Camouflage

—23—

The evacuation of the artifact room had taken a little longer than expected, but there were no leaks, and all of the data- gathering equipment seemed to be working fine. At five thirty, Naomi said through the monitor, “Okay. We can start the countdown.”

Jack nodded. “Fire when ready, Gridley.” No one else in the room knew who Gridley was.

After a few minutes, there was no temperature change at 10 percent. Naomi increased it to 20, and then to 30.

“Go to fifty,” Jack said, and Russ and Jan nodded.

“Where’s it all going?” Jan muttered, a question they’d all asked before. At least when there was air in the building, some of the energy had gone into heating the air. Now, the laser was putting out enough energy to run a small city into a hundred-square- centimeter area, and it was all disappearing—into the artifact, apparently.

“Go to a hundred?” Jack said.

“Seventy-five,” Russ and Jan said simultaneously.

It never got there. The monitor went blank and a second later the people in cottage 7 heard the dull thump of an explosion.

Jan and Russ were the first ones there, with their bicycles. Half the building had collapsed, the big laser almost submerged in the water. Naomi and Moishe staggered out of the water, coughing and gagging.

Russ took Naomi’s arm. “Are you all right?”

She ignored the question, and stared back at the wreck of the lab. “It moved.”

“Moved?” Russ said.

“Floated up and crashed down.”

“Holy shit.”

“Merry Christmas.”

Most of the equipment was wrecked, but a high-speed camera, which the manufacturer called “ruggedized,” had been rugged enough to record the sequence of events before it lost power and fell into the water.

When the laser increased to 72 percent output, 300,000 watts, the artifact gently rose off its cradle, at a uniform velocity of 18.3 centimeters per second. When it cleared the laser’s beam, the weapon punched a hole in the opposite wall, causing the slight explosion they had heard, as the building suddenly filled with air. The beam didn’t do any other damage except to explode a coconut at the top of a tree on the Mulinu’a Peninsula, more than two kilometers away.

The artifact continued rising diagonally until it was poised over the laser’s optical fiber gun-barrel. Then, whatever force had been holding it aloft quit. It fell, destroying the laser and collapsing that side of the building into the bay.

The camera didn’t record what happened after that, but evidently the artifact floated back up and repositioned itself on the cradle in the now open-air artifact room. When the investigators got to it, a few minutes later, it was still beaded with salt water, and cool to the touch.

This would change the direction of their research.