Camouflage

able to step in on grounds of national security. But there’s not much they can do here. Jack’s even a Samoan citizen.”
    “You do have a NASA team,” the changeling said.
    “I’m on it,” Jan said. “And we used NASA space suits, and they got us the use of the military laser that made things so interesting a couple of months ago. But our agreements with them are carefully drawn up, and the deal with the individual employees, well, it’s kind of mercenary.”
    “It gives them all a cut of the profits if everyone behaves,” Russ said, “and nobody gets anything if anyone leaks anything. Not to mention the pack of lawyers that will descend to worry the flesh off his bones and then crack the bones.”
    “Something like that will be in your nondisclosure statement, too. Jack is fair, I think, but not flexible.” Jan tapped on her notebook again. “Obviously, I think you’re hired. Have to pass it by Jack, who crashed a few hours ago and probably won’t be making decisions until tomorrow morning. But the two of us and Naomi really do all the tech and administrative hires.”
    “So I just stay by the phone?”
    Russ shook his head. “It’s not that big an island. We’ll find you.”
    “You can run, but you can’t hide,” Naomi said, and smiled.

- 37 -
apia, samoa, 13 june 2021
    T rying to crack the artifact’s code was the most interesting thing the changeling had ever done. If it could just be locked up in a room for awhile with the string of ones and zeros—and a data line to the outside—it could decipher the thing by itself. Whether that would take a week, a year, or a millennium, it didn’t know. Or much care.
    But the others were fighting the clock. Jack wanted the thing cracked while it was still news, and so if the lid stayed on it, they would announce the communications breakthrough one day, and the translation the next.
    To help guard the secret, he upped the ante: there was a million-dollar bonus to the person or team who broke the code, as long as its existence stayed secret. Otherwise, the prize went down to a hundred thousand.
    The changeling wondered what the man’s logic was, or whether logic had anything to do with it. Why was he so sure there would be money in this? If the message just said, “Hi; here are some pretty pictures in return,” and gave upnothing more revolutionary than what had been given it—which was what the changeling and most of its coworkers expected—then how was Poseidon going to make a dime off it? T-shirts and action figures?
    When the changeling broached that question to Naomi, she squinted and put a finger to her lips. “Ours is not to reason why,” she whispered.
    The number of ones and zeros was 31,433, which was the product of a prime and a prime squared: 17 x 43 x 43. So it might be seventeen squares, each forty-three dots and dashes on a side, or forty-three rectangles, seventeen by forty-three, arranged in various ways. Or just one line of 31,433 bits of information.
    Their computers could marshal powerful decryption tools, and no doubt if the government got into it, they would have much more sophisticated ones. But the assumption had to be that this was not a hidden message, at least not hidden on purpose.
    This was where intuition came in, or maybe plain dumb luck. Twenty people were working on it, and they had twenty large flatscreens and five 1.5-meter cubes, for visualizing in three dimensions. Find something that looks like a coherent message, or at least part of one. The rooms they worked in looked like crossword-puzzle nightmares, white and black squares and cubes in constant chaotic dance.
    The changeling “felt” something—it was not logic, certainly not numbers, but a sense that the thing really was trying to be clear. It was just so inhuman that humans couldn’t get it.
    Maybe the changeling had become too human itself, to get it.
    People hungry for the million were grinding themselves down on coffee and speed and no sleep, so Russ declared a “snow day.” Everybody stay home and sleep or otherwise relax. Jack had to go along with it. After five days, people were getting a little crazy.
    T he changeling spent its snow day walking up the hill with Russ. They agreed not to talk about the project at all.
    “Up the hill” was the steep four-kilometer hike to Vailima, the mansion where Robert Louis Stevenson had spent his last years. Russ had been there a couple of times, and so was “native guide” to Rae.
    The