“So why didn’t you just move the thing to Baja? Why start from scratch here?”
“I wish.” He stared at the grill. “Partly the difficulty of moving the damned thing. Mostly political, though. Mexico’s too close to the United States, not just in miles, but politically and economically. Jack didn’t want Uncle Sam breathing down our neck. Mexican soldiers knocking on our door. Down our door.”
“They could do that?”
“Sure they could. Threat to hemisphere security.” He split two buns and set them on the grill. “Independent Samoa really is independent. And stable. Tonga was closer to the artifact’s original position, but we didn’t want to deal with the politics there.
“Jack studied surveys of the Samoan Islands, and wound up here by a process of elimination.”
“The first factor being ‘Is there a town?’ ”
He nodded. “They call it the only city in Samoa, but as you know, it’s not exactly Hong Kong. It’s really just a bunch of towns crowded together, but it does have a pharmacy, hardware store, and so forth.” He gestured toward the main building. “And this patch of land: it was undeveloped, privately owned, and on the water. Jack got in touch with the matai of the family that owned it and arranged to lease it. He even became a Samoan citizen.”
“Did he join the family, the aiga?”
“No, although he didn’t rule out the possibility. Technically, he’d have to share all his wealth with the family.” He raised an eyebrow. “That’s not in his nature.”
“You’ve known him a long time?”
“No. Not until … he got in touch with me about the submarine disaster that led to our finding the artifact.” The changeling knew, as Rae, that there was something secret going on there. Maybe it could tease the truth out of him in this incarnation.
“We never would have met, in the normal course of things. He was born into money, but chose a military career. I’m pretty far from either of those.” He inspected the hot dogs. “These two are done.” She held out paper plates and he installed buns and dogs on them, then repositioned the remaining two according to some arcane thermodynamic principle, and split two more buns to toast.
They silently went about the business of mustard and ketchup and relish, all out of small squeeze packets that Russell had liberated from various airports.
The changeling took a bite. “Good.” Bland, actually.
Russell shrugged. “Sometimes I’d kill for some plain American sidewalk vendor food. Bacteria and all.”
“You made money, though. As opposed to being born with it. You didn’t raise the Titanic with spare change.”
He shook his head, chewing. “Always use other people’s money. Sometimes I feel more like a pitchman than an engineer.” He paused to squirt another envelope of mustard into the bun. “Jack thinks, or claims to think, that there’s a huge fortune in this. Maybe someday, but probably not for him. He’s got a zillion eurobucks to earn back—and he’s old.”
“How about you?”
“I’m not so old.”
“I mean money. Do you expect to make a fortune yourself?”
“No; hell, no. I’m in it for the game.”
“That’s what I thought. Hoped.”
“Biggest thing in the twenty-first century. Maybe the biggest thing, all the way back.” He stared at the containment building. “Even if it’s not from another world. That would mean that our view of reality, our science, is wrong. Not just incomplete, but wrong.”
“Isn’t that true, no matter where it comes from?”
“In a way, no. Last century, a guy pointed out that a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic…”
Arthur C. Clarke, the changeling didn’t say. It had met him at an Apollo launch in the 1970s.
“And that gives us an out. Our science could still be a subset of theirs. Like going back to Newton and showing him a hologram.”
He was so absorbed in his explanation he wasn’t aware of the man walking quietly up behind him. His shadow fell over him and he jumped, startled. “Jack!”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”
“This is Sharon Valida. Jack Halliburton.”
The changeling extended its hand. “We’ve met, briefly. I work at the Pacific Commercial Bank.”
“And have a good memory for faces.”
Especially yours, the changeling thought.
“Hot dog?” Russell said.
“No, I’m headed for the hotel. I saw you here and wondered whether we might get together a little earlier tomorrow morning, before the … thing.”
“Like what, eight o’clock?”
“Eight would be fine. I’ll leave a message for Jan.” He nodded at the changeling. “Miss Valida. See you then, Russell.”
When he was out of earshot, the changeling said, “He always dresses like that?” White linen suit, Panama hat, Samoan shirt.
“Yeah, when he’s not working in the lab. Maybe a century out of date.”
“A few other rich old guys who come into the bank dress that way. My boss calls them his Somerset Maugham characters. Was he some actor?”
“Writer, I think.” He ate the last bite and stood up. “Ready for another?”
“Let it get a little burnt. Try a beer, though.”
“Excellent idea.” He took two Heinekens out and popped them.
She drank off her wine and accepted one. “Here’s to drunken debauchery on Sunday.” They clinked bottles together. “So … showing Newton a hologram.”
“Well, it’s occurred to me that this thing might not be from another planet. It might be from our own future.”
“Really? I thought you could only go the other way.”
“You know about that?”
“I saw a thing on the cube. Particle accelerator.”
“Yeah, they’ve been able to move a particle a fraction of a second into the future. Which is kosher; general relativity has always allowed that.”
“But not into the past?”
“That’s right—and it’s not just relativity; it’s causality, common sense. Cause and effect out the window.”
“But you think—”
“I know it’s like ‘one impossible thing happens, therefore anything impossible can happen.’ But it makes a screwy kind of sense. They sent this indestructible thing back a million years into the past, and put it where no one could find it. Then they went to dig it up…”
“And it wasn’t there!” She nodded rapidly. “So they sent this kind of robot back here to find out what happened.”
“Not a robot,” he said. “Definitely not a robot.”
“You knew her?”
He hesitated. “Pretty well. Or I thought I did. She was pretty human for a robot. Or transhuman, as I say, from the future.”
“Evolved from humans?”
“Bingo. It wouldn’t take millions of years, either. It’s only law and custom, not science, that keeps us from directing our own evolution now.”
The changeling considered this. It seemed to have memories going so far back that it always considered itself a visitor from the distant past. It could have been from the future, though, and lost the memory of that travel.
It knew that a way around the causality paradox might be that the time traveler not be allowed to take any information back in time. It had never thought of applying that to its own amnesia of the time before the centuries it had spent as a great white shark. It could have been sent back as a blank-slate creature that needed no memory to survive, and evolve.