Camouflage

—20—

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.

Muese, one of the native Samoan techs who had stayed behind, had dug a deep fire pit on the beach between the blast wall and the laboratory, and was roasting a pig, buried wrapped in taro leaves. He made a shallow pit in the afternoon and wrapped yams and potatoes in foil, and put a rack over the coals to grill chicken and fish.

Jack provided tubs of ice with drinks and a keg of beer, and invited all forty-eight employees of the project to the luau. There was no special reason to have a party, but no reason not to have one, either. Work would resume in earnest the next day.

Just before sundown, Muese dug up the pig and spent a half hour carving it, while others tended to the chicken and slabs of tuna and masimasi. The automatic security floodlights came on, less romantic than guttering torches, but good light to cook and eat by.

After the sumptuous meal, a group got together by the fire with guitars, a harmonica, a fiddle, and a tin whistle, and played improbable Irish and Welsh music, popular in the States. Russ and Jan sat apart with a bottle of cold white Burgundy wrapped in a wet towel.

“So what happens next,” Russ said, “if we get out to Jupiter and still don’t have anything?”

She shrugged. “More invasive procedures, I suppose. Jack must have ideas. He’s not committing himself.”

Russ finished off his glass but didn’t pour another. “He has more than ideas. He has an offer. From China.”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“Yeah. I only know because I was in the office when the machine decrypted it. He couldn’t tell me not to watch.”

“Let me guess. They want to bury the thing in chop suey.”

“Not even close. Chop suey’s American, anyhow.”

“I know. What is it?”

“They’ll cosponsor putting the artifact into orbit. Split the cost of a cluster of four Long March rockets.”

“And once in orbit?”

“Take the big laser up with it, I guess. Try it at a hundred percent, safely off Earth.”

She shook her head. “Remind me to be somewhere else when it’s overhead.”

“I think he can be talked out of it. It would mean taking government money.” He refilled both of their glasses. “We have to come up with something else, though.”

She stared at the containment dome. “We could just send it into the future.”

“First we build a time machine.”

“I mean one day at a time. Just put a fence around it and wait for science to catch up with it.” She took a sip, still staring. “Suspend the project for ten, fifty, a hundred years.”

“Jack would die first.”

She nodded. “As would we all.”