Camouflage

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. “Whatevidently 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, kilotons, 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?”
    T hey 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.
    There was also the matter of where to put them. American Samoa was dismally crowded. New Zealand and Australia were virtually closed, having absorbed more than100,000 Samoans over the past century—and that emigration of course siphoned off the ones who wanted to leave the traditional lifestyle.
    The other islands in the group were mostly impenetrable jungle or volcanic waste. Savai’i had 60,000 people crowded into a necklace of towns along the inhabitable coast, and didn’t want more.
    Besides, most Samoans were deeply religious and somewhat fatalistic. If God chose to take them, He would. And it would be disrespectful to the point of sacrilege to leave their homes, with generations of ancestors buried in the front yards. Pollsters said that even if the United States completely paid for relocation, they’d only move about 20 percent of the population.
    Samoans pointed out that it would be a lot simpler to move the artifact. The land didn’t belong to Poseidon, let alone to the U.S. government; it was leased. The family that owned the land could evict them.
    Jack applied his skills as a negotiator to that aspect of the problem. He had a meeting with the local village elders, the fono, and pointed out that evicting them, while a defensible act, had its negative side. It would be, in effect, capitulating to U.S. nuclear might. It would be a breach of agreement—an agreement that involved far more money and prestige than the village had ever known—and some would see that as a humiliation. Besides,