Camouflage (16 page)

The two men showed up together just as the sundown storm started. The setting sun was a dull red ball on the horizon while sheets of rain marched sideways across the harbor. No thunder or lightning; just an incessant downpour.

"Another wonderful day in paradise," she said.

"E.T. hasn't phoned home?" Jack said as he sat down.

"Got 'call waiting.' " The waiter appeared with the wine list. Jack waved it away and ordered a bottle of Bin 43.

"So what do you think?" Russ said.

"Oh, I don't know." She refilled her coffee cup from a silver thermos flask. "I guess it's time to move on to the planetary environments phase. If it reacts to anything, I can repeat the Drake algorithm then." She sipped the coffee. "As you say, Russ, maybe it's asleep or in some dormant mode. Maybe if we reproduce its home planet's conditions, it will be more inclined to talk."

Jan winced as a shift of wind sent a fine spray over them. "Waiter," Jack said, standing and pointing to a table just inside. He carried Jan's coffee flask in, and while a woman lit candles, the waiter appeared with a bottle and three glasses.

"I'm willing to be patient," Jack said, going through the tasting ritual.

"It's not a matter of patience." She put her hand over her wineglass. "I feel as if we've gone as far as we can in this direction."

"Well, we knew it was going to be all or nothing," Russ said. "Just one peep out of the thing and we'd be ..." He rose an eyebrow and took a sip of wine.

"Yes, we would," she said. "But we're not. Let's move on."

"Starting at square one?" Jack said. "Mercury?"

"We could start anywhere," Russ said. "Mercury is going to cost out better. Just hot vacuum."

"So there's a decision?"

He looked at Jan. "Acoustic. We want to continue tapping out your message on the thing's surface. If it responds acoustically, we won't hear it in a vacuum."

"We can run a taut wire from it," Jack said, "like a tin-can telephone."

"Hard to get it through the wall without damping vibrations."

Jack shrugged. "So don't run it through." He spread out his napkin and clicked a pen open. He drew a square inside a square and attached the inner to the outer with springs. "See? You have your taut wire pulling on the back of
this"
—he tapped the inner square—"and it acts like an old-fashioned speaker. It's gonna vibrate in a way that mimics the artifact's vibrations."

"But we still can't hear it," Jan said.

"Ah, but we can
watch
it. Draw a grid on the square and put a camera on it."

"Fourier transforms," Russ said with approval.

"Duck soup," Jack said.

"We have no duck," the waiter said. He was standing behind Jack's shoulder. "We have clam chowder or chicken with mushrooms."

Russ looked at him and decided he wasn't joking. "I'll have the chowder and grilled masimasi."

"Me, too," Jan said.

"The usual," Jack said.

"Cholesterol with cholesterol sauce," Jan said.

"You will have a red wine with that?"

"Bin 88," Jack and Russ said simultaneously. "And I want it really
blue
this time," Jack said of his steak. "Cold in the center."

The waiter nodded and left. Russ imitated his accent: "Sir, we cannot guarantee that you will survive this meal. Samoan cattle have parasites for which there are no Western names."

Jack smiled and refilled both glasses of white wine. "Mercury, and then go on to Mars? Vacuum with a little carbon dioxide. Then Venus and the gasbags."

"Good name for a rock band," Russ said.

"Titan?" Jan said. "Europa?"

"Makes sense," Russ said. "And just outer space, 2.8 degrees above absolute zero. It probably spent a long time in that environment."

"Hold on," Jan said, and took an old computer out of her purse. She unrolled the keyboard and pulled out the antenna and typed a few words. "Let's be methodical here. Starting with the mercurian environment." They got halfway through the solar system before dinner came, and finished it over sherry and cheese, mapping out a rough schedule. They would spend five days with each environment, and one to four days in transition.

Hot Mercury, cool Mars, hellish Venus, cold poison Titan, arctic Europa, then the jovian model: high-pressure liquid hydrogen and helium, flowing at about 150 meters per second, flavored with methane and ammonia.

Jan took a sip of sherry and scrolled through the schedule. "Something bothers me."

