Joe Haldeman - Camouflage

Colleen rolled in a cart with various glasses and bottles. “Gentlemen?” The NASA man stuck to tea, Russ took white wine, Jack a double Bloody Mary.

“So what does your dynamic dozen propose?” Jack asked as the woman left the room.

He leaned forward. “Isolation. More profound than extreme bio-hazard. The environment the military uses in developing…”

“Nanoweapons,” Russ supplied. “Of course we’re not actually developing them. Just learning how to defend ourselves against them, if somebody else does.”

“Well, it’s not just the military. Everybody developing nanotech uses similar safeguards to keep the little things isolated.

“We’d cover the lab building your crew is finishing now with an outside layer, sort of an exoskeleton. Basically a seamless metal room almost the same size as the lab. To enter, you have to go through an airlock. The atmospheric pressure inside is slightly lower than outside. The airlock’s also a changing room; nobody ever wears street clothes into the work area.”

“I don’t think our people would enjoy working under those constraints,” Russ said. “Feels like government interference.”

“You could also see it as taking advantage of the government. We give you the functional equivalent of lunar isolation—air and water recycled, power sources independent of the outside.”

“Plus getting back all the capital we’ve put in, to date?” Jack said, looking at Russ.

“That’s right,” Nesbitt said. Russ nodded almost imperceptibly.

Jack squeezed some more lime into his Bloody Mary. “I guess we’ll look into your contract. Have our lawyers look into it. Maybe make a counteroffer.”

“Fair enough.” Nesbitt stood. “I’ll go up and fetch it. I think you’ll find it clear and complete.”

What they wouldn’t find was a little detail about the “independent power source”: As a public health measure for the planet, its plutonium load could be command-detonated from Washington, turning the whole island into radioactive slag.

The changeling could have avoided the draft by simulating any number of maladies or deficiencies; one out of three American men were rejected. Like a lot of men, for various reasons, he avoided it by joining the Marines.

The Corps was not enthusiastic about recruits like Jimmy Berry, no matter how good they would look on a recruiting poster. He was tall, strong, handsome, healthy, and obviously from a rich family. He was probably lying about not having gone to college, to get out of being assigned to Officer Candidate School. He would be hard to break, which would make it that much harder to break the other shitbirds. And they had to be broken before they could be built anew as Marines.

They called him Pretty Boy and Richie Rich. But he was a little more of a problem than they’d anticipated. On their way to their first day in barracks, a big drill sergeant called him out of ranks— “You march like a fuckin’ girl”—and made him do fifty push-ups, which he did without breaking a sweat. Then the sergeant sat on his back and said, “Fifty more.” He did these with no obvious effort.

So the first night, the drill sergeant organized a “blanket party” for the annoying shitbird. He got three more big sergeants and three big corporals to throw a blanket over the sleeping Jimmy and beat some respect into him.

It was two in the morning and the changeling, mentally playing the piano with four hands, heard the seven tiptoeing down the aisle of the barracks, but dismissed the sound as unimportant. Nothing here could hurt it.

But when the blanket suddenly was wrapped tightly around it and someone struck it with a club, it did fight back for less than a second. Then it figured out the situation and was totally passive.

In less than a second, though, it had broken a wrist and two thumbs, and had kicked one man across the room, to get a concussion against the opposite wall.

One of the survivors kept swinging the club at Jimmy’s inert form, until the others hustled him out. Then the recruits, by ones and twos, came over to see what damage had been done.

The changeling manufactured bruises and cuts and released an appropriate amount of blood. It was a ghastly sight in the dim light from the latrine. “We have to get him to the infirmary,” someone said.

“No,” the changeling said.

The overhead lights snapped on. “What the fuck is going on in here?” the drill sergeant roared. He was wearing clean pressed fatigues, but the shirt was only buttoned halfway, and his left hand hung useless at his side, the thumb turning purple and blue. “You shitbirds get back to your bunks.”

Two noncoms sidled by him to the unconscious one lying by the wall. He moaned when they picked him up and hustled him away.

The drill sergeant stood in front of Jimmy, inspecting his bruises and cuts and two black eyes. “What happened to you, recruit?”

“What do you think happened, Sergeant?”

“Looks to me like you fell out of your bunk.”

“That must be it, Sergeant.”

“Will you need medical help?”

“No, Sergeant.”

“LOUDER!” he screamed.

“NO, SERGEANT!” The changeling matched his tone and accent perfectly.

“Good.” He wheeled and marched back toward the door. “You shit-birds didn’t see nothin’. Get to sleep. Formation at 0500.” He snapped off the lights.

After a minute of silence, people started to whisper. The changeling sat upright in its bunk. Someone brought him aspirin and a cup of water.

“Where’d you learn to fight like that?”

“Fell out of bed,” it said. “So did the sergeant.”

That was repeated all over the camp, especially when the next morning they had a new drill sergeant, and the old one was nowhere to be seen. They gave the changeling the nickname “Joe Louis.”

The new drill sergeant was not inclined to single out Joe Louis. But he didn’t favor him, either. He had eight weeks to turn all these pathetic civilians into Marines.

For the first week they did little other than run, march, and suffer through calisthenics, from five in the morning until chow call at night— and sometimes a few more miles’ run after dinner, just to settle their stomachs. The changeling found it all fairly restful, but observed other people’s responses to the stress and did an exactly average amount of sweating and groaning. At the rifle range, it aimed to miss the bull’s-eye most of the time, without being conspicuously bad.

It almost made a mistake at the gas-mask training “final exam.” One at a time, the recruits were led into a darkened room where they had to wait until the gas-masked sergeant within asked you for your name, rank, and serial number. You gasped them out and then quickly put on your gas mask, saluted, and left.

The changeling walked into the dark room and took a breath, and was almost overcome with an inchoate rush of nostalgia. It had forgotten, after a million years, that its home planet’s atmosphere was similar to this, about 10 percent chlorine. The smell was delightful.

The sergeant with the gas mask and clipboard let it wait for about two minutes. Then he turned a bright flashlight into its eyes. “Are you breathing, Private Berry?”

“No, sir.”

“Don’t call me ‘sir’; I work for a living.” He kept the flashlight steady for another minute. “I’ll be goddamned. You swim a lot, Private Berry?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Underwater, I guess?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

He paused for another thirty seconds and shook his head. “ Dang! Give me your name, rank, and serial number, and put the mask on.” The changeling did. “Now get the hell outta here before you puke all over me.”