“You told her you could arrange it?” Jan said.
“Put her off. I said security’d probably be relaxed soon, if the artifact stayed calm.”
“Leading her on,” Jack said.
“Maybe so. But I had no reason to think it was anything other than normal curiosity. Who wouldn’t want to go take a look at the thing?”
“Especially someone who’d come all this way to take a low- paying job, out of curiosity about it,” Jan said. “We tested her enthusiasm, remember, by having her pay her own way out for the interview.”
“Which we can do again, for the trap,” Jack said. “But maybe we should be more subtle.”
Russell nodded. “Whatever Rae is, she knows human nature well. She’s either going to be very careful or direct. She might just phone us and set up a meeting, one where she can control the conditions.”
“I wonder how old she is,” Jack said.
“Thirty-some.”
“Try thirty thousand. She can’t be killed—at least not by a point-blank shotgun blast, or by drowning—and she can masquerade as another person down to the fingerprints and retinas. Who was she before Rae Archer? Before that? She might go all the way back through human history and prehistory.
“She might have come to this planet even before humans evolved. Wandering around as a saber-toothed tiger. As a dinosaur before that.”
“No,” Jan said, “I don’t think she’s an alien at all. Just a different kind of human. They probably evolved alongside us and learned to keep their nature secret—or somewhat secret. There are legends about shape-changers and immortals.”
Jack rubbed his beard. “If so, there can’t be many of them. They’d just take over.”
“Maybe they have,” Russ said. “We ought to check every world leader for DNA.” He and Jan laughed nervously.
“The CIA is probably having this same conversation,” Jack said.
In fact, by the time Jack said this, every employee of the CIA had donated a few cheek cells to the agency, as had employees of NSA and Homeland Security. A “suggestion” had come down from the White House that all of the country’s leaders be tested.
Laboratories that did DNA testing were initially overwhelmed, but then their usual work was not just testing for the presence of DNA, but rather analyzing a sample to link it to a particular microorganism or person. This called for time-consuming processes like electrophoresis or mass spectrometry. But of course in those cases they already knew that a sample contained DNA; the question was pinning down its origin.
It turned out that a DNA/no DNA test was a lot simpler. You took the buccal swab and swirled it around in a test tube containing a solution that turns acid in the presence of even a microgram of DNA, then added a drop of phenol red. If it turned yellow, voila, the scraping was from a human cheek, or at least it came from something that had DNA of some description. It couldn’t discriminate between onion DNA and human, but in this case it didn’t matter. Samples of the “flesh” and “blood” in the arm that resided in a freezer in the Apia police station had been sent all over the world for analysis. The samples had the right proportions of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur, and nitrogen to have come from the amino acids that make up human (or animal) protein, but their chemistry was not human. It was not even organic chemistry.
The thing it came from had not been alive, in the sense that a human is alive.
The tests proved that every member of the American intelligence community was human, at least in a nominal sense, and so were all prominent politicians, including the president, which surprised a few people.
—44—
Just a week after it had been blasted with a shotgun and swam to the airport, the changeling returned. Sharon Valida had a brand- new passport, a six-month work permit, and a suitcase full of light business outfits. Over the internet, she’d landed a job with a bank in Apia looking for a customer representative who could speak German and French.
She also had packed a nice bikini and cute jogging outfit; a dinner dress and a bottle of Sudafed unlike any other in the world. Each capsule had been carefully opened and emptied and refilled with a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of reference DNA stolen from a teaching laboratory at the University of Hawaii. She had bitten down on one every few hours from the Honolulu airport to the Apia one, where a uniformed man apologetically stuck a swab in her mouth and stroked the inside of both cheeks. He did something under the counter and then waved her through.
The changeling was in a quiet race against time. It had to establish a convincing identity as a working woman in Apia before Michelle Watson, the Poseidon receptionist, retired to have her baby. It knew that Michelle’s husband was a pleasant but unemployed beach bum, and she wanted to work as long as she could waddle down to the bank with her paycheck, which was okay with Poseidon.
Some time in the next six weeks they would advertise for a replacement. The ad wouldn’t ask for a pretty young woman with a degree in business and minor in oceanography, but that was what they’d get.
The changeling rented an apartment on Beach Street, a few blocks from the project site, and began a routine that included jogging at dawn and dusk, which was when Russell was out riding his bike. He said he used the time to think, but he probably wouldn’t be thinking so hard that he would ignore a pretty blonde in a tight silver jogging outfit with property of nobody stenciled on the back.
Its bank job was not difficult, and was moderately interesting when they actually needed Sharon as a translator. The rest of the time they had it out front, being pretty and a teller, both of which the changeling could do without thinking about anything but ones and zeros.
Three of the men at the bank asked Sharon out, and she dated them in strict rotation, without becoming “involved.” It had been a woman often enough to know that men would accept a lack of sexual activity for a long time, if you were attractive and kept them talking about themselves. They were British, American, and Samoan; reserved, brash, and shy, respectively. The Samoan was the most interesting, taking his palagi woman to native places where no one else was Caucasian, and doing physical things like sailing and swimming. More traditional physical behavior, she was reserving for Russell.
Russell pedaled by her almost every morning, either approaching with a conventional I’m-not-looking-at-your-breasts smile and nod, or slowing down and coasting as he closed on her from behind.
The changeling contrived an incident the second week. Hearing the familiar bicycle about a block away, it stumbled and fell, skinning a knee.
Russell raced up and dropped his bike with a clatter. Sharon was looking at the minor wound and tentatively picking gravel out of it. The changeling manufactured enough histamine to make itself on the verge of tears.
“Are you all right?” He was a little out of breath.
“It’s nothing,” the changeling said. “I’m such a klutz.”
“Wait.” Russell stepped back to his bicycle and got the water bottle. He unscrewed the top and, steadying her with a light touch to the calf, poured cool water on the abrasion.
“Ooh.” There was no pain, actually, but the changeling made itself flinch. “No, it’s all right.”
It was more than all right, actually. His familiar touch and the smell of his sweat. If the changeling had been slightly more human, she would have grabbed him and held him tight.