Jack nodded. "The pressure chamber's—"

"No. What if the thing misunderstands? What if it thinks we're attacking it?"

Russ laughed nervously. "I thought I was the anthropomorphic one."

"If it does its little jump-off-the-pedestal trick while it's in the Jupiter simulation..."

"Be worse than a daisy-cutter bomb," Jack said. "Flatten everything out to here. They'll hear it in American Samoa."

"In Fiji," Russ said. "Honolulu."

-29-

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967

For a few months, the changeling and the chameleon were in the same city, doing more or less the same things.

The chameleon was at MIT, studying marine engineering. It had enjoyed Korea as a naval officer, and wanted to learn more about the design of warships.

It liked anything about killing.

The changeling had gotten its doctorate in anthropology in 1960. Combining its deep knowledge of Earth's biology with a broad knowledge of the cultures that crawled all over the planet convinced it that it had to be from somewhere else. So it went to Harvard with impeccably faked credentials (again a boy from California) and began the study of astronomy and astrophysics.

If they ever rode together on the Red Line or had a beer at the same time at the Plough and Stars, they were unaware of being in the company of a fellow extraterrestrial. They were both looking for other aliens; they were both too experienced to be found out.

Neither one was drafted for Vietnam. The changeling faked severe stomach ulcers. The chameleon finished its master's degree and joined Officer Candidate School.

So while the chameleon pointed eight-inch guns at unseen targets in the Vietnamese jungle, the changeling pointed huge telescopes at unseen targets outside the galaxy. It mostly counted photons and put the numbers into a BASIC program, which dispensed something like truth. Sometimes, unlike professional astronomers, the changeling unhooked the telescope from its photon counter and actually looked through it at the night sky.

It was fascinated with globular clusters, and eventually hunted down all of the hundred-some visible from Massachusetts. It saw its home, M22, as a fuzzy blob shot through with sparkles, and returned to it many times without knowing why.

The changeling had a master's in astronomy by 1974, but felt it had to know more about computers before continuing on, so it moved down to MIT for a couple of years, studying electrical engineering and computer science.

Two of its professors had taught an alien before.

It liked the area, and so returned to Harvard for its Ph.D. in astrophysics, where it had another coincidental encounter. As part of its graduate assistantship, it graded papers for an elementary astrophysics course, Atmospheres of the Sun and Stars. One of its students was Jan Dagmar, who it would meet more than forty years later, in Samoa.

Harvard followed the tradition of kicking its chicks out of the nest, so after its doctorate, the changeling had to look elsewhere for work. The natural place was the National Radio Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, where Frank Drake had started Project OZMA, which after twenty years had evolved into the SETI Project, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

The changeling worked there, massaging data, for two years, and then took an indefinite leave of absence, and a series of profound career shifts. It was an exotic dancer and part-time prostitute in Baltimore for a while, then a short-order cook back in Iowa City. As an old lady, it read palms on the county-fair circuit in the Midwest, and returned to California in its old Jimmy body to be a surf bum for a couple of seasons.

Sacrificing half its mass, it became a juggling dwarf with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, making contacts in the freak world. It met some interesting people, but they all seemed to be from Earth, no matter what they claimed.

It married the Bearded Lady, an even-tempered and sardonic hermaphrodite, and they lived together until 1996. The changeling left behind a hundred ounces of gold and no explanation, and became a student again.

After absorbing two stray dogs, it went back to the Jimmy template, but took the body past California and down to Australia. It studied marine science at Monash University, aware that most of what it had studied a half century before had been profoundly revised.

It had learned to trust certain feelings—memories buried so deep they were no longer memories—and one of those feelings was a special affinity for deep waters, and the Pacific.

-30-

Apia,
Samoa
, 2021

They decided it would be prudent to build a blast wall between the laboratory and the island, before starting the planetary environment experiment. If the Jupiter simulation blew up, they might still hear it in Fiji, but at least it wouldn't level Apia.

