Part 29 (1/2)

technology were they? Swelk said they'd had s.p.a.ce travel for many Earth centuries. Still, a species as tradition-bound as the Krulirim surely discouraged the heresies that begat scientific revolutions. For the sake of argument, imagine they were merely one century ahead of humans.

A hundred years ago, Earth's cutting-edge technology was vacuum tubes and biplanes. No jet engines or rockets. No quantum mechanics, which meant no transistors or integrated circuits. No computers or fiber optics. What would the best scientific minds of 1907 make of, say, a half-melted s.p.a.ce shuttle or Boeing 777? What beside wings and a tail would make sense?

Negativism was a vice Kyle refused to indulge. He flipped back the tarp to uncover the familiar insectile shape. To his surprise, the satellite gave no evidence of having been opened. Except for strips of masking tape, it looked untouched. He felt the surprise on his own face. ”But the wings came right off.”

”Watch.” Matt grabbed a portable electric heater with a pistol grip-an industrial-strength hair dryer. It started with a roar, heat s.h.i.+mmers rising from its nozzle. He directed hot air toward the stump from which had once sprouted a solar-wing spar. After a few seconds, a gap formed. The stump divided very near the hull, suggesting the hinge that had eluded the s.p.a.cewalkers. Gripped in an insulated glove, the

hinged joint swung freely. ”No, wait.” He waved off Kyle. After the area cooled, he straightened the spar and reheated it. The seam disappeared. Wiggling the stump showed the junction had returned to its former rigidity. ”Works every time, at exactly the same distance from the hull.”

Shape-retaining alloys were found in expensive eyegla.s.s frames and golf clubs, but Kyle had never

heard of a material that remembered and reformed seams. ”How'd you find this?”

”We wanted to get inside. There were no bolts to undo, no seams to unweld. Rather than cut at random, and damage who knows what, we did an ultrasound scan. It showed seams. The hull material feels,” he rapped, ”more like plastic than metal, so someone mentioned thermoplastic. We tried heating the lines from the ultrasound image.”

Aha. ”The tape on the hull marks heat-activated seams.”

”This is why you're paid the big bucks.” Ignoring Kyle's humph, Matt began heating the waistlike indentation between the main hull sections, rocking the satellite to reach completely around. ”Everyone

comments these sections don't look like they belong together.” A s.p.a.ce opened as he spoke. ”Things are often as they seem.”

Kyle pried gingerly at the newly opened gap with asbestos-coated gloves. The hull sections parted, only

a few wires linking the halves. Every satellite he'd ever seen was jam-packed, its parts tightly interlinked. ”Okay, one side has the phased-array antennas for active radar cancellation-stealthing. The other side has wave guides for the maser. Any guesses?”

”In a minute.” Matt unrolled a paper scroll, weighting the corners with empty coffee mugs. The printout appeared to be an ultrasound image. ”The other grafts are less obvious, but four pieces make up this baby. Look here,” he tapped, ”and here. You can see two smaller modules also spliced in. Like the radar section, there aren't many connections to the main body.”

”Any idea what this means?”

”Yeah. Swelk told you the stars.h.i.+p was a commercial freighter. She traveled with a film company. So why did the Krulirim have doomsday weapons?””We've all wondered.” The question drove Ryan Bauer nuts.”Here's our best guess,” said Matt. ”Imagine you're on the interstellar equivalent of a tramp steamer. You have no weaponry, but signaling equipment must be very powerful to reach between stars. Say, comm masers.” He rummaged in a cabinet drawer and found some candy. ”At this rate, there won't be any pizza left. Now there's no reason to hide comm masers, but the aliens wanted these hidden. Their plan wouldn't work if we'd seen them frying the Atlantis or the early-warning birds. So what could they have carried that would hide comm satellites?”

”Radar buoys?” guessed Kyle. ”Handy for returning to places one's already checked out. Only you

reprogram the buoys to beam the opposite signal of whatever they sense.”

”So we think.” Matt popped a handful of candy into his mouth. ”Say they've improvised a stealthed weapon. How is it aimed? The star sensors used with a comm maser wouldn't track a shuttle in flight.”

He tapped a small circle on the printout. ”See this little guy spliced into the maser section? We hope to prove it's an IR sensor, interfaced to the onboard computer.”

”What's this graft?” Kyle pointed on the scan to another hull alteration. This section had its own antenna; a few wires connected it to the main electronics section. His question elicited only a shrug. ”Well, I have a thought. It looks like an independent, much lower power, microwave subsystem. Maybe it was used to read out the d.a.m.ned orbs. Swelk said the recording equipment was from the troupe's supplies.”

”Makes sense.”

His on-the-beach feelings of redundancy were largely confirmed. Matt's team was making tremendous progress. ”Now the big question. Why did it stop working?”

By way of reply, Matt aimed a penlight. ”What do you see?”

Kyle pondered. Fat wires leading from the two small grafts and the radar section ended in an ill-shapen

metallic glob. Near that clump was something blocky whose only familiar features were a connection to the solar-panel stump and what looked like a ”heat pipe” for transporting thermal energy to an external radiator. On a human satellite, the greatest source of heat was the main power supply. The blocky thing had a small scorch on an otherwise featureless and unused metal connector. He burst out laughing. ”You just can't get good help these days.”

”Yup,” agreed Matt. ”Bad power connections. It would seem a sloppy soldering job has given us our best chance yet to understand these guys.”

* * * I would've thought it impossible, thought Darlene, to be lonelier than the sole noncelebrant at a party. Now I know better. Being that lone noncelebrant's spouse was much worse. The intimate setting, an antique-filled sitting room in the White House Residence, only emphasized Kyle's withdrawal. She nursed a pina colada-she'd become enamored with them in the Virgin Islands-while chatting with the rest of the team. In a gathering of five, there was no disguising Kyle's silent sulking.

Britt said the President would be by to extend his appreciation, ”for a job well done.” For a job two-thirds done, Kyle had muttered, not that his principled dissent or his odd choice of fractions now mattered. Nor did it improve his mood that even she, however reluctantly and diplomatically, disagreed with him. As one of the team, she couldn't paper over this difference of opinion. Sighing, she again sampled her drink. The White House bartender was second to none.

The ringing of fine crystal got everyone's attention. Britt was wielding the silver spoon. ”Everyone? A moment of your time, please.”

”That s.h.i.+p sailed five years ago,” said Erin Fitzhugh, drawing a laugh.

”Fair enough.” Britt set down his champagne flute. ”And since I, too, want to thank you all for your heroic efforts, that reminder is entirely apt. Darlene, Erin, Kyle, Ryan-the order of that list being alphabetical, mind you-your country owes you a debt of deep grat.i.tude.”