West of Nothing

12. The Hard Hat

"WHATCHA LOOKING AT?" From less than a foot away, Shouter's exclamation nearly blew out Mason's left eardrum.

"It's nothing." Mason minimized the image.

"If it was nothing, then why were you gawking at it like a porn star?" Before Mason could stop him, Shouter reached over and hit the key combination to throw it onto a jumbo.

"Not the hard hat debate again," Corny groaned. "How many times have we been over this?"

"We haven't heard what the kid has to say yet," Skunkworks spoke up for him. "Maybe he's got a new angle on it."

"So what's your new angle, Peeper?" Shouter egged him on.

Terrific, Mason thought. He hadn't meant to get dragged into this. All he had to go on was a hunch. "I'm just trying to figure out what the hard hat is doing there."

"That's obvious—protecting it!"

"From what? It's not like it has to worry about natural predators. And the whole point of being small is to be silent and sneaky so you can get into places without being noticed. But why go to all the trouble to miniaturize—it's seriously freaking hard to build something that small—just to slap a big-ass helmet on it?"

"That thing seems to move around just fine, hard hat or no," Corny pointed out.

"Yeah, somehow it does," Mason said. "But just imagine how much better it would move if it wasn't armored up like a Sherman tank. I did some rough simulations of its gait mechanics. The simulations wouldn't come out right unless I boosted the relative weights of the hard hat and the feet—which seem overly large to begin with—by some crazy amount."

"Maybe your simulations are shit!" Shouter gave his opinion.

I checked his figures, Gabby said, which was half true. Mason had shown her what he was doing through a screen-sharing function of the chat app. She agreed he hadn't made any obvious errors.

"There are good reasons to make heavy clompers," Skunkworks said. "Like having a lower center of gravity. And if you're going to use them to break things, it helps to have something punchy on the end."

"That's true," Mason agreed. "But the same can't be said for the hard hat."

"Maybe it's used as ballast to center it and keep it from shimmying around," Skunkworks reasoned.

"If that were its main purpose, it would make more sense for it to be on the bottom. This way makes it top heavy, like a gorilla on stilts."

"Are you blind?" Shouter said. "That's not a tattoo there. Something really nailed the little bastard. Without the hard hat, it would have been annihilated."

"But what could have done that?" Mason wondered aloud. "You'd have to be the world's best marksman to hit something that size with a bullet."

"Could be the other way around!" Shouter said. "Maybe it got blasted into something. The math works out the same."

"It might not have anything to do with ballistics," Skunkworks said. "Industrial acid or lasers could create that sort of radial pattern. There's some pretty good evidence for lasers, actually." He displayed a top-down view. "If it were a high speed impact, you would expect to see the greatest damage right in the center, but that's not the case here. The center is almost damage free, more of an epicenter really, a central point of divergence."