Camouflage (20 page)

Jan and Russ looked at each other, and Naomi chuckled.

"The Zipf slope is minus one," Russ said quietly, "so the message isn't just noise." Dolphin calls and human languages generate a slope of minus one; it can't occur by chance.

"The Shannon entropy is scary," Jan said. "It's twenty-sixth order."

"Wow," the changeling said, excitement growing. Human languages only had ninth-order complexity. Dolphins were fourth order. "So it didn't make up its own version of the Drake message?"

"We hoped for that," Russ said, "but it doesn't meet the first requirement: the two primes that would tell us the proportions of the information matrix."

"We did the obvious," Jan said, still testing.

The changeling stared at her. "Assumed the matrix would be the same size as yours, or the product of two other primes. But that didn't work."

"Not quite," Russell said. "We finally figured out that it's
three
primes multiplied together. That sort of ups the ante."

Jan nodded and leaned forward, elbows on the table. "You know, this organization is only weakly hierarchical. That is, Russ and Jack Halliburton call the shots; direct and define what the rest of us are going to do. At the working level, well, it's pretty chaotic. That's the way we want it.

"This isn't like some R&D enterprise, where you can assign duties and work to a timetable. We're all wandering in the dark, in a sense, going on intuition.

"Even old people like Russ and me know that education and experience can get in the way of intuition. When we hire people at your level, it's with the understanding that, although much of your work will be routine, there's always room for your input. The woman you may replace was always coming up with off-the-wall ideas, and sometimes they were helpful."

"Why did she leave?" the changeling asked.

"Illness in the family, her daughter. She might be back once things settle down, but it looks like a long watch."

"Meanwhile, we need someone like you," Russ said. "You're not likely to ... this is embarrassing. But the woman
she
replaced had to leave to have a baby. Likewise, we're about to lose our receptionist to motherhood."

"I can't have children," the changeling said, not adding
except by fission.
It reddened and touched its lips.

"We didn't mean to pry," Jan said, giving Russ a sharp look.

"Of course not, no." He looked like a man who desperately needed some papers to shuffle through. Instead, he studied the inside of his empty coffee cup.

"Oh, I'm not sensitive about it," the changeling said. "It's only biology. Simplifies my life.

"If I do get the job, what would the job be, at this stage? It doesn't sound like gas chromatography or spectroscopy are on the menu right now."

"Not now, not anymore." Russ took the cup over to the coffee urn and filled it. "Your CV mentioned cryptography."

"One course and some reading."A lot more, actually, in another life. When it had studied computer science at MIT, everyone was interested in it.

Jan tapped twice on her notebook and studied the screen. "It's not on your transcript."

"I just sat in. My advisor vetoed it as frivolous. She would've killed me if she'd known I was doing that rather than advanced differential equations."

"Been there," Jan said.

"Might have been a lucky choice," Russ said. "It's what you'll be doing for awhile, I think.

"With this pesky data string from the artifact, we're dividing into two groups. One, the one you'd be in, will try to decipher the message. The other's keeping after the artifact with a series of more complex messages, along the lines of the first one. That'll be Jan's group."

"You're keeping it in house? Keeping the government out?"

"Absolutely. We're a profit-making corporation, and there just might be an obscene profit in whatever this thing has to say. Better be, to justify what Jack's sunk into it."

"If we were in the States," Jan said, "the government might be able to step in on grounds of national security. But there's not much they can do here. Jack's even a Samoan citizen."

"You do have a NASA team," the changeling said.

"I'm on it," Jan said. "And we used NASA space suits, and they got us the use of the military laser that made things so interesting a couple of months ago. But our agreements with them are carefully drawn up, and the deal with the individual employees, well, it's kind of mercenary."

"It gives them all a cut of the profits if everyone behaves," Russ said, "and nobody gets anything if anyone leaks anything. Not to mention the pack of lawyers that will descend to worry the flesh off his bones and then crack the bones."

"Something like that will be in your nondisclosure statement, too. Jack is fair, I think, but not flexible." Jan tapped on her notebook again. "Obviously, I think you're hired. Have to pass it by Jack, who crashed a few hours ago and probably won't be making decisions until tomorrow morning. But the two of us and Naomi really do all the tech and administrative hires."

"So I just stay by the phone?"

Russ shook his head. "It's not that big an island. We'll find you."

"You can run, but you can't hide," Naomi said, and smiled.

- 37-

Apia, Samoa, 13 June 2021

Trying to crack the artifact's code was the most interesting thing the changeling had ever done. If it could just be locked up in a room for awhile with the string of ones and zeros—and a data line to the outside—it could decipher the thing by itself. Whether that would take a week, a year, or a millennium, it didn't know. Or much care.

But the others were fighting the clock. Jack wanted the thing cracked while it was still news, and so if the lid stayed on it, they would announce the communications breakthrough one day, and the translation the next.

To help guard the secret, he upped the ante: there was a million-dollar bonus to the person or team who broke the code, as long as its existence stayed secret. Otherwise, the prize went down to a hundred thousand.

The changeling wondered what the man's logic was, or whether logic had anything to do with it. Why was he so sure there would be money in this? If the message just said, "Hi; here are some pretty pictures in return," and gave up nothing more revolutionary than what had been given it—which was what the changeling and most of its coworkers expected—then how was Poseidon going to make a dime off it? T-shirts and action figures?

When the changeling broached that question to Naomi, she squinted and put a finger to her lips. "Ours is not to reason why," she whispered.

The number of ones and zeros was 31,433, which was the product of a prime and a prime squared: 17x43x43. So it might be seventeen squares, each forty-three dots and dashes on a side, or forty-three rectangles, seventeen by forty-three, arranged in various ways. Or just one line of 31,433 bits of information.

