Dawn was still hours away when the final ditch widened into a mud flat and the changeling wormed its way into the bay. It dove down to the bottom and began the process of changing into a fish.
A shark bit it in two, which was annoying. But it evidently didn’t like the flavor, and left the two halves alone. The changeling crawled along the bottom, crunching up bivalves and crabs, and when it had enough mass, it took the familiar shape of a great white shark itself. By then it was in the South China Sea. It pointed itself east. Only ten thousand miles to California.
—23—
The evacuation of the artifact room had taken a little longer than expected, but there were no leaks, and all of the data- gathering equipment seemed to be working fine. At five thirty, Naomi said through the monitor, “Okay. We can start the countdown.”
Jack nodded. “Fire when ready, Gridley.” No one else in the room knew who Gridley was.
After a few minutes, there was no temperature change at 10 percent. Naomi increased it to 20, and then to 30.
“Go to fifty,” Jack said, and Russ and Jan nodded.
“Where’s it all going?” Jan muttered, a question they’d all asked before. At least when there was air in the building, some of the energy had gone into heating the air. Now, the laser was putting out enough energy to run a small city into a hundred-square- centimeter area, and it was all disappearing—into the artifact, apparently.
“Go to a hundred?” Jack said.
“Seventy-five,” Russ and Jan said simultaneously.
It never got there. The monitor went blank and a second later the people in cottage 7 heard the dull thump of an explosion.
Jan and Russ were the first ones there, with their bicycles. Half the building had collapsed, the big laser almost submerged in the water. Naomi and Moishe staggered out of the water, coughing and gagging.
Russ took Naomi’s arm. “Are you all right?”
She ignored the question, and stared back at the wreck of the lab. “It moved.”
“Moved?” Russ said.
“Floated up and crashed down.”
“Holy shit.”
“Merry Christmas.”
Most of the equipment was wrecked, but a high-speed camera, which the manufacturer called “ruggedized,” had been rugged enough to record the sequence of events before it lost power and fell into the water.
When the laser increased to 72 percent output, 300,000 watts, the artifact gently rose off its cradle, at a uniform velocity of 18.3 centimeters per second. When it cleared the laser’s beam, the weapon punched a hole in the opposite wall, causing the slight explosion they had heard, as the building suddenly filled with air. The beam didn’t do any other damage except to explode a coconut at the top of a tree on the Mulinu’a Peninsula, more than two kilometers away.
The artifact continued rising diagonally until it was poised over the laser’s optical fiber gun-barrel. Then, whatever force had been holding it aloft quit. It fell, destroying the laser and collapsing that side of the building into the bay.
The camera didn’t record what happened after that, but evidently the artifact floated back up and repositioned itself on the cradle in the now open-air artifact room. When the investigators got to it, a few minutes later, it was still beaded with salt water, and cool to the touch.
This would change the direction of their research.
—24—
The changeling enjoyed swimming for a few years as a great white shark—it had had that form for a thousand times as long as the human one.
For reasons it didn’t understand, it circled for hours over the deep Tonga Trench, and dove as far as it could in comfort. But it was used to having its animal bodies do things out of obscure impulse, and after awhile moved on. When it got within a few hundred yards of the California coast, it dropped most of its mass and became a bottle-nosed dolphin.
At two in the morning, it swam into a protected cove, shallow enough to be safe from serious predators, and spent a painful hour turning back into a human being.
It used the familiar Jimmy template, but made itself a little shorter and gave itself dark hair with a touch of gray. It darkened its skin and created black pants and a black sweater—burglar gear.
It had to steal some money and information.
The lay of the land was similar to what it had faced the first time it had been human; it crossed a short beach and climbed some rocks to find a winding coastal road. It headed north at an easy lope.
Four times it hid from approaching headlights. After a few miles it came upon an isolated service station with a cottage out back.
Perfect for its petty theft. It could make dollar bills as easily as it made clothing, out of its own substance, but it didn’t know whether currency might have changed, whether you still needed ration books— whether there might be some completely new wartime system. They might be using Japanese yen, if the war was over.
The placards in the service station window were in English, and none of them exhorted you to join the services—one did have an American eagle with the instruction to buy U.S. savings bonds, but not war bonds. Maybe the war was over and the Japanese hadn’t won.
The door was locked, but it was a simple one. It turned a forefinger into a living skeleton key, and felt its way through the tumblers in less than a minute.
It wished for moonlight. Even with irises totally dilated, there was little detail.
One wall was shelves full of automobile supplies. It opened a quart of oil and drank it for energy and the interesting flavor, altering its metabolism for a few minutes to something it had used a few hundred thousand years before, lying alongside the vent of an undersea volcano.
It found a box of wooden matches and sucked the end off one, for the phosphorus, and then lit one, with a flare of light and a delicious sting of sulfur dioxide. It saw two things it needed: a 1947 World Almanac and a cash register.
After stuffing the almanac in its belt, it lit another match and studied the machine. Pushing down on the no sale key produced a loud chime, and the cash drawer slid out with a metallic hiss.
It studied a twenty-dollar bill in the match light. No obvious differences. American currency had changed in size three years before the changeling had become Jimmy, and people had still been complaining about it.
It gave a cursory check to the ten, five, and one, and put them back into the till. Then the lights went on with a loud snap.
An old white man stood in the doorway with a double- barrelled shotgun. “Finally,” he said in a squeaking, trembling voice. “I finally got your ass.”
Evidently someone had been robbing him. “I haven’t—” the changeling started to say, but then there was a loud explosion and it couldn’t finish the sentence, for lack of a mouth.
It ducked, and the second shot went high. Sensible of the impossibility it was creating by not falling down dead, it rushed past the man while he was fumbling to reload, forming a large temporary eye out of the gore of its face, and started sprinting down the road.
The old man fired two more shots into the darkness, but the changeling was out of range.
Once around the first bend, the changeling went off the road and sat in the darkness, working on an appearance less incriminating. Elderly farming woman, Caucasian with a deep tan. Faded seersucker dress.
In the moonless overcast night, the changeling moved swiftly inland. A few farm dogs howled at its passing. As the gray dawn approached, it hid in an abandoned truck in a wooded area outside of Grover City.