Camouflage

—14—

Little green men,” Halliburton said, staring at Nesbitt. “You’ve been reading the tabloids.”

“The thing is at least a million years old,” Russell said.

Nesbitt nodded. “But it’s obviously a made thing.”

“Maybe not,” Russell said. “It could be the product of some exotic natural force.”

“Assume not, though. If some intelligence made it a million or some millions of years ago … well, we can’t say anything about their motivation, but if they’re like humans at all, there’s a good chance the thing is inhabited in some sense.”

“Still alive after a million years,” Halliburton said, stacking up two little egg salad sandwiches.

“We’re still alive after more than a million years.”

“Speak for yourself, spaceman.”

“I mean humanity, since we evolved from Homo erectus. We’ve been traveling through space in a closed environment, growing from a few individuals to seven billion.”

“It’s a point,” Russ said. “That thing is a closed environment, in spades.”

“Your eight billion little green men are going to be tiny green men.”

“Well, it’s probably not full of little hamsters in space suits,” Nesbitt said. “It may not be inhabited in the sense of carrying individuals. It could have some equivalent of sperm and eggs, or spores—or it could be basically information, like a von Neumann machine.”

“Oh, yeah. I sort of remember that,” Russ said.

“I don’t,” Halliburton said. “German?”

“Hungarian, I think. It’s an early nanotech idea. You send little spaceships out to various stars. Each one is a machine, programmed to seek out materials and build two duplicates of itself, which would take off for two other stars.”

“Yeah,” Russ said, “and after a few million years, every planet in the galaxy would have been visited by one of these machines. The fact that there obviously isn’t one on Earth is offered as proof that there’s no other space-faring life in this galaxy.”

“That’s a stretch.”

Russ shrugged. “Well, the galaxy is thousands of millions of years old. The logic is that the project would be relatively simple to set up, and then would take care of itself.”

“But you see the hole in that logic,” Nesbitt said.

“Sure,” Jack said. “I see where you’re going. The argument assumes we would know the machine was here.”

“It might well be hidden,” Nesbitt said, “hidden in a place where it wouldn’t be found except by other creatures with high technology.”

Jack rubbed the stubble on his chin. “You’re right there. No pearl diver’s gonna find that thing and bring it up.”

“And bringing it out of that environment into this one might be a signal that life on the planet has evolved sufficiently to initiate the next course of action.”

“Make contact with us.”

“Maybe. Or maybe eliminate us as rivals.” He looked at both of them in turn. “What if a creature like Hitler had started the project? Genghis Khan? And they were at least humans. There are plenty of animals who simplify their existence by eliminating their own kind who threaten their primacy. We ourselves have destroyed whole species— smallpox and malaria—for our health.”

“It’s far-fetched,” Halliburton said.

“But even if the probability was near zero, the stakes are so high that the problem should be addressed.”

“Hm.” Jack tapped his teacup with his spoon and the woman appeared. “Sun’s over the yardarm, Colleen.” She nodded and slipped away. “So how are your twelve people supposed to save humanity from alien invasion?”

“We discussed moving the whole operation to the lunar surface.”

“Holy cow,” Russ said.

“It would make the Apollo program look like a science fair project,” Nesbitt said. “No one has a booster that can orbit one-tenth that thing’s mass. And we couldn’t send it up piecemeal.”

Jack squinted, doing numbers. “I don’t think it could be done at all. Mass of the booster goes up with the square of the mass of the pay-load. Strength of materials. Goddamn thing’d collapse.”

“And you see the implications of that. Someone got that thing here from a lot farther away than the moon.”

“That’s still just an assumption,” Russ said, “and I still lean toward a natural explanation. It probably was formed here on Earth, by some exotic process.”

Nesbitt’s temper rose for the first time. “Pretty damned exotic! Three times as dense as plutonium—and that’s if it were the same stuff through and through! What if the goddamned thing’s hollow? What’s the shell made of?”

“Neutronium,” Russ said. “Degenerate matter. That’s my guess, if it’s hollow.”

“Baloney-um is what we called it in school,” Jack said. “Make up the properties first; find the element later.”

Colleen rolled in a cart with various glasses and bottles. “Gentlemen?” The NASA man stuck to tea, Russ took white wine, Jack a double Bloody Mary.

“So what does your dynamic dozen propose?” Jack asked as the woman left the room.

He leaned forward. “Isolation. More profound than extreme bio-hazard. The environment the military uses in developing…”

“Nanoweapons,” Russ supplied. “Of course we’re not actually developing them. Just learning how to defend ourselves against them, if somebody else does.”

“Well, it’s not just the military. Everybody developing nanotech uses similar safeguards to keep the little things isolated.

“We’d cover the lab building your crew is finishing now with an outside layer, sort of an exoskeleton. Basically a seamless metal room almost the same size as the lab. To enter, you have to go through an airlock. The atmospheric pressure inside is slightly lower than outside. The airlock’s also a changing room; nobody ever wears street clothes into the work area.”

“I don’t think our people would enjoy working under those constraints,” Russ said. “Feels like government interference.”

“You could also see it as taking advantage of the government. We give you the functional equivalent of lunar isolation—air and water recycled, power sources independent of the outside.”

“Plus getting back all the capital we’ve put in, to date?” Jack said, looking at Russ.

“That’s right,” Nesbitt said. Russ nodded almost imperceptibly.

Jack squeezed some more lime into his Bloody Mary. “I guess we’ll look into your contract. Have our lawyers look into it. Maybe make a counteroffer.”

“Fair enough.” Nesbitt stood. “I’ll go up and fetch it. I think you’ll find it clear and complete.”

What they wouldn’t find was a little detail about the “independent power source”: As a public health measure for the planet, its plutonium load could be command-detonated from Washington, turning the whole island into radioactive slag.