7

Apia, Samoa, 2019

They had a lot of company when two tugs began to tow the artifact toward the beach. Three military helicopters jockeyed for space with six from news organizations.

It was a perplexing sight. The artifact wasn’t visible even from directly overhead, though the shroud over it had been removed. The titanium-mesh net that carried its mass kept it suspended a meter above the ocean floor, and the water was perfectly transparent.

A newsie photographer with diving gear jumped from a helicopter skid and went down beside it, and saw a sand-colored drape over a long cigar-shaped object. The drape fluttered once and revealed a shiny mirror surface. The mesh of the net was too fine for the newsie to reach through and expose it, but it was moving slowly enough for her to swim alongside and offer pictures and a running commentary, amusing for its lack of content, as the artifact hit the sandy floor and crunched through dead coral on its way to shore. It made a groove a meter deep in the sand, and the cables pulling it yanked tight and thrummed with the force of moving it.

When the tugs came gently aground, Greg and Naomi dragged a heavy cable through the light surf and dove with it, giving the newsie something to photograph. They cut through the mesh with a torch and pulled back the drape while the other two engineers worked their way down the cable with a large metal collar.

The collar, a meter round, supported four thick bolts. They slipped it over the shiny metal thing, and drove the bolts down with an air hammer, deafening in the water. When they were done, they took out earplugs and waved at the dazed newsie, and swam back along the cable.

A deeply anchored winch on the far side of the concrete slab growled into life, and the cable started to crawl out of the sea. When the cable sang taut, the growl increased in pitch and volume. People around the large machine could smell ozone and hot metal as it strained. But it won; the cable inched its way up the pad.

The artifact wormed slowly up through the surf. You wouldn’t have to know anything about physics or engineering to see that there was something fundamentally strange going on—the thing’s unearthly heaviness as it sledged through the damp sand; its mirror brightness.

The barrier of bright yellow DO NOT CROSS ribbon may have saved some lives. The cable started to fray where it was attached to the collar, then suddenly snapped, and a hundred meters of thick heavy cable whipped back with terrible speed. The broken end of it smashed through the window that protected the winch operator, Larry Pembroke, and sheared off his arm at the shoulder.

One of the Marine helicopters was down in less than a minute, and while the corpsman gave first aid they put the severed limb in a cooler full of beer and Cokes. They were in the air in another minute, streaking toward Pago Pago, where a surgical team was assembling. He’d be all right in a few months, though it would cost Poseidon, as the saying goes, an arm and a leg.

By the time the excitement had settled down, Russ and Jack had considered and discarded three plans for getting the heavy thing up on its slab. It lay there in the surf like a half-beached whale, weighing more than ten whales.

Since it seemed indestructible, Jack was in favor of using explosives—a large enough shaped charge would pitch it forward. Russ was totally against the idea, since there was no way of telling how delicate the artifact was inside. Nonsense, Jack said; the thing had gone through earthquakes under crushing pressure. If there was anything fragile inside, it was long since garbaged.

They asked Naomi, who had been a demolition engineer, and she said that intuitively it seemed impractical, and then did some numbers. No way. A free-standing shaped charge doesn’t direct all its force in one direction. The side blast would make a crater so big it would swallow the concrete slab—and the explosion would probably shatter every window on this side of the island.

But she suggested a kind of explosive that is truly linear: a rocket engine. If they could strap a booster from a small spaceship onto it and—if it were a kind they could shut off!—they could drag it up onto the slab by brute force.

And think of the visuals.

They got the other engineers together and hashed out the details. They’d need a kind of chute, to keep it going in a straight line, and the booster would have to be a kind that could be carefully controlled. The thing was pointed straight at Aggie Grey’s Hotel, and it would be bad publicity to demolish a century-old landmark full of tourists, where Jack had finally taught the bartender how to make a decent martini.

But the scheme would be great publicity if it worked. They called the American, French, and British space agencies, but China underbid everyone by half: a mere thirty million eurobucks. Jack called some people and found he could underwrite a quarter of it by granting an exclusive news franchise. By lunchtime the next day they were joined by a Chinese lawyer with a short contract and a big notebook of specifications.

They could have their rocket in eight days. Jack grumbled about that—they’d be old news by then—but it’s not exactly like buying a car off the lot. And the artifact wasn’t going anywhere.

8

San Quillermo, California, 1932

“Jimmy” had made a little too much noise during its sexual initiation, and although Mr. Berry was secretly relieved that his boy was doing something normal, he obeyed his wife’s wishes and fired Deborah, slipping her a hundred-dollar bill as she left. That was a year’s rent for her: more than adequate compensation.

The changeling was becoming human enough to be slightly annoyed to find her replaced by another male, but it had learned enough from the one encounter that its simulation of a woman would fool anyone but a thorough gynecologist.

Dr. Grossman wondered whether Jimmy’s astounding musical performance extended into related areas of motor control, and so for the next meeting he brought along a friend who was an artist—and also a beautiful woman. He wanted to observe the boy’s reaction to that, as well as his skill with a pencil.

Jimmy did show some special interest when they were introduced. She was a stunning blonde who matched his own six feet.

“Jimmy, this is Irma Leutij. Everyone calls her Dutch.”

“Dutch,” it repeated.

“Hello, Jimmy,” she said in the husky voice she automatically used with attractive men. She calculated that Jimmy was about five years her junior, wrong by a thousand millennia.

“We want to do an experiment with drawing,” Grossbaum said. “Dutch is an artist.”

The changeling knew the sense of the word “experiment,” and was cautious. “Artist… experiment?”

“Do you like to draw?” Dutch said.

It shrugged in a neutral way.

Grossbaum snapped open his briefcase and took out two identical drawing tablets and plain pencils. He gestured toward the breakfast-room table. “Let’s sit over there.” Jimmy followed them and sat down next to Dutch. The psychiatrist put open tablets and pencils in front of them and sat down opposite.

“What shall I draw?” Dutch said. “Something simple?”

“Simple but precise. Maybe a cube in perspective.”

She nodded and did it, nine careful lines in four seconds.

“Jimmy?” He pushed the pencil toward the boy.

The changeling was cautious, remembering people’s reaction to the piano playing. It could have duplicated the woman’s actions exactly, but instead slowed down to a crawl.

Grossbaum noted the speed. He also noted that Jimmy’s cube was a precise copy, even to its position on the page and accidental overlap of two lines, less than a millimeter. An expert artist could have done it if you asked for an exact copy. The slow compulsive precision would be appropriate for an idiot savant.