Camouflage

their meal, two piles of freshly sliced fruit and a hot iron pan of sizzling sausages. Halliburton sent away his coffee and asked for a Bloody Mary.
    “Celebrating?”
    “Always.” He ignored the fruit and tore into the sausages. “The test should commence at about 1400.”
    “How much do tanks weigh?” Russell served himself mango, paw-paw, and melon.
    “I’d have to look it up. About sixty tons.”
    “Oh, good. That’s within a couple of orders of magnitude.”
    “Have to extrapolate.”
    “Let’s see.” He sliced the melon precisely. “If a two-pound chicken can sit on an egg without harming it, let’s extrapolate the effect of a one-tonne chicken.”
    “Ha-ha.” The waiter brought the Bloody Mary and whispered, “With gin, sir.” Halliburton nodded microscopically.
    “It’s not exactly Hooke’s law,” Russell continued. “How can you get a number that means anything?”
    Halliburton set down his silverware and wiped his fingers carefully, then took a pad out of his shirt pocket. He tapped on its face a few times. “The Wallace-Gellman algorithm.”
    “Never heard of it.”
    He adjusted the brightness of the pad and passed it over. “It’s about compressibility. The retaining plates we drove down into the sand. It’s actually the column of sand supporting the thing’s mass, of course.”
    “A house built on sand. I read about that.” Russell studied the pad and tapped on a couple of variables for clarification. He grunted assent and passed it back. “Where’d you get it?”
    “Best Buy.”
    He winced. “The algorithm.”
    “California building code. A house built on sand shall not stand without it.”
    “Hm. So how much does an apartment building weigh?”
    “We’re in the ballpark. It’s going to settle some. That’s why the moat-and-dike design.”
    “If it settles more than five meters, we won’t have a moat. We’ll have an underwater laboratory.” Once the thing was in place, the plan was to put a prefabricated dome, five meters high, over the thing, dig a moat around it, and then build a high dike around the moat. (If it settled more than a couple of feet, water would seep around it at high tide anyhow. The moat made that inevitability a design feature.)
    “Won’t happen. It was in sand when we found it, remember?”
    Not volcanic sand, Russell thought, but he didn’t wantto argue it. The coral sand wasn’t that much more compressible, he supposed. He signaled the waiter. “Is it after noon, Josh?”
    “Always, sir. White wine?”
    “Please.” He reached over the fruit and speared a sausage.
    “So when do we expect the tanks?”
    “They said 1300.”
    “Samoan time?”
    “U.S. Marine Corps time. They have to get them back by nightfall, so I expect they’ll be prompt.”
    T he Marines were a little early, in fact. At a quarter to one, they could hear the strained throbbing of the cargo helicopters working their way around the island. They probably didn’t want to fly directly over it. Don’t annoy an armed populace.
    They were two huge flying-crane cargo helicopters, each throbbing rhythmically under the strain of its load, a sand-colored Powell tank that swung underneath with the ponderous grace of a sixty-tonne pendulum. They circled out over the reef before descending to the Poseidon site, a forty-acre rhombus of sand and scrub inside a tall Hurricane fence.
    Two men on the ground guided them in, the tanks settling in the sand with one solid crunch. The helicopters hummed easily as they reeled in their cables and touched down delicately on the perforated-steel-plate landing pad just above the high-tide line.
    There were three Poseidon engineers waiting at the site. Greg Fulvia, himself just a few years out of the Marines, went to talk with the tank crews, while Naomi Linwood and Larry Pembroke did a final collimation of the four pairs of laser theodolites that would measure thedeformation of the concrete floor while the great machines crawled back and forth on it.
    A couple of workers rolled up in a beach buggy and set up a canopy over a folding table where Russell and Halliburton were waiting under the sun. They put out four chairs and a cooler full of bottled water and limes on ice. Naomi came over to take advantage of it, yelling “Bring you one” to Larry over her shoulder.
    Naomi was brown from the sun and as big as Russell, athletic, biceps tight against the cuffed sleeves of her khaki work clothes, dark sweat patches already forming. She