Free Camouflage by Joe Haldeman Page A

the first moon landing and young enough to go cave-diving for fun. She had advanced degrees in both physical and life sciences, on top of a B.A. in philosophy.
    Her eleven compatriate scientists worked daily with the members of the original Poseidon team, and they worked together with them away from the site, too, comparing notes, planning out approaches. They all lived together in the Vaiala Beach Cottages, where number 7 was designated the common room, a big coffee urn always going, refrigerator and pantry full of food for thought.
    Russell spent a lot of time in fale number 7, and had moved into number 5, leaving the fancy suite at Aggie Grey's, a ten-minute bicycle ride away. Jack stayed at his, saying he could think better in air-conditioning.
    They all agreed, although Jack was characteristically impatient, to wait until the isolated environment was finished before starting their tests. So they had eight days of brainstorming their approaches. Equipment and supplies came in daily from Honolulu, Sydney, Tokyo.
    The night before the first tests, Russ called Jan and they met at the rocks overlooking the site to share a bottle of the best champagne he could find in Samoa. The relationship that was developing between them was not exactly romantic in a conventional sense, but they had discovered in each other a kind of romantic reverence toward nature and science that went back to childhood. They had both wanted to be astronauts as children; Russell had actually been accepted as a mission specialist when the Challenger disaster put everything on hold, and he switched over to the doomed Mars missions.
    They shared champagne and a pair of powerful binoculars, studying the crescent moon in the clear dark sky. The nightglass stabilizers hummed and clicked while he looked down the terminator edge and named the craters—Aristarchus, Messier, Globinus, Hell. "That's a deep one," he said.
    She laughed. "I used to know some of the names. My dad had a telescope."
    "You said they moved down to Florida to watch the moon rockets." She nodded in the darkness. "And all the other ones, the shuttle and all. But the Apollo rockets were the biggies—Saturn V's. Deafening: you could feel the noise rattling your bones. And dazzling, the one they did at night."
    "That was the first one?"
    "No, the last. The first one was Apollo 11, in 1969."
    "Oh, yeah. I slept through it, my mother said. I was not quite two."
    "I was twelve," she said, refilling her glass. "The first time I ever tasted champagne. Still makes me think of it."
    They stared out over the project into the night, in companionable silence. The dim yellow security lights attracted bugs; small birds swooped out of the darkness. "This may be even bigger," she said. "It almost certainly will be."
    "Even if it turns out to be homegrown," he said, "we'll have to totally rethink physics and chemistry."
    "Chemistry is physics," she said automatically. "Tell you what. If this thing turns out to be terrestrial in origin, I'll buy you the most expensive bottle of champagne in the Honolulu duty-free."
    They clicked glasses. "If not, I'll buy you two."
    "What, you're that skeptical?"
    "Hell, no; I agree with you. And I've got an expense account."

    A test area, about four inches square, was marked off by tape on the artifact's side, about midway. An electron microscope and its positron equivalent could be easily brought to bear on the area. They built a forced-draft hood over it, to suck away and analyze poisonous vapors.
    First they measured it passively. It had an albedo of exactly 1.0—it reflected all light that fell on it, in every wavelength. Optically, it presented a perfect curve, down to 1/200 of a wave of mercury light, a surface impossible for a human optician to duplicate.
    Although it looked like metal, it felt like silk; it wasn't cold to the touch. It was not a conductor of heat, nor, as far as passive testing could tell, of electricity.
    Then they went to work, trying to dent it.