She laughed. "I used to know some of the names. My dad had a telescope."

"You said they moved down to Florida to watch the moon rockets." She nodded in the darkness. "And all the other ones, the shuttle and all. But the Apollo rockets were the biggies-Saturn V's. Deafening: you could feel the noise rattling your bones. And dazzling, the one they did at night."

"That was the first one?"

"No, the last. The first one was Apollo 11, in 1969."

"Oh, yeah. I slept through it, my mother said. I was not quite two."

"I was twelve," she said, refilling her gla.s.s. "The first time I ever tasted champagne. Still makes me think of it."

They stared out over the project into the night, in companionable silence. The dim yellow security lights attracted bugs; small birds swooped out of the darkness. "This may be even bigger," she said. "It almost certainly will be."

"Even if it turns out to be homegrown," he said, "we'll have to totally rethink physics and chemistry."

"Chemistry is is physics," she said automatically. "Tell you what. If this thing turns out to be terrestrial in origin, I'll buy you the most expensive bottle of champagne in the Honolulu duty-free." physics," she said automatically. "Tell you what. If this thing turns out to be terrestrial in origin, I'll buy you the most expensive bottle of champagne in the Honolulu duty-free."

They clicked gla.s.ses. "If not, I'll buy you two."

"What, you're that skeptical?"

"h.e.l.l, no; I agree with you. And I've got an expense account."

A test area, about four inches square, was marked off by tape on the artifact's side, about midway. An electron microscope and its positron equivalent could be easily brought to bear on the area. They built a forced-draft hood over it, to suck away and a.n.a.lyze poisonous vapors.

First they measured it pa.s.sively. It had an albedo of exactly 1.0-it reflected all light that fell on it, in every wavelength. Optically, it presented a perfect curve, down to 1/200 of a wave of mercury light, a surface impossible for a human optician to duplicate.

Although it looked like metal, it felt like silk; it wasn't cold to the touch. It was not a conductor of heat, nor, as far as pa.s.sive testing could tell, of electricity.

Then they went to work, trying to dent it. Sc.r.a.pe it, corrode it, chip it, burn it-do anything to make the artifact acknowledge the existence of humanity.

When it was still underwater, Poseidon divers had tried a diamond-tipped drill on it, to no effect. But now they rolled in a huge mining drill: it used a 200-horsepower electric motor to spin its diamond tip at 10,000 r.p.m., with more than a ton of force behind it.

The scream it made was too much for the scientists' earplugs; they had to rig a remote control for it. At the maximum push, just before the diamond tip evaporated, it shattered all the useless windows and ruined the positron microscope beyond repair.

The electron microscope worked, though, and all it showed was a film of oxides from the metallic part of the ruined drill bit. When they cleaned that off, even at the highest magnification there was no difference between the test square and the undrilled surface next to it: a perfect mirror.

-17-.

Bataan, Philippines, 7 December 1941

Many of Jimmy's boot camp compadres steamed across the Pacific with him, to join the Fourth Marine Regiment in Shanghai. They arrived in November 1941, and barely had time to get their land legs before they were ordered to sail again, this time for the Philippines, a.s.signed to provide beach defense for Corregidor.

The naval command knew it was only a matter of time before j.a.pan attacked American forces in the Pacific. America had severed trade ties with j.a.pan in July, and frozen her a.s.sets in American banks. The Navy and the Army set about redistributing their meager forces to places that seemed most vulnerable to attack. That included the Philippines, which blocked j.a.panese access to the East Indies.

The Fourth Regiment set up shop in Corregidor and sent a detachment, including Jimmy, south to the small base at Bataan. They called it a "s.h.i.t a.s.signment," one step farther away from the amenities of Manila, but they didn't know how terminally bad it was going to become.

When the j.a.panese hit Pearl Harbor on the morning of the seventh (which was the eighth on Jimmy's side of the international date line), there was an immediate air raid alert in Manila and American fighters and bombers scrambled into the air to do battle. The timing was off, though; there were no j.a.panese in sight. They landed again, and when, a few hours later, the j.a.panese did did come screaming out of the sun, there was no warning for the planes on the ground. come screaming out of the sun, there was no warning for the planes on the ground.