The wall was three meters thick at its base, curving up to one meter thickness at the top, ten meters high. It was a semicircle 150 meters in diameter, open to the sea. Local artists were hired to paint bright murals on the land side, but it was still an eyesore. The local
fono
was appeased by a schoolbus and two stained-glass windows for the Methodist church.

In the event of an explosion, all the force that would have gone landward should be diverted straight up or expended on destroying the blast wall, which was made of a foamed concrete that would boil off rather than break.

But they were months away from Jupiter. The original plan had been to start with Mercury, but the technical staff argued for doing Mars first. Two of the techs, Naomi and Moishe, had gone to Florida and been fitted with modified NASA space suits, and spent a few weeks training with them. They could comfortably enter the Martian environment and check out the situation. Mercury was marginal; their suits' air-conditioning could only handle it for short periods. It was logical to start the experiment under conditions that allowed continuous direct human contact.

So for the first couple of days, Naomi and Moishe walked around on their tenth-acre of "Mars," checking the place for leaks from the outside world, running tests on all the sensors and communication devices in the relatively clement environment.

Only relatively: the atmospheric pressure was pumped down to about a hundredth that of sea level, and there was no oxygen in their brew, just carbon dioxide with traces of nitrogen and argon. It was refrigerated down to minus one hundred degrees Centigrade, and cycled up to a balmy twenty-six, simulating the Martian equator during the summer. The ambient light was dim and pink, heavy on the ultraviolet.

The environment caused no serious problems, so Jan essentially repeated the three-minute Drake message over and over, tapping it out and blinking it in various wavelengths, in a pattern they would repeat in every environment: radio waves to microwaves through visible light to ultraviolet. They didn't go up into gamma or X rays, which they felt could be perceived as aggression.

In the original back-of-the-menu plan, they started with radio waves at a wavelength of one meter, and then went to a tenth of a meter, and then microwaves at one centimeter, and so forth, the seventh and eighth iterations being ultraviolet. But Jack pointed out that there was nothing special about the number ten, except for creatures who have ten tentacles or fingers, so to be nonprovincial about it they used 9.8696, pi squared, as the divisor.

The artifact tolerated Mars but didn't remark on it, so they pumped out the thin gruel of its atmosphere and substituted the hot vacuum of Mercury. A blazing artificial sun crawled across the sky while Jan's message patiently tapped and bleeped and blinked through the inferno, 600 degrees K., hot enough to melt lead.

But Mercury was a picnic spot compared to Venus. They stayed on the safe side of the blast wall and pumped in hot carbon dioxide, ninety atmospheres of it at 737 degrees K. As had been true with Mercury, the artifact's temperature rose at exactly the same rate as the ambient temperature. Its response to Jan's message was the same silence. They slowly brought the temperature and pressure back down to Samoan ambience, warm for North Americans, if fatally frigid for Venusians.

Some wiring and components had been stressed too much, and it hadn't been easy on the human components, either. So they took a few days off while replacement parts were assembled and shipped from various countries, and everybody took a short vacation over on the more old-fashioned island Savai'i.

After you'd seen the famous blowholes, there wasn't a lot to do unless you were a surfer with a death wish, so they mostly walked around enjoying the peacefulness. Some of them watched or played cricket. Jan engaged an old woman to teach her how to paint the traditional
siapo
cloth, and she spent a couple of afternoons doing that, making souvenir placemats for her grandchildren while listening to the hypnotic ocean crash, sipping the local fruit juice, not thinking about much. Trying not to.

They stayed at the venerable Safua Hotel, which was actually just a bunch of cottages around a central
fale,
where a buffet feast was offered for supper and an automated bar served as a social focus.

There was no cube on the island, by law, so the evening entertainment was homemade. Russ and Naomi played chess while most of the others listened to a pickup band of local kids who alternated modern music with traditional Samoan. They tried to teach everybody how to dance Samoan style, with little success except, surprisingly, Jack. He mumbled something about Hawaii when he was in the service.

After three days they got word that all the replacement equipment had arrived, and installation would be complete the next morning. So they took a light plane back to Apia—the ferry over having been a little rough for most of them—and with binoculars could occasionally see rays and sharks in the transparent water.