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swam back along the cable.
    A deeply anchored winch on the far side of the concrete slab growled into life, and the cable started to crawl out of the sea. When the cable sang taut, the growl increased in pitch and volume. People around the large machine could smell ozone and hot metal as it strained. But it won; the cable inched its way up the pad.
    The artifact wormed slowly up through the surf. You wouldn’t have to know anything about physics or engineering to see that there was something fundamentally strange going on—the thing’s unearthly heaviness as it sledged through the damp sand; its mirror brightness.
    The barrier of bright yellow DO NOT CROSS ribbon may have saved some lives. The cable started to fray where it was attached to the collar, then suddenly snapped, and a hundred meters of thick heavy cable whipped back with terrible speed. The broken end of it smashed through the window that protected the winch operator, Larry Pembroke, and sheared off his arm at the shoulder.
    One of the Marine helicopters was down in less than a minute, and while the corpsman gave first aid they put the severed limb in a cooler full of beer and Cokes. They were in the air in another minute, streaking toward Pago Pago, where a surgical team was assembling. He’d be all right ina few months, though it would cost Poseidon, as the saying goes, an arm and a leg.
    By the time the excitement had settled down, Russ and Jack had considered and discarded three plans for getting the heavy thing up on its slab. It lay there in the surf like a half-beached whale, weighing more than ten whales.
    Since it seemed indestructible, Jack was in favor of using explosives—a large enough shaped charge would pitch it forward. Russ was totally against the idea, since there was no way of telling how delicate the artifact was inside. Nonsense, Jack said; the thing had gone through earthquakes under crushing pressure. If there was anything fragile inside, it was long since garbaged.
    They asked Naomi, who had been a demolition engineer, and she said that intuitively it seemed impractical, and then did some numbers. No way. A free-standing shaped charge doesn’t direct all its force in one direction. The side blast would make a crater so big it would swallow the concrete slab—and the explosion would probably shatter every window on this side of the island.
    But she suggested a kind of explosive that is truly linear: a rocket engine. If they could strap a booster from a small spaceship onto it—if it were a kind they could shut off!—they could drag it up onto the slab by brute force.
    And think of the visuals.
    They got the other engineers together and hashed out the details. They’d need a kind of chute, to keep it going in a straight line, and the booster would have to be a kind that could be carefully controlled. The thing was pointed straight at Aggie Grey’s Hotel, and it would be bad publicity to demolish a century-old landmark full of tourists, where Jack had finally taught the bartender how to make a decent martini.
    But the scheme would be great publicity if it worked. They called the American, French, and British space agencies, but China underbid everyone by half: a mere thirtymillion eurobucks. Jack called some people and found he could underwrite a quarter of it by granting an exclusive news franchise. By lunchtime the next day they were joined by a Chinese lawyer with a short contract and a big notebook of specifications.
    They could have their rocket in eight days. Jack grumbled about that—they’d be old news by then—but it’s not exactly like buying a car off the lot. And the artifact wasn’t going anywhere.

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san guillermo, california, 1932
    “ J immy” had made a little too much noise during its sexual initiation, and although Mr. Berry was secretly relieved that his boy was doing something normal, he obeyed his wife’s wishes and fired Deborah, slipping her a hundred-dollar bill as she left. That was a year’s