Camouflage (14 page)

He held up the book. "Samoa, Vince. We're gonna go there soon as school's out."

Vince gave the changeling a funny look. "Sure you are. Where the hell is Samoa?"

"Middle o' nowhere, in the Pacific."

"They fight there?"

"Don't know." He raised eyebrows at the changeling.

"Don't ask me." The changeling had passed the island group as a great white shark, on its way to California, and hadn't seen any naval presence. But the war still had a few years to go, then.

"So hi," he said. "I'm Vince Smithers. You're not from, uh..."

"Matt Baker," the changeling said, and shook his hand. "San Guillermo, California." This was interesting. The changeling had some difficulty reading subtle emotions, but jealousy isn't subtle. "We're gonna split a banana split, and I'll take a Coke."

He scribbled that down and looked at Stuart. "Vanilla Coke?" Stuart nodded and he went back to the fountain.

"You guys know each other?" the changeling said.

"Everybody knows everybody here. Vince and me used to go to school together, but his parents put him in a military academy. What was that shitty place, Vince?"

"God, I don't want to say the name. I left to pursue a career in banana-split-ology. Much to my father's delight."

They continued in a kind of uneasy banter, the changeling watching with an anthropologist's eye. They were less exotic to it than Polynesians, but no less interesting.

There was a conspiratorial edge to their exchange. They had done something forbidden together, something secret. Not necessarily sex, but that would be a good first guess. Did Stuart mean for his new companion to make that inference? The changeling's only experience with homosexuality had been in the asylum, and there had been no social aspect to it; he had just been a receptacle for two of the guards. There had been a third, who only came to him once, and had been more interesting than the two brutes: he had quit after a couple of minutes and started weeping, and said how sorry he was, and evidently quit the job right after.

It was so much more complicated than it had to be, but the changeling had noted that this was true of every human biological function that wasn't involuntary.

Vince brought the split and Stuart's Coke. "You don't want some vanilla in yours?" he said to the changeling.

A complexity. "Sure. I'll try anything once." Vince nodded grimly. It was an obvious turning point.

They divided the confection meticulously, and pursued it from opposite ends. Stuart told the changeling about his scholarship to Princeton.

"Nice campus. Major in anthropology?"

"No, English and American lit. You've been there?"

"Once, visiting relatives."A semester, actually, studying invertebrate paleontology.

"You have relatives everywhere."

"Big family."

He made a face. "Mine are all in Iowa." He said it as "Io-way," with a downward inflection.

"You don't plan to come back and raise a bunch of Iowans yourself?"

"No and double no. Not that I don't
like
kids." He speared a piece of banana. "I
hate
them."

"Brothers and sisters?"

"Thank God, no. The kids at school are bad enough."

The changeling was absorbing all this avidly. They finished the split. "Well. Want to show me around fabulous North Liberty?"

"You got five minutes?" On the way out, the changeling gave Vince a dollar and airily waved off the change.

"Rolling in dough," Stuart said.

"Best crap shooter in San Guillermo."

"Bull
shooter." They both laughed.

It actually took about ten minutes. From the center of town, Stuart led him down West Cherry Street.

"This is my house," he said. "Want to come in?"

"Sure. Meet your parents."

Stuart looked at his eyes, exactly level. "They're gone. They won't be home till tomorrow."

The changeling returned his gaze. "I don't have to be in Cedar Rapids till tomorrow. Missed my train."

The courting ritual was brief. Stuart raided his parents' liquor cabinet and fixed them bourbons that were much too large and strong. Just fuel to the changeling, of course, but if Stuart had been older, it might have killed his sexual desire.

It didn't, of course. He lurched up the stairs, dragging the changeling by the hand, into a bedroom that was not at all boyish. No models or posters, just hundreds of books in nailed-together bookcases.

The changeling had no idea of what the protocol was, still being ignorant of heterosexual protocol. So once in the bedroom it just did what Stuart did, one permutation after another. It narrowed the diameter of its penis for his comfort, remembering pain in the asylum.

