Camouflage Part 12

The ride to Iowa City was interesting; the bus rumbling past mile after mile of constant green, farmland occasionally punctuated by wild prairie or forest. There were individual farmhouses with barns, always red, but no towns until they pulled into Iowa City.

The bus was going on to Cedar Rapids, but the driver directed him to the train station, the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Interurban Railway, which went up to North Liberty. The changeling walked through the university campus to get there, noting that students dressed about the same way they did in Berkeley. A little more casual, not as much obvious wealth. More pipe-smoking among the males, fewer women in slacks. Dresses to midcalf.

It had been listening carefully to conversations. There was a characteristic Iowa accent, but it had been more p.r.o.nounced in the Davenport station. It would try to maneuver into a situation where it could overhear Stuart.

Stuart went to high school in Iowa City, the changeling knew from his records, so on a hunch it let two trolleys go by. Sure enough, when school was out, teenagers started arriving in groups of two and four.

Except Stuart, who walked alone, reading a book. He didn't talk to any of the others, and they ignored him.

The changeling maneuvered close to the boy and studied him surrept.i.tiously while appearing to read its own book. He was slim and muscular, with a delicate manner. The book he was so absorbed in was the twenty-year-old Coming of Age in Samoa, Coming of Age in Samoa, which the changeling had read as an undergraduate in 1939. which the changeling had read as an undergraduate in 1939.

When the trolley came, the changeling got on behind Stuart and sat next to him. "Interesting book."

Stuart looked up sharply. "You've read this?"

"My father had a copy of it," the changeling improvised. "One of his textbooks in college."

"He let you read it?"

"No ... I put the dust jacket from another book around it. He never noticed."

Stuart laughed. "My dad took it away from me. This one, I keep hidden when I'm home. But h.e.l.l, I'm old enough."

The changeling nodded vigorously. "They're afraid you'll get ideas."

"As if that was bad." He looked at the changeling. "You're new?"

"Just pa.s.sing through.Visiting relatives."

"What, in Liberty?"

The changeling thought fast. North Liberty only had a few hundred people; Stuart would know most of them. "No, Cedar Rapids."

"Where you from?"

"California. San Guillermo."

Stuart looked introspective. "Always wanted to go there. I was accepted at Berkeley. Didn't get a scholars.h.i.+p. Are you a student?"

"Taking some time off." It checked its watch. "Anything to do in North Liberty? I have a couple hours to kill."

"They would die," Stuart said. "Ice cream parlor, really just a soda fountain. Go out and look at the quarry."

"What do they mine?"

"Sandstone." He laughed and jerked a thumb back at Iowa City. "Did all the sandstone for the Capitol Building there. Then they moved the capital to Des Moines."

"And carelessly left the building behind," the changeling said in an attempt at humor. The boy gave him an odd look and laughed.

"You could kill an hour with a soda. Or go on to Cedar Rapids and get an actual beer."

"A soda sounds good. I like small towns."

"You could see all of Liberty in about ten minutes." They talked for awhile more, the changeling mostly listening or mining the memory of the day's papers.

They both got off at North Liberty, along with a couple of dozen students. Almost everyone went down the main street. When they went into the ice cream shop, a girl behind them said in a soft singsong, "Stew-ie's got a boy friend."

He turned pink at that. "Stupid girl," he muttered, as the screen door smacked shut behind them.

Interesting, the changeling thought. Could free-thinking Stuart be h.o.m.os.e.xual, attracted to the exotic out-of-towner? Dark and handsome, with a body almost a twin of Stuart's, defender of Margaret Mead.

They sat at a small round marble table by an oscillating fan. The changeling looked at the bill of fare, a small two-sided card. "How 'bout I buy us a banana split? I couldn't eat a whole one."

"I'll split it with you." He reached into his pocket.

"No, my treat. I'm researching the odd inhabitants of this island."

He snorted. "Margaret Mead wouldn't find much here."

