“But you see the hole in that logic,” Nesbitt said.
“Sure,” Jack said. “I see where you’re going. The argument assumes we would know the machine was here.”
“It might well be hidden,” Nesbitt said, “hidden in a place where it wouldn’t be found except by other creatures with high technology.”
Jack rubbed the stubble on his chin. “You’re right there. No pearl diver’s gonna find that thing and bring it up.”
“And bringing it out of that environment into this one might be a signal that life on the planet has evolved sufficiently to initiate the next course of action.”
“Make contact with us.”
“Maybe. Or maybe eliminate us as rivals.” He looked at both of them in turn. “What if a creature like Hitler had started the project? Genghis Khan? And they were at least humans. There are plenty of animals who simplify their existence by eliminating their own kind who threaten their primacy. We ourselves have destroyed whole species— smallpox and malaria—for our health.”
“It’s far-fetched,” Halliburton said.
“But even if the probability was near zero, the stakes are so high that the problem should be addressed.”
“Hm.” Jack tapped his teacup with his spoon and the woman appeared. “Sun’s over the yardarm, Colleen.” She nodded and slipped away. “So how are your twelve people supposed to save humanity from alien invasion?”
“We discussed moving the whole operation to the lunar surface.”
“Holy cow,” Russ said.
“It would make the Apollo program look like a science fair project,” Nesbitt said. “No one has a booster that can orbit one-tenth that thing’s mass. And we couldn’t send it up piecemeal.”
Jack squinted, doing numbers. “I don’t think it could be done at all. Mass of the booster goes up with the square of the mass of the pay-load. Strength of materials. Goddamn thing’d collapse.”
“And you see the implications of that. Someone got that thing here from a lot farther away than the moon.”
“That’s still just an assumption,” Russ said, “and I still lean toward a natural explanation. It probably was formed here on Earth, by some exotic process.”
Nesbitt’s temper rose for the first time. “Pretty damned exotic! Three times as dense as plutonium—and that’s if it were the same stuff through and through! What if the goddamned thing’s hollow? What’s the shell made of?”
“Neutronium,” Russ said. “Degenerate matter. That’s my guess, if it’s hollow.”
“Baloney-um is what we called it in school,” Jack said. “Make up the properties first; find the element later.”
Colleen rolled in a cart with various glasses and bottles. “Gentlemen?” The NASA man stuck to tea, Russ took white wine, Jack a double Bloody Mary.
“So what does your dynamic dozen propose?” Jack asked as the woman left the room.
He leaned forward. “Isolation. More profound than extreme bio-hazard. The environment the military uses in developing…”
“Nanoweapons,” Russ supplied. “Of course we’re not actually developing them. Just learning how to defend ourselves against them, if somebody else does.”
“Well, it’s not just the military. Everybody developing nanotech uses similar safeguards to keep the little things isolated.
“We’d cover the lab building your crew is finishing now with an outside layer, sort of an exoskeleton. Basically a seamless metal room almost the same size as the lab. To enter, you have to go through an airlock. The atmospheric pressure inside is slightly lower than outside. The airlock’s also a changing room; nobody ever wears street clothes into the work area.”
“I don’t think our people would enjoy working under those constraints,” Russ said. “Feels like government interference.”
“You could also see it as taking advantage of the government. We give you the functional equivalent of lunar isolation—air and water recycled, power sources independent of the outside.”
“Plus getting back all the capital we’ve put in, to date?” Jack said, looking at Russ.
“That’s right,” Nesbitt said. Russ nodded almost imperceptibly.
Jack squeezed some more lime into his Bloody Mary. “I guess we’ll look into your contract. Have our lawyers look into it. Maybe make a counteroffer.”
“Fair enough.” Nesbitt stood. “I’ll go up and fetch it. I think you’ll find it clear and complete.”
What they wouldn’t find was a little detail about the “independent power source”: As a public health measure for the planet, its plutonium load could be command-detonated from Washington, turning the whole island into radioactive slag.
—15—
The changeling could have avoided the draft by simulating any number of maladies or deficiencies; one out of three American men were rejected. Like a lot of men, for various reasons, he avoided it by joining the Marines.
The Corps was not enthusiastic about recruits like Jimmy Berry, no matter how good they would look on a recruiting poster. He was tall, strong, handsome, healthy, and obviously from a rich family. He was probably lying about not having gone to college, to get out of being assigned to Officer Candidate School. He would be hard to break, which would make it that much harder to break the other shitbirds. And they had to be broken before they could be built anew as Marines.
They called him Pretty Boy and Richie Rich. But he was a little more of a problem than they’d anticipated. On their way to their first day in barracks, a big drill sergeant called him out of ranks— “You march like a fuckin’ girl”—and made him do fifty push-ups, which he did without breaking a sweat. Then the sergeant sat on his back and said, “Fifty more.” He did these with no obvious effort.
So the first night, the drill sergeant organized a “blanket party” for the annoying shitbird. He got three more big sergeants and three big corporals to throw a blanket over the sleeping Jimmy and beat some respect into him.
It was two in the morning and the changeling, mentally playing the piano with four hands, heard the seven tiptoeing down the aisle of the barracks, but dismissed the sound as unimportant. Nothing here could hurt it.
But when the blanket suddenly was wrapped tightly around it and someone struck it with a club, it did fight back for less than a second. Then it figured out the situation and was totally passive.
In less than a second, though, it had broken a wrist and two thumbs, and had kicked one man across the room, to get a concussion against the opposite wall.
One of the survivors kept swinging the club at Jimmy’s inert form, until the others hustled him out. Then the recruits, by ones and twos, came over to see what damage had been done.
The changeling manufactured bruises and cuts and released an appropriate amount of blood. It was a ghastly sight in the dim light from the latrine. “We have to get him to the infirmary,” someone said.
“No,” the changeling said.
The overhead lights snapped on. “What the fuck is going on in here?” the drill sergeant roared. He was wearing clean pressed fatigues, but the shirt was only buttoned halfway, and his left hand hung useless at his side, the thumb turning purple and blue. “You shitbirds get back to your bunks.”
Two noncoms sidled by him to the unconscious one lying by the wall. He moaned when they picked him up and hustled him away.
The drill sergeant stood in front of Jimmy, inspecting his bruises and cuts and two black eyes. “What happened to you, recruit?”
“What do you think happened, Sergeant?”