” Kahurangi said. “And even if we could there’s still no way we could guarantee they’d do what we wanted every single time. They’re biological creatures, not machines. I mean, we can speak to other humans perfectly well, right? We don’t have to spray them with chemicals or anything. We can just talk to them, and they can understand exactly what we want. Do they do what we want them to do every single time?”

“Not always,” Sanders admitted.

“There you go.”

“Let me take this in another direction. Could we drug a kaiju?”

Kahurangi grinned. “Do you want to get a kaiju stoned, Mr. Sanders?”

“I don’t want to do anything with one. I just want to know if it’s theoretically possible.”

“I’m sure it is, although as far as I know we’ve never done it.”

“Never?”

“Well, I’m new, so I would have to check,” Kahurangi admitted. “But in a larger sense, again, these are biological creatures, even if they are mostly nuclear powered. I’m sure you can create compounds that have specific effects on them.”

“And for other creatures from here, too.”

“Sure, although everything will react differently. Heck, there are some drugs that work on adult humans that don’t work well on children and vice versa. Also, it would take a brave person to dose a kaiju or even a kaiju parasite to see what their invented pharmaceutical compound would do.”

“You already do that when you spray them with pheromones,” Tipton pointed out.

Kahurangi grinned again. “Yeah, but then we usually run the hell away.”

“Is there anything in your current arsenals of smells and pheromones that can keep a kaiju in one place?” Sanders asked. “Bella is sitting right on top of a fluctuating barrier between our worlds. If she gets up, she might get up on the wrong side of the barrier.”

Kahurangi shook his head. “No,” he said. “But as I understand it, Bella isn’t likely to cross over, and she’s acting to keep the other kaiju away.”

“How so?”

“Well, speaking of pheromones, ever since she nested, she’s been emitting a huge amount of them, and they all say the same thing to the other kaiju in the area.”

“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.”