Afterward, the boy slept in its arms, snoring drunkenly. It analyzed the genetic material he had left behind. He had a problem with cholesterol, and should take it easy on the banana splits. Also diabetes in his future. Maybe just as well he didn't want to reproduce.

-25-

Apia, Samoa, 2021

There was no way they could have kept it secret. For one thing, a longboat crew had been practicing less than a kilometer away. They heard the explosion when the laser punched through the wall of the building full of vacuum. All thirty-four were still staring when the side of the building collapsed and there was a huge spray of water.

From their angle they couldn't see the artifact. But the building was continually monitored by an automatic extreme-telephoto camera that CNN had mounted on a hillside on Mount Vaia, overlooking the bay. It caught the building's collapse, and zoomed in on the artifact rising leisurely back up to its original position.

No one on Samoa knew that there was a hasty conference in Washington five minutes later, the president pulled out of a late-night poker game to help decide whether to vaporize their island. Somebody was disingenuous enough to point out that it really wouldn't be an act of war, since there were no hostilities between the two nations, and one of them would no longer exist after the explosion. The president's response to that was characteristically curt, and he went back to his game after demanding that a summary of events be on his table in the morning.

It would be one short page. Poseidon wasn't talking, and the NASA team abided by their agreement.

They ran the tape over and over, along with the sensor data, and on the hundredth viewing they knew little more than on the first. As the laser cranked up to 72 percent of full force, the temperature of the artifact began to increase, all over. When it was 1.2 degrees Centigrade above the ambient temperature, it rose diagonally off its cradle at 18.3 centimeters per second, travelling at a 45-degree angle until it was over the laser's output tube. Then it fell to the floor. It was like dropping an apartment building on a wineglass. The floor didn't resist.

The part under the cradle didn't collapse; it was independently supported. It probably
would
have crumbled if the artifact had fallen on it, too. But it seemed only interested in the laser. When it came back up, it settled into the cradle as gently as a feather.

The researchers had to study the CNN record of that part, their ruggedized camera lying ruggedly on the bottom of the bay, its backup power source sending a record of swirling silt. Exactly 1.55 seconds after the splash, the artifact rose back out of the water, still at a constant rate of 18.3 centimeters per second, and settled back into its cradle. The scene was unchanged when Russ and Jan pedaled up a couple of minutes later.

While a work crew nervously reconstructed the artifact room and its protective surround, a separate NASA crew—at least they wore identically new NASA coveralls—retrieved the drowned laser and power source and analyzed the damage. It was profound.

Jack Halliburton didn't normally walk into cottage 7 unannounced. The crowd of nine who were sitting around the table piled high with reports and lunch remains fell silent when he came through the door.

Russ was one of the most surprised. "Jack. You want a sandwich?"

He shook his head and sat down on the chair offered. "Get me the output curve for the laser just before the artifact fell on it."

MoisheRosse, who had become their laser guy, picked up two cylindrical keyboards and started surfing, the big TV acting as a monitor.

"It's a simple step function," Russ said. "Turns off."

"I know. I want to know exactly when and why."

"Good luck with the why." The innards of the power source were deeply classified; they used it as a black box that always delivered what you asked.

"They told me a little something." A familiar graph appeared on the screen, the output of the laser slightly rising and then falling off abruptly. The abscissa of the graph was ticked off in microseconds.

"Give me a split screen and let's see what happens on the real-time tape a couple of microseconds before it turns off."

The artifact was slowly rising, two millimeters per microsecond. The image rolled around slowly—the slow-motion record of violent dislocation—when the laser beam slid under the artifact and punched through the opposite wall.

"Hold it. Stop it right there." The frame's time was 06:39:23.705. The graph showed the power shutting off at 06:39:23.810.

"More than a tenth of a second. So?" Russ gestured at the screen. "What did they tell you?" They had assumed that either the laser had shut off automatically, via some internal safety circuit, or the violence of the implosion had done the job. The feds weren't talking.

