Read Online Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization by Alex Irvine - Free Book Online Page B

tended to characterize as personable but unmotivated. He remembered labs as being the province of the nerd, the place where chalk dust and white coats and Erlenmeyer flasks were not oddities but the rule. The place where weirdness was normal and normal people were viewed with scorn and disdain.
    This lab was even weirder than that.
    Herc had been in the Kaiju Science lab a few times, and his first thought every time he walked in was that it was like two halves of a brain. One side was neat, efficient, sparkling clean, and generally so perfectly arranged that Herc instinctively wanted to avoid it for fear of messing something up. The other side was like the bedroom of a teenager obsessed with monster movies.
    No surface was uncluttered. Jars and tubes of strange materials and fluids were stacked and scattered everywhere, sitting on top of computer monitors that displayed images of kaiju together with complicated helical patterns Herc took to be DNA. From the ceiling hung an inflatable kaiju and an inflatable Jaeger, facing each other down over a lab table where something was bubbling next to a sink. Herc instinctively wanted to avoid that side, too, but for fear of catching something.
    Down the middle of the space, from the center of the doorway to the back wall, where it disappeared under a refrigerator, was a line of hazmat tape. Two halves of a brain, maybe, but it was also like a bedroom shared by two siblings who couldn’t live a minute without finding something to fight about.
    Of course, it wasn’t only siblings who fought all the time. Herc thought of his son, Chuck, and then refocused on the matter at hand.
    At the moment, Gottlieb was blazing away on a chalkboard so big he had to stand on a ladder to get to the last un-scribbled-upon area. He was writing so fast that even if Herc had known the scientific shorthand he used, the pace still would have been too much for him. Beyond him, the clean half of the lab looked like the backdrop for one of the instructional videos Herc had sat through during his first Ranger testing.
    “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