Free Camouflage by Joe Haldeman Page B

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 lightsattracted 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. Scrape it, corrode it, chip it, burn it—do anything to make the artifact acknowledge the existence of humanity.
    When it was still underwater, Poseidon divers had tried a diamond-tipped drill on it, to no effect. But now they rolled in a huge mining drill: it used a 200-horsepower electric motor to spin its diamond tip at 10,000 r.p.m., with more than a ton of force behind it.
    The scream it made was too much for the scientists’ earplugs; they had to rig a remote control for it. At the maximum push, just before the diamond tip evaporated, it shattered all the useless windows and ruined the positron microscope beyond repair.
    The electron microscope worked, though, and all it showed was a film of oxides from the metallic part of the ruined drill bit. When they cleaned that off, even at the highest magnification there was no difference between the test square and the undrilled surface next to it: a perfect mirror.

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bataan, philippines, 7 december 1941
    M any of Jimmy’s boot camp compadres steamed across the Pacific with him, to join the Fourth Marine Regiment in Shanghai. They arrived in November 1941, and barely had time to get their land legs before they were ordered to sail again, this time for the Philippines,