Bataan and Corregidor were constantly bombed and strafed, with little or no help from the air. Meanwhile, j.a.panese land forces were coming ash.o.r.e to the north and south, in Luzon and Mindanao.

The original War Plan, before Pearl Harbor, had called for all American forces to go south to Bataan, and maintain a holding action there, delaying the j.a.panese advance into the East Indies. Instead, General MacArthur moved his forces up to meet the j.a.panese where they were landing.

MacArthur had at his disposal 120,000 Filipino troops, most of them reservists who had never fired a shot, and one-tenth that many Americans. They had the j.a.panese outnumbered but not outgunned, and the defensive move was an unmitigated disaster. He went back to the original plan on 27 December, and within a week all the northern Luzon forces were sharing Bataan's limited resources with Jimmy. They were soon joined by thousands of Filipino civilians, fleeing the invaders. In two weeks, everyone's food ration was cut in half; in February, they were reduced to a thousand calories per day, mostly from rice. They got a little tough meat from the slaughter of starving horses and mules.

Defeat inevitable, MacArthur and other top bra.s.s were evacuated to the safety of Australia, while the j.a.panese continued to pound the Bataan Peninsula.

In April, the j.a.panese ground troops moved down to take over. On the eighth, General Wainwright concentrated all his viable forces for a last-ditch effort on Corregidor, and on the nineteenth formally surrendered the starvelings left behind on Bataan.

The changeling had watched this all with interest. It had been killed twice by bombs, but in the chaos it was easy to rea.s.semble at night and show up as a lucky survivor. It had mimicked the weight loss of the men around it, Jimmy going from a healthy 180 pounds to a haggard 130.

When they heard about the surrender, some of the men decided to chance it and try to swim across two miles of shark-infested water to Corregidor. The changeling could have done that with ease, of course, temporarily becoming one of the infesting sharks, but decided against it. Corregidor was doomed, too; why bother?

His friend Hugh, who had been with him since boot camp, told Jimmy that he was tempted to swim even though he knew he wouldn't make it; he couldn't swim two miles even if he were in good shape, and the water a placid swimming pool. "I got a feeling," he said, "that drowndin' ain't nothin' compared to what the f.u.c.kin' j.a.ps are gonna do to us."

That would turn out to be true for almost everyone but the changeling. They were about to begin a forced march from Bataan to a concentration camp some two weeks away, under broiling sun without food or water. The orders that the j.a.panese had been given in Manila said "any American captive who is unable to continue marching all the way to the concentration camp should be put to death." And they might be the lucky ones.

The changeling and Hugh and a dozen others were in a communications shack when the j.a.panese came. Five young soldiers with bayoneted rifles crowded into the small room and started screaming. They got louder and angrier, and the changeling realized that they expected their captives to speak j.a.panese. What else didn't they know?

By gestures they got across the idea that the men were supposed to take off their clothes. One was too slow, and a soldier prodded him in the b.u.t.tock with the bayonet, which caused an unusual amount of blood and hysterical laughter.

"Oh my G.o.d," Hugh whispered. "They're going to kill us all."

"Try to stay calm," the changeling said without opening its mouth. "They'll go after people who draw attention to themselves." As drill sergeants did.

They rummaged through the pile of clothing, and one of them found a j.a.panese coin. He held it up and started screaming at a man.

"That ain't mine," he said. "They told us to get rid of all that s.h.i.t." A soldier behind him clubbed him with his rifle b.u.t.t at the base of the skull, and he went down like a tree. The soldier clubbed him twice more, but stopped at a sharp command.

The one who seemed to be in charge screamed at the captives, repeatedly gesturing at their fallen comrade, who was bleeding from both ears and twitching. Then they left, as suddenly as they'd appeared.

A man kneeled by his friend and gently turned him over. Only the whites of his eyes showed. He drooled saliva and blood and something like water. "Cerebrospinal fluid," the changeling said.

"He gonna die?"

"It's very serious." The changeling sorted through the pile and found its fatigues and put them on. "Better get dressed," it said to the man holding his friend. "We want to all look the same to them."

"Jimmy's right," Hugh said, finding his own clothes. "They prob'ly gonna kill us all, but I ain't gonna go first."

While they were dressing, a new j.a.panese soldier stepped into the doorway. He had a clean uniform and no rifle. He pointed at the naked man on the floor. "Bury him," he said in English.

