Joe Haldeman - Camouflage

First they measured it passively. It had an albedo of exactly 1.0—it reflected all light that fell on it, in every wavelength. Optically, it presented a perfect curve, down to 1/200 of a wave of mercury light, a surface impossible for a human optician to duplicate.

Although it looked like metal, it felt like silk; it wasn’t cold to the touch. It was not a conductor of heat, nor, as far as passive testing could tell, of electricity.

Then they went to work, trying to dent it. Scrape it, corrode it, chip it, burn it—do anything to make the artifact acknowledge the existence of humanity.

When it was still underwater, Poseidon divers had tried a diamond-tipped drill on it, to no effect. But now they rolled in a huge mining drill: it used a 200-horsepower electric motor to spin its diamond tip at 10,000 r.p.m., with more than a ton of force behind it.

The scream it made was too much for the scientists’ earplugs; they had to rig a remote control for it. At the maximum push, just before the diamond tip evaporated, it shattered all the useless windows and ruined the positron microscope beyond repair.

The electron microscope worked, though, and all it showed was a film of oxides from the metallic part of the ruined drill bit. When they cleaned that off, even at the highest magnification there was no difference between the test square and the undrilled surface next to it: a perfect mirror.

Many of Jimmy’s boot camp compadres steamed across the Pacific with him, to join the Fourth Marine Regiment in Shanghai. They arrived in November 1941, and barely had time to get their land legs before they were ordered to sail again, this time for the Philippines, assigned to provide beach defense for Corregidor.

The naval command knew it was only a matter of time before Japan attacked American forces in the Pacific. America had severed trade ties with Japan in July, and frozen her assets in American banks. The Navy and the Army set about redistributing their meager forces to places that seemed most vulnerable to attack. That included the Philippines, which blocked Japanese access to the East Indies.

The Fourth Regiment set up shop in Corregidor and sent a detachment, including Jimmy, south to the small base at Bataan. They called it a “shit assignment,” one step farther away from the amenities of Manila, but they didn’t know how terminally bad it was going to become.

When the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor on the morning of the seventh (which was the eighth on Jimmy’s side of the international date line), there was an immediate air raid alert in Manila and American fighters and bombers scrambled into the air to do battle. The timing was off, though; there were no Japanese in sight. They landed again, and when, a few hours later, the Japanese did come screaming out of the sun, there was no warning for the planes on the ground.

Bataan and Corregidor were constantly bombed and strafed, with little or no help from the air. Meanwhile, Japanese land forces were coming ashore to the north and south, in Luzon and Mindanao.

The original War Plan, before Pearl Harbor, had called for all American forces to go south to Bataan, and maintain a holding action there, delaying the Japanese advance into the East Indies. Instead, General MacArthur moved his forces up to meet the Japanese where they were landing.

MacArthur had at his disposal 120,000 Filipino troops, most of them reservists who had never fired a shot, and one-tenth that many Americans. They had the Japanese outnumbered but not outgunned, and the defensive move was an unmitigated disaster. He went back to the original plan on 27 December, and within a week all the northern Luzon forces were sharing Bataan’s limited resources with Jimmy. They were soon joined by thousands of Filipino civilians, fleeing the invaders. In two weeks, everyone’s food ration was cut in half; in February, they were reduced to a thousand calories per day, mostly from rice. They got a little tough meat from the slaughter of starving horses and mules.

Defeat inevitable, MacArthur and other top brass were evacuated to the safety of Australia, while the Japanese continued to pound the Bataan Peninsula.

In April, the Japanese ground troops moved down to take over. On the eighth, General Wainwright concentrated all his viable forces for a last-ditch effort on Corregidor, and on the nineteenth formally surrendered the starvelings left behind on Bataan.

The changeling had watched this all with interest. It had been killed twice by bombs, but in the chaos it was easy to reassemble at night and show up as a lucky survivor. It had mimicked the weight loss of the men around it, Jimmy going from a healthy 180 pounds to a haggard 130.

When they heard about the surrender, some of the men decided to chance it and try to swim across two miles of shark- infested water to Corregidor. The changeling could have done that with ease, of course, temporarily becoming one of the infesting sharks, but decided against it. Corregidor was doomed, too; why bother?

His friend Hugh, who had been with him since boot camp, told Jimmy that he was tempted to swim even though he knew he wouldn’t make it; he couldn’t swim two miles even if he were in good shape, and the water a placid swimming pool. “I got a feeling,” he said, “that drowndin’ ain’t nothin’ compared to what the fuckin’ Japs are gonna do to us.”

That would turn out to be true for almost everyone but the changeling. They were about to begin a forced march from Bataan to a concentration camp some two weeks away, under broiling sun without food or water. The orders that the Japanese had been given in Manila said “any American captive who is unable to continue marching all the way to the concentration camp should be put to death.” And they might be the lucky ones.

The changeling and Hugh and a dozen others were in a communications shack when the Japanese came. Five young soldiers with bayoneted rifles crowded into the small room and started screaming. They got louder and angrier, and the changeling realized that they expected their captives to speak Japanese. What else didn’t they know?

By gestures they got across the idea that the men were supposed to take off their clothes. One was too slow, and a soldier prodded him in the buttock with the bayonet, which caused an unusual amount of blood and hysterical laughter.

“Oh my God,” Hugh whispered. “They’re going to kill us all.”

“Try to stay calm,” the changeling said without opening its mouth. “They’ll go after people who draw attention to themselves.” As drill sergeants did.

They rummaged through the pile of clothing, and one of them found a Japanese coin. He held it up and started screaming at a man.

“That ain’t mine,” he said. “They told us to get rid of all that shit.” A soldier behind him clubbed him with his rifle butt at the base of the skull, and he went down like a tree. The soldier clubbed him twice more, but stopped at a sharp command.

The one who seemed to be in charge screamed at the captives, repeatedly gesturing at their fallen comrade, who was bleeding from both ears and twitching. Then they left, as suddenly as they’d appeared.

A man kneeled by his friend and gently turned him over. Only the whites of his eyes showed. He drooled saliva and blood and something like water. “Cerebrospinal fluid,” the changeling said.

“He gonna die?”

“It’s very serious.” The changeling sorted through the pile and found its fatigues and put them on. “Better get dressed,” it said to the man holding his friend. “We want to all look the same to them.”

“Jimmy’s right,” Hugh said, finding his own clothes. “They prob’ly gonna kill us all, but I ain’t gonna go first.”