Their computers could marshal powerful decryption tools, and no doubt if the government got into it, they would have much more sophisticated ones. But the assumption had to be that this was not a
hidden
message, at least not hidden on purpose.

This was where intuition came in, or maybe plain dumb luck. Twenty people were working on it, and they had twenty large flatscreens and five 1.5-meter cubes, for visualizing in three dimensions. Find something that looks like a coherent message, or at least part of one. The rooms they worked in looked like crossword-puzzle nightmares, white and black squares and cubes in constant chaotic dance.

The changeling "felt" something—it was not logic, certainly not numbers, but a sense that the thing really was trying to be clear. It was just so inhuman that humans couldn't get it.

Maybe the changeling had become too human itself, to get it.

People hungry for the million were grinding themselves down on coffee and speed and no sleep, so Russ declared a "snow day." Everybody stay home and sleep or otherwise relax. Jack had to go along with it. After five days, people were getting a little crazy.

The changeling spent its snow day walking up the hill with Russ. They agreed not to talk about the project at all.

"Up the hill" was the steep four-kilometer hike to Vailima, the mansion where Robert Louis Stevenson had spent his last years. Russ had been there a couple of times, and so was "native guide" to Rae.

The changeling probably knew more about Robert Louis Stevenson's writing than everybody else on the project combined, by virtue of its English major some lives before. Rut it played dumb and let Russ educate it.

It decided that it had read
Treasure Island,
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and nothing else by Stevenson. So as they trudged up the hill, Russ told her the stories of
Kidnapped
and
The Master of Ballantrae,
and some of the complex story of Stevenson's life on the island.

The changeling knew most of it, but was a good listener. How the great writer had come out here seeking relief from tuberculosis, and found not a cure, but a relaxed and relaxing style of life. He, or his wife, Fanny, imported a lot of things that made Vailima a transplanted corner of civilized Scotland: fine linens and china, a good piano that was rarely played, walls lined with books—even a fireplace, in case the Earth changed its orbit.

It would be a better story if Stevenson had written any of his classics here, but those were behind him. He did write five books, and threw great parties, for the Samoans as well as the Anglos and Europeans. He found people to love, a condition that Fanny may have been resigned to before they moved, and his last years were full of joy and ease.

The changeling was not seducing Russ; it was just being there. But that was sufficient. Russ had never been immune to attractive women, and he was at a stage in life that was like Stevenson's, minus wife and illness, plus good genes and all the benefits of twenty-first-century medicine. His body and mind were young enough that a liaison with a thirty-year-old woman was not ridiculous to either of them. As they pounded uphill together, sweating and laughing, stopping for a beer at a little joint, the difference in age became a novelty rather than a barrier.

They walked through Stevenson's mansion, shoes off, with a teen-aged Samoan guide who hadn't read much of the author's work, but knew everything about daily life in the mansion, and talked as if Stevenson had just stepped out for awhile, perhaps riding down to Apia to see what the latest freighter had brought in, or joining the native workers in farm chores or clearing brush—she claimed that in spite of his physical problems, he took special pleasure in working to exhaustion, because afterward he could sit and look at the beauty of the forest and the distant sea, and truly enjoy it, his busy brain stilled. After the guide left, Russ said that he hoped it was true, but doubted it.

Not for the first time, the changeling wished it had discovered humans before 1932. It would have been interesting to watch the centuries go by; see how people changed.

After the tour, they climbed farther up the mountain, to where Stevenson and Fanny were buried. On his stone, the familiar inscription:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig my grave and let me lie;

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I lay me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me;

"Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill."

"I wonder if he really meant that," the changeling said. " 'Gladly die.' Was he that ill? Or maybe he was talking about the natural order of things."

"He was gravely ill," Russ said, "but it wasn't in Samoa. He wrote it in California, a long time before he got here and his health improved."

The changeling took his hand and they looked at the stone for a few silent moments. "So what do you want to do for the rest of your snow day?" it said.

"I don't know. We could build a fort and have a snowball fight."

It laughed. "I have a better idea." About a kilometer back down the hill was a quaint twentieth-century hotel, where they spent a couple of hours under a ticking ceiling fan, making love and then quietly sharing their life stories. Russ did most of the talking, but then he thought he had lived a lot longer.

They got back to the project site just before dark, and for appearances' sake, went their separate ways, Russ going downtown for dinner and the changeling getting a sandwich at the beach concession.

The changeling assumed that their secret wouldn't be a secret for long; in fact, it was out before they left their hotel room, since the clerk had recognized Russ. On Samoa, gossip is a varsity sport, a high art. The clerk had a cousin who worked at the project, and every native employee knew some version of the story before Russ and Rae came down the hill. Everyone else would know in a day or two.

But they wouldn't know it all. Russell couldn't sleep that night. He liked women but was married to work; it had been almost thirty years since the last time he would have called himself "in love." But there was no other word for what he felt for Rae. He couldn't get her out of his mind. How lucky he was; how much this day had changed his life.

He didn't know the half of it.

-38-

Los Angeles, California, 25 June 2021

The fingerprints betrayed the changeling. The real Rae Archer had her driver's license renewed, and her fingerprints went into the Homeland Security database.

In a fraction of a second, a computer flagged them as identical to a set that was in a CIA database. The CIA thanked Homeland Security for the information and said they would take it from here.

Everybody working on the Poseidon project had unwittingly provided latent prints to a Samoan dishwasher who was employed by the CIA. When the CIA found that there were two Rae Archers with identical prints, one of them employed in a supersecret foreign scientific project, they went into high gear.