Jack was silent, staring, for a long moment. "What evidently happened," he said, "at 23.810, was that all the plutonium in that reactor turned to lead."

"Turned to lead?"

"Yeah. That's why it stopped working. You can't get blood out of a turnip."

"Good God," Moishe said. "Where did all that energy go?"

"At a first guess, inside our little friend."

"How many grams of plutonium?" Russ said.

"They're still not talking. But they acted nervous as hell. I don't think they have grams on their collective mind. I think it's tons, kilo-tons, megatons."

"TNT equivalent," Russ said.

Jack nodded. "They want to evacuate the island."

"Megatons?" Russ said, his eyes widening. "What have we been sitting on?"

"Like I say, they're not talking numbers. Besides, I have a suspicion that they're also not talking about the
thing
blowing up. I think they want to be free to nuke it to atoms if it looks dangerous."

" 'If'!"

Jack looked around the room. "I suspect we'll lose some of our crew here, too. Can't say I'd blame anyone for leaving."

Moishe broke the silence. "What, when it's just getting interesting?"

They weren't going to move 200,000 Samoans just by saying "You're in danger; you have to leave." For one thing, the "independent" in Independent Samoa applied mostly to America. Anybody who wanted to live under Uncle Sam's thumb could take the ferry to American Samoa.

There was also the matter of where to put them. American Samoa was dismally crowded. New Zealand and Australia were virtually closed, having absorbed more than 100,000 Samoans over the past century—and that emigration of course siphoned off the ones who wanted to leave the traditional lifestyle.

The other islands in the group were mostly impenetrable jungle or volcanic waste. Savai'i had 60,000 people crowded into a necklace of towns along the inhabitable coast, and didn't want more.

Besides, most Samoans were deeply religious and somewhat fatalistic. If God chose to take them, He would. And it would be disrespectful to the point of sacrilege to leave their homes, with generations of ancestors buried in the front yards. Pollsters said that even if the United States completely paid for relocation, they'd only move about 20 percent of the population.

Samoans pointed out that it would be a lot simpler to move the artifact. The land didn't belong to Poseidon, let alone to the U.S. government; it was leased. The family that owned the land could evict them.

Jack applied his skills as a negotiator to that aspect of the problem. He had a meeting with the local village elders, the
fono,
and pointed out that evicting them, while a defensible act, had its negative side. It would be, in effect, capitulating to U.S. nuclear might. It would be a breach of agreement—an agreement that involved far more money and prestige than the village had ever known—and some would see that as a humiliation. Besides, if they cooperated, Jack would, in gratitude, renovate both schools and build a new church.

He never mentioned Poseidon. The deal had been with him.

It wound up costing the renovation of two more churches and the sponsorship of a celebratory feast. But honor won the day.

(The fact that the Samoan national government wanted the village to evict Poseidon had worked to Jack's advantage. The primacy of village law was written into the constitution, and there was no question that in matters of real estate—a touchy subject on the finite island—village law trumped the feds. The elders took pleasure in reaffirming this principle.)

The rebuilding was profound. The dome over the experimental area, besides providing environmental isolation, was to serve as a double blast confinement volume, a dome of titanium inside a dome of steel. Jack and Russ and Jan united in opposing the extra expense and complication. If the artifact decided to explode, the domes might as well be made of cardboard.

The government, still under the aegis of NASA but with much more money and clout than the agency possessed, agreed that they were probably right. The double dome was a just-in-case precaution.

Also "just in case" were the manacles that supposedly held the artifact down, attached to arm-thick cables that were deeply anchored in bedrock. They had calculated the amount of force it had taken to lift the artifact off its cradle; the manacles could hold down four to six times as much. No one who had seen the airy effortless grace with which the artifact had floated up would bet on the cables.

It was Jan's turn to run the show. Having scalded and frozen and zapped the thing, with no result other than disaster—maybe now it was time to talk to it.