"He ain't dead," his friend protested.

"Oh." The officer unsnapped a holster and pulled out a Nambu pistol. He bent over and put the muzzle in the man's mouth and fired. The noise was loud in the small room. Blood and brains and chips of bone scattered across the concrete floor. "Bury him now." He holstered the pistol and walked out.

The man who had been holding his friend started after the officer. Two others tried to restrain him, but he broke free. At the door, though, he sagged and just stared out. "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," he said. "f.u.c.king j.a.p b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

-18-.

Oswiecim, Poland, 7 December 1941

While the changeling was enjoying the hospitality of the j.a.panese, the chameleon was helping to oversee the construction of Birkenau, a new extermination camp four kilometers from Auschwitz. He was about to meet his soulmate, Josef Mengele, for the second time.

The chameleon had a good instinct for the winds of war, and so had moved to Germany in 1937, and took the ident.i.ty of a young right-wing doctor in Frankfurt. He was a perfect Aryan, blond and blue-eyed and athletic.

In 1938, he enlisted in the n.a.z.i Schutzstaffel, the SS "Black-shirts," where he first met Mengele, also a young doctor. The randomness of war separated them, though; Mengele served as a medical officer in France and Russia, where he was wounded and decorated. The chameleon wanted to be in on the invasion of Poland, where he operated on a lot of people but saw no action to speak of.

In 1939 the chameleon found a position more amenable to his talents. He was deployed to Brandenburg for "Aktion T4," the n.a.z.i euthenasia project. People who had physical deformities, mental r.e.t.a.r.dation, epilepsy, senile disorders, and a host of other conditions that made them inferior to the Aryan ideal were allowed "mercy killing." In other places, this was done by more or less painless injections. In Brandenburg, they pioneered the use of the gas chamber disguised as a shower room.

Hitler terminated Aktion T4 in August of 1941, because of public outcry after an influential bishop disclosed the truth of the project in a broadcast sermon. The chameleon was transferred to Auschwitz, where his expertise with gas chambers was valued, as well as his prior service in Poland.

He didn't like Poland at all. Brandenburg was a civilized university town, with sophisticated food and drink and vice. Auschwitz had nothing but subhumans destined for rightful extermination. Granted, the difference between human and subhuman was moot to him.

The chameleon was pleased when, in May 1943, his old acquaintance from Frankfurt was a.s.signed-by Himmler, no less-to be chief women's doctor, and then was appointed chief doctor for both Auschwitz and Birkenau. The chameleon became one of Mengele's a.s.sistant surgeons.

By this time the Final Solution was in full swing, boxcars arriving regularly, crowded with miserable castouts: gypsies, communists, h.o.m.os.e.xuals, and, mostly, Jews. Himmler had ordered Birkenau built with a capacity for 100,000 prisoners, more than three times the size of Auschwitz proper; its gas chambers and crematoria could destroy 1,500 people in one day. It was all terror and chaos, and Mengele loved it.

One of the duties that doctors shared was to be "choosers," who stood in front of the doors when the boxcars were opened, and on the basis of visual inspection ordered people to go to the right, for the work camp, or the left, for extermination. A lot of the doctors detested this detail, but Mengele loved it. He even showed up to watch when it wasn't his turn, an arresting sight in his immaculate uniform, mirror-bright boots, white gloves, and riding crop.

One reason he liked to observe the crowds staggering out of the boxcars was to make sure that no twins were separated or sent to extermination before he could make use of them. Twins comprised his main area of research, and the chameleon helped him in this quest for knowledge.

Mengele's interest was twofold: He wondered whether there might be some way to induce properly Aryan women to have twins, so the Master Race could grow at twice the usual rate, and he also did simple environmental experiments that were a perversion of "nature versus nurture"-he would leave one twin alone while he stressed the other one to death with starvation, poison, asphyxiation, mutilation, or whatever occurred to him, and then, after killing the control twin as well, usually with an injection of phenol to the heart, he and his a.s.sistants (including the chameleon) would conduct parallel autopsies, noting internal changes that might be related to the cause of death.

It was not exact science, and perhaps the motivation for it had little to do with anything more exalted than taking pleasure in control, torture, murder, and dissection. Mengele loved it, smiling and chatting all the while.

