Camouflage

excitement? Or frustration.”
    “I don’t know. Come out here, run, fall down.” They laughed. “I’ve been kind of drifting. Both my parents died when I was in college, like ten years ago, eleven.”
    “I’m sorry. . . .”
    She dipped her head. “Yeah. They left me some money, and I sort of wandered around Europe, then Japan. Nowthat the money’s gone, I wish I’d stayed in school. Not much you can do with a BBA.”
    “You’re still young. You could go back.”
    “I guess thirty-one’s young.” She stared into her tea. “Maybe not to graduate school admission committees.”
    “You’d go back to business?”
    She shook her head. “Maybe macroeconomics. Pacific Rim economics. But I’ve been thinking more oceanography. I could get a B.S. in a year, maybe three semesters.” She smiled. “Come out here and work for you.”
    “Not with a bachelor’s,” he said seriously. “Take a couple of years and get a doctorate. The artifact’s not going anywhere.”
    “But you don’t know that,” she said. “It might decide to go back to Alpha Centauri.”
    Their sandwiches came. Russell discarded the top piece of bread and carefully sliced the remainder into one-inch strips, then rotated the plate 90 degrees and cut the strips into thirds. The changeling remembered the habit and smiled.
    “Saves me a hundred calories,” he said. “The media all think the thing’s from another star. That’s the easiest explanation. We’re trying to come up with something less obvious.”
    “Like what? Secret government project?”
    “Or that it’s always been here. You know what hell this has been for physicists and chemists.”
    “I can imagine.”
    He took a bite and then salted everything, as the changeling expected. “ That’s no different whether the thing is local or from another galaxy. It means there are very basic laws we don’t understand about . . . the nature of matter.” He speared a square of sandwich and gestured with it. “It’s chaos. Nothing we know is true anymore.”
    “Can you really say that?” the changeling said, carving its own sandwich into quarters. “Like we learned in school, Galileo’s physics was an approximation of Newton’s;Newton got swallowed by Einstein; then Einstein by Holling.”
    “Hawking, then Holling, to be technical. But this is different. It’s like everything worked, down to eight decimal places, and then somebody says, ‘Hold it. You forgot about magic.’ That’s what this damned thing is.” He laughed. “I love it! But then I’m not a physicist.”
    “They must be going crazy.” She picked up one quarter and nibbled on it.
    “You should see my e-mail. Actually, I should see my e-mail. This indispensible woman, Michelle, throws out nine-tenths of it before I come to work.”
    “She knows physics?”
    “Well, like you—she’s an accountant with some course work in various sciences. But she reads everything, knows more about general science than I do.”
    “She doesn’t really throw them away,” the changeling asked. “You at least glance at them?”
    “Oh, yeah. At least the ones that have some entertainment value—we call them the X-files. I get together with Jan, our space scientist, every Friday to run through them. Kind of fun, actually.” He speared another square. “Pleasant nutlike flavor.”
    “Did you ever get anything useful?”
    “Not yet.” He turned serious. “The whole game is going to change soon. We’re going public with . . . an aspect we’ve kept secret. Wish I could tell you.”
    The changeling was glad he couldn’t. Knowing about the message gave it an edge for Michelle’s job. Those credits in Math 471 and 472, advanced statistics. “Oh, come on. Pretty please?”
    He smiled. “Your womanly wiles will get you nowhere. I’ll tell you on Monday, though, if you’d like to have lunch again.”
    “Okay. Can I bring my pal from the Weekly World News ?”
    “He might already be down at the office. We’re making the announcement at nine o’clock.”
    “You really think you’ll be free for lunch, then?”
    “I’m telling you too much.” He looked left and right. “That’s why we chose Monday. No planes till Tuesday morning. Gives us, what, some measure of spin control.”
    He did look a little worried. The changeling reached over and patted his hand. “Mum’s the word.”
    “ ‘Mum’s the word’?” He chuckled. “I haven’t heard that since I was a kid.”
    Oops. “My mother