“You got five minutes?” On the way out, the changeling gave Vince a dollar and airily waved off the change.

“Rolling in dough,” Stuart said.

“Best crap shooter in San Guillermo.”

“Bull shooter.” They both laughed.

It actually took about ten minutes. From the center of town, Stuart led him down West Cherry Street.

“This is my house,” he said. “Want to come in?”

“Sure. Meet your parents.”

Stuart looked at his eyes, exactly level. “They’re gone. They won’t be home till tomorrow.”

The changeling returned his gaze. “I don’t have to be in Cedar Rapids till tomorrow. Missed my train.”

The courting ritual was brief. Stuart raided his parents’ liquor cabinet and fixed them bourbons that were much too large and strong. Just fuel to the changeling, of course, but if Stuart had been older, it might have killed his sexual desire.

It didn’t, of course. He lurched up the stairs, dragging the changeling by the hand, into a bedroom that was not at all boyish. No models or posters, just hundreds of books in nailed-together bookcases.

The changeling had no idea of what the protocol was, still being ignorant of heterosexual protocol. So once in the bedroom it just did what Stuart did, one permutation after another. It narrowed the diameter of its penis for his comfort, remembering pain in the asylum.

Afterward, the boy slept in its arms, snoring drunkenly. It analyzed the genetic material he had left behind. He had a problem with cholesterol, and should take it easy on the banana splits. Also diabetes in his future. Maybe just as well he didn’t want to reproduce.

25

Apia, Samoa, 2021

There was no way they could have kept it secret. For one thing, a longboat crew had been practicing less than a kilometer away. They heard the explosion when the laser punched through the wall of the building full of vacuum. All thirty-four were still staring when the side of the building collapsed and there was a huge spray of water.

From their angle they couldn’t see the artifact. But the building was continually monitored by an automatic extreme-telephoto camera that CNN had mounted on a hillside on Mount Vaia, overlooking the bay. It caught the building’s collapse, and zoomed in on the artifact rising leisurely back up to its original position.

No one on Samoa knew that there was a hasty conference in Washington five minutes later, the president pulled out of a late-night poker game to help decide whether to vaporize their island. Somebody was disingenuous enough to point out that it really wouldn’t be an act of war, since there were no hostilities between the two nations, and one of them would no longer exist after the explosion. The president’s response to that was characteristically curt, and he went back to his game after demanding that a summary of events be on his table in the morning.

It would be one short page. Poseidon wasn’t talking, and the NASA team abided by their agreement.

They ran the tape over and over, along with the sensor data, and on the hundredth viewing they knew little more than on the first. As the laser cranked up to 72 percent of full force, the temperature of the artifact began to increase, all over. When it was 1.2 degrees Centigrade above the ambient temperature, it rose diagonally off its cradle at 18.3 centimeters per second, travelling at a 45-degree angle until it was over the laser’s output tube. Then it fell to the floor. It was like dropping an apartment building on a wineglass. The floor didn’t resist.

The part under the cradle didn’t collapse; it was independently supported. It probably would have crumbled if the artifact had fallen on it, too. But it seemed only interested in the laser. When it came back up, it settled into the cradle as gently as a feather.

The researchers had to study the CNN record of that part, their ruggedized camera lying ruggedly on the bottom of the bay, its backup power source sending a record of swirling silt. Exactly 1.55 seconds after the splash, the artifact rose back out of the water, still at a constant rate of 18.3 centimeters per second, and settled back into its cradle. The scene was unchanged when Russ and Jan pedaled up a couple of minutes later.

While a work crew nervously reconstructed the artifact room and its protective surround, a separate NASA crew—at least they wore identically new NASA coveralls—retrieved the drowned laser and power source and analyzed the damage. It was profound.

Jack Halliburton didn’t normally walk into cottage 7 unannounced. The crowd of nine who were sitting around the table piled high with reports and lunch remains fell silent when he came through the door.

Russ was one of the most surprised. “Jack. You want a sandwich?”

He shook his head and sat down on the chair offered. “Get me the output curve for the laser just before the artifact fell on it.”

Moishe Rosse, who had become their laser guy, picked up two cylindrical keyboards and started surfing, the big TV acting as a monitor.

“It’s a simple step function,” Russ said. “Turns off.”

“I know. I want to know exactly when and why.”

“Good luck with the why.” The innards of the power source were deeply classified; they used it as a black box that always delivered what you asked.

“They told me a little something.” A familiar graph appeared on the screen, the output of the laser slightly rising and then falling off abruptly. The abscissa of the graph was ticked off in microseconds.

“Give me a split screen and let’s see what happens on the real-time tape a couple of microseconds before it turns off.”

The artifact was slowly rising, two millimeters per microsecond. The image rolled around slowly—the slow-motion record of violent dislocation—when the laser beam slid under the artifact and punched through the opposite wall.

“Hold it. Stop it right there.” The frame’s time was 06:39:23.705. The graph showed the power shutting off at 06:39:23.810.

“More than a tenth of a second. So?” Russ gestured at the screen. “What did they tell you?” They had assumed that either the laser had shut off automatically, via some internal safety circuit, or the violence of the implosion had done the job. The feds weren’t talking.

Jack was silent, staring, for a long moment. “What evidently happened,” he said, “at 23.810, was that all the plutonium in that reactor turned to lead.”

“Turned to lead?”

“Yeah. That’s why it stopped working. You can’t get blood out of a turnip.”

“Good God,” Moishe said. “Where did all that energy go?”

“At a first guess, inside our little friend.”

“How many grams of plutonium?” Russ said.

“They’re still not talking. But they acted nervous as hell. I don’t think they have grams on their collective mind. I think it’s tons, kilo-tons, megatons.”

“TNT equivalent,” Russ said.

Jack nodded. “They want to evacuate the island.”

“Megatons?” Russ said, his eyes widening. “What have we been sitting on?”

“Like I say, they’re not talking numbers. Besides, I have a suspicion that they’re also not talking about the thing blowing up. I think they want to be free to nuke it to atoms if it looks dangerous.”

“ ‘If’!”

Jack looked around the room. “I suspect we’ll lose some of our crew here, too. Can’t say I’d blame anyone for leaving.”

Moishe broke the silence. “What, when it’s just getting interesting?”

They weren’t going to move 200,000 Samoans just by saying “You’re in danger; you have to leave.” For one thing, the “independent” in Independent Samoa applied mostly to America. Anybody who wanted to live under Uncle Sam’s thumb could take the ferry to American Samoa.