The chameleon was amazed. In tens of thousands of years, he couldn't remember having met a human being so similar to himself. Could Mengele be another one of whatever he was? When the time was right, he might find out by killing him. Meanwhile, he just enjoyed his company.

Mengele appreciated the chameleon's skill in underwater autopsies, which others found unnerving. When they killed people by asphyxiation, in the high-alt.i.tude simulation chamber, they put the corpses immediately underwater for dissection. An observer watched for telltale bubbles, to see which parts of the body retained the most air. There was a lot in the brain.

Most of Mengele's "scientific" records were destroyed as the Soviets advanced on Auschwitz in 1945. The high-alt.i.tude work survived, though, and eventually informed s.p.a.ce research in both Russia and the United States.

When the Soviet soldiers marched through the gates of Birkenau, the chameleon was one of thousands of starving Jews. His pal Mengele escaped because, out of vanity, he had opted out of the SS practice of having your blood type tattooed on your arm.

The chameleon proceeded to track him down, keeping his Jewish ident.i.ty and joining the Mossad under Issad Harel in the 1950s. He left the Israeli Secret Service after ten years, with a few tidbits lifted from the Mengele file, and met him just off a riverbank near Enseada de Bertioga, Brazil, on 7 February 1979.

He was a fit old man of sixty-eight, swimming. The chameleon changed back into his 1941 n.a.z.i appearance when he waded out to say h.e.l.lo. The old murderer's eyes got very wide before his head vanished under the water. Mortal, after all.

-19-.

Apia, Samoa, 2020

Everything else having failed to impress the artifact, the NASA folks appealed to their opposite numbers in the American military.

For more than fifty years there had been an international agreement forbidding weapons of ma.s.s destruction in orbit. That didn't mean you couldn't build them on the Earth, of course, and wait for the law to change.

HESL, the High Energy Spalling Laser, was not technically a "weapon of ma.s.s destruction" anyhow. It was designed to vaporize a small target, like a tank or a ballistic missile or even a limo with the right person in it, from orbit. What kept it from being orbited, for the time being, was the powerful nuclear reactor that powered up its zap.

The machine had been designed to just fit inside the new s.p.a.ce shuttle's cargo bay, which meant it was way too large for the protective sh.e.l.l around the artifact. It took six weeks to disa.s.semble it and rebuild a structure large enough to house the weapon.

Inevitably, it caused some friction between Russ and Jan.

Russ sometimes reacted to stress by eating. He got to number 7 a half hour before their noon meeting, and while brewing tea orchestrated a huge sandwich. Ham and beef and salami slices alternating with goat and cheddar cheese, sliced pickle, and tomato and lettuce. They were out of pickled beet slices; he put them on the list. One slice of bread was slathered with mustard and mayonnaise, the other with peanut b.u.t.ter. He compressed the thing down to manageable proportions and sliced it in two diagonally.

"You're not going to eat all that by yourself, are you?" Jan was watching from the door.

"I'm willing to share." He put half of it on another plate and carried both to the table.

"Want tea?" She poured two mugs and brought them over.

She inspected the sandwich carefully and removed the pickle. "We've modified the thing so the first shot will be a tenth of the normal minimum power." She sliced a corner off the sandwich and nibbled on it. "Peanut b.u.t.ter?"

"So that would be about a thousand megajoules?"

"More like one and a half times that. We tried it out on a big block of stone down at the quarry."

"I'm surprised I didn't hear the explosion," he said around bites. "Peanut b.u.t.ter's the healthiest part of the sandwich."

"The engineers took precautions. It was swaddled in a ton of some kind of protective cloth. I mean, it is is a spalling laser." a spalling laser."

"So it spalled impressively?"

She nodded. "Blew it to flinders. Then blew out a piece of the quarry wall behind it, two hundred meters away."

"How long did it go?"

"Half a microsecond burst, they said."

He shook his head. "It's too big a leap. That must be a thousand times the energy flux we've brought to bear on the thing."

"About eight hundred, I think. But that laser didn't even warm it up." That was true; they'd tried a twenty-million-joule industrial laser on it, and the thermal sensors hadn't budged. The thing seemed to be an infinite heat sink.