“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.
—26—
College was harder the second time around. Oceanography had been a natural pursuit for the changeling; English and literature were not, especially in the advanced classes mandated by Stuart’s performance in high school. The changeling ground through one semester and changed its major to anthropology.
Anthro was a natural, too, since it had been objectively studying the human race for sixteen accelerated years. The only problem was limiting its class responses and papers to perceptions appropriate to a bright but unworldly lad from Iowa—who had never been in an insane asylum or boot camp, and had only read about Bataan in the newspapers.
The changeling changed. It would never be human, but it was human enough for something like empathy with its professors. They were trying to understand, and teach about, the human condition—but were themselves trapped in human bodies; stuck in human culture like ancient insects in amber.
The changeling had an advantage there. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human. It began to suspect it wasn’t even from Earth.
A few months before it had come up out of the sea onto California soil for the second time, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold had seen a formation of flying discs weaving through the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. People on the ground reported seeing them, too.
Then there was a lot of excitement over one of them crashing outside Roswell, New Mexico, though the Army Air Force investigators said it was just a weather balloon. Belief in the “flying saucer” explanation persisted, though.
During the changeling’s first year at Berkeley, an Air National Guard pilot crashed while trying to intercept an Unidentified Flying Object, as they had come to be called. The Air Force (as it had come to be called) established Project Sign to investigate UFOs.
The changeling followed press reports avidly. As it turned out, though Project Sign’s report rejected the idea of extraterrestrial origin, saying UFOs were misinterpretations of natural phenomena, an earlier top-secret “Estimate of the Situation” apparently thought otherwise. But that would stay top secret for a long time. Project Sign was changed to Project Grudge, and when it was terminated at the end of 1949, the Air Force explicitly denied the possibility of extraterrestrial origin, adding mass hysteria and “war nerves” to the natural-phenomenon explanation, and also said that many of the reports were cynical frauds by publicity-seekers or the hallucinations of psychologically disturbed people.