Camouflage by Joe Haldeman Read Free Book Online

from a private hospital rolled up quietly to the service entrance, and Dutch was carried out over the gravel in Jimmy’s old wheelchair.
    The doctor who examined her had never seen a broken pubic bone before. He accepted her story about a bucking horse out of control, but suggested that during her confinement she might want to be examined for pregnancy, just in case.

- 9 -
apia, samoa, 2019
    C NN runs a news special on 14 December 2019.
    The camera pans along gentle surf, to rest on the artifact. It closes in during voice-over introduction:
MALLORY (VO)
    Over the past several weeks, what began as a mystery has become an enigma. It started when a private marine research organization, Poseidon Projects, claimed salvage rights for an unclaimed wreck deep in the Tonga Trench a few hundred miles from this Samoan island.
    With the help of Poseidon Projects, famous for having raised the Titanic, Atlantis used acres of floats to bring the “wreck” to within a few fathoms of the surface. They towed it with tugs to a holding location . . .
    Archive footage of towing and parking the artifact.
MALLORY (VO, CONT.)
    just offshore of Independent Samoa, where they had secured a ninety-nine-year lease on a piece of undeveloped land, which was being turned into a small research center . . .
    Archive footage of the shrouded artifact being pulled toward shore.
MALLORY (VO, CONT.)
    built solely to investigate this thing, which was obviously not the wreck of a ship.
    Archive underwater footage: the shroud flaps teasingly, to show the bright metal surface of the thing. A montage of scenes while Poseidon engineers attach the towing collar to the artifact, and start dragging it in.
MALLORY (VO, CONT.)
    That cable is powered by this machine . . . capable of moving thousands of tons.
    But when this heavy thing—more massive than a Nautilus submarine, but smaller than a delivery van—when it came to the shoreline and dug into the sand . . .
    Archive footage of the cable accident.
MALLORY (VO, CONT.)
    it had met its match. One man was almost killed when the cable broke.
    They had to find a way to move it the last hundred yards, to the concrete pad that would become the floor of their laboratory.
    Screen fades to a live image of the thing with its rocket attached.
MALLORY (VO, CONT.)
    This is a self-contained Chinese booster rocket, normally used in the Glorious Wonder series, to carry up to a ton into low Earth orbit.
    It’s not going quite so far today.
    Interior view: an improvised bunker a couple of hundred yards from the thing. You can see the artifact through a thick window. Mallory is sitting with two men, drinking coffee at a table made of a plank on stacked boxes.
MALLORY
    We’re going to watch this with Jack Halliburton and Russell Sutton, joint directors of Atlantis Associates.
    I suppose this is going to be the shortest rocket trip in history.
JACK
    There were some last century that only got an inch off the pad.
RUSS
    This one’s reliable as a Ford truck, though. Except . . .
MALLORY
    What could go wrong?
JACK
    We’re not worried about the rocket. Just its attachment to the artifact.
RUSS
    It’s the irresistible force versus the immovable object.
JACK
    We know the thing’s mass; we know the properties of the sand it’s resting on. The rocket generates plenty enough thrust to do the job.
RUSS
    The only problem is the attachment between the rocket and the artifact. If the collar that connects them breaks . . . we’ll need another approach.
MALLORY
    And the rocket goes screaming into the center of town there?
    Telephoto zoom from the rocket’s POV: straight into Aggie Grey’s.
JACK
    No, there’s an automatic shutoff if the rocket suddenly feels no resistance. It might go fifty or a hundred feet.
MALLORY
    But if it doesn’t work?
JACK
    Glorious Wonder carries a lot of insurance.
RUSS
    A lot of people in Apia are off visiting relatives in the country. I think I would be, too.
    A loud whistle blows.
JACK
    That’s