Camouflage

—19—

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 mass 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 mass 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 space shuttle’s cargo bay, which meant it was way too large for the protective shell around the artifact. It took six weeks to disassemble 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 butter. 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 butter?”

“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 butter’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 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.

“What if we destroy it?”

“I think we’ll be lucky to get enough ablation for an absorption spectrum.”

“And if you don’t, you crank it up to full power?”

“Only by degrees. We’ll be cautious, Russ.”

“Oh, I know you will.” He took a big bite and concentrated on chewing it. “I’m mainly … I’m just worried about the first shot. If that doesn’t affect it, it can handle another factor of ten.”

“You anthropomorphize it. Brave little spaceship versus the monstrous military-industrial complex.”

“You’ve been hanging around too much with Jack. Speaking of anthropomorphizing. He’s angry with the thing.”

“Well, it’s resisting his advances.” She looked at him steadily. “He doesn’t like that.”

Russ couldn’t repress a smile. “He doesn’t, eh?” Jack’s attraction to the astrobiologist had been immediately obvious.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m a grandmother.”

“But not very grandmotherly.”

“Don’t you start. I’m ten years older than you.”

Eight or nine, Russ thought, but didn’t press it. “You want something besides the sandwich?”

“Pepcid. I brought my own.”