"Oh, I bet she would. Probably about as many people here as on her island."

"Yeah, and we go around half-naked and screw anyone we want." They both laughed at that.

The soda jerk, a young redhead with a face full of acne, was approaching with his pad. He gave them an uncertain smile. "Where's that, Stu?"

He held up the book. "Samoa, Vince. We're gonna go there soon as school's out."

Vince gave the changeling a funny look. "Sure you are. Where the h.e.l.l is Samoa?"

"Middle o' nowhere, in the Pacific."

"They fight there?"

"Don't know." He raised eyebrows at the changeling.

"Don't ask me." The changeling had pa.s.sed the island group as a great white shark, on its way to California, and hadn't seen any naval presence. But the war still had a few years to go, then.

"So hi," he said. "I'm Vince Smithers. You're not from, uh..."

"Matt Baker," the changeling said, and shook his hand. "San Guillermo, California." This was interesting. The changeling had some difficulty reading subtle emotions, but jealousy isn't subtle. "We're gonna split a banana split, and I'll take a c.o.ke."

He scribbled that down and looked at Stuart. "Vanilla c.o.ke?" Stuart nodded and he went back to the fountain.

"You guys know each other?" the changeling said.

"Everybody knows everybody here. Vince and me used to go to school together, but his parents put him in a military academy. What was that s.h.i.+tty place, Vince?"

"G.o.d, I don't want to say the name. I left to pursue a career in banana-split-ology. Much to my father's delight."

They continued in a kind of uneasy banter, the changeling watching with an anthropologist's eye. They were less exotic to it than Polynesians, but no less interesting.

There was a conspiratorial edge to their exchange. They had done something forbidden together, something secret. Not necessarily s.e.x, but that would be a good first guess. Did Stuart mean for his new companion to make that inference? The changeling's only experience with h.o.m.os.e.xuality had been in the asylum, and there had been no social aspect to it; he had just been a receptacle for two of the guards. There had been a third, who only came to him once, and had been more interesting than the two brutes: he had quit after a couple of minutes and started weeping, and said how sorry he was, and evidently quit the job right after.

It was so much more complicated than it had to be, but the changeling had noted that this was true of every human biological function that wasn't involuntary.

Vince brought the split and Stuart's c.o.ke. "You don't want some vanilla in yours?" he said to the changeling.

A complexity. "Sure. I'll try anything once." Vince nodded grimly. It was an obvious turning point.

They divided the confection meticulously, and pursued it from opposite ends. Stuart told the changeling about his scholars.h.i.+p to Princeton.

"Nice campus. Major in anthropology?"

"No, English and American lit. You've been there?"

"Once, visiting relatives."A semester, actually, studying invertebrate paleontology.

"You have relatives everywhere."

"Big family."

He made a face. "Mine are all in Iowa." He said it as "Io-way," with a downward inflection.

"You don't plan to come back and raise a bunch of Iowans yourself?"

"No and double no. Not that I don't like like kids." He speared a piece of banana. "I kids." He speared a piece of banana. "I hate hate them." them."

"Brothers and sisters?"

"Thank G.o.d, no. The kids at school are bad enough."

The changeling was absorbing all this avidly. They finished the split. "Well. Want to show me around fabulous North Liberty?"

"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 c.r.a.p shooter in San Guillermo."

"Bull shooter." They both laughed. 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 s.e.xual 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 heteros.e.xual protocol. So once in the bedroom it just did what Stuart did, one permutation after another. It narrowed the diameter of its p.e.n.i.s for his comfort, remembering pain in the asylum.

Afterward, the boy slept in its arms, snoring drunkenly. It a.n.a.lyzed 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 winegla.s.s. The floor didn't resist.

The part under the cradle didn't collapse; it was independently supported. It probably would 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. 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 a.n.a.lyzed 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."

MoisheRosse, 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 cla.s.sified; they used it as a black box that always delivered what you asked.