Joe Haldeman - Camouflage

While they were dressing, a new Japanese soldier stepped into the doorway. He had a clean uniform and no rifle. He pointed at the naked man on the floor. “Bury him,” he said in English.

“He ain’t dead,” his friend protested.

“Oh.” The officer unsnapped a holster and pulled out a Nambu pistol. He bent over and put the muzzle in the man’s mouth and fired. The noise was loud in the small room. Blood and brains and chips of bone scattered across the concrete floor. “Bury him now.” He holstered the pistol and walked out.

The man who had been holding his friend started after the officer. Two others tried to restrain him, but he broke free. At the door, though, he sagged and just stared out. “Bastards,” he said. “Fucking Jap bastards.”

While the changeling was enjoying the hospitality of the Japanese, the chameleon was helping to oversee the construction of Birkenau, a new extermination camp four kilometers from Auschwitz. He was about to meet his soulmate, Josef Mengele, for the second time.

The chameleon had a good instinct for the winds of war, and so had moved to Germany in 1937, and took the identity of a young right-wing doctor in Frankfurt. He was a perfect Aryan, blond and blue-eyed and athletic.

In 1938, he enlisted in the Nazi Schutzstaffel, the SS “Black- shirts,” where he first met Mengele, also a young doctor. The randomness of war separated them, though; Mengele served as a medical officer in France and Russia, where he was wounded and decorated. The chameleon wanted to be in on the invasion of Poland, where he operated on a lot of people but saw no action to speak of.

In 1939 the chameleon found a position more amenable to his talents. He was deployed to Brandenburg for “Aktion T4,” the Nazi euthenasia project. People who had physical deformities, mental retardation, epilepsy, senile disorders, and a host of other conditions that made them inferior to the Aryan ideal were allowed “mercy killing.” In other places, this was done by more or less painless injections. In Brandenburg, they pioneered the use of the gas chamber disguised as a shower room.

Hitler terminated Aktion T4 in August of 1941, because of public outcry after an influential bishop disclosed the truth of the project in a broadcast sermon. The chameleon was transferred to Auschwitz, where his expertise with gas chambers was valued, as well as his prior service in Poland.

He didn’t like Poland at all. Brandenburg was a civilized university town, with sophisticated food and drink and vice. Auschwitz had nothing but subhumans destined for rightful extermination. Granted, the difference between human and subhuman was moot to him.

The chameleon was pleased when, in May 1943, his old acquaintance from Frankfurt was assigned—by Himmler, no less— to be chief women’s doctor, and then was appointed chief doctor for both Auschwitz and Birkenau. The chameleon became one of Mengele’s assistant surgeons.

By this time the Final Solution was in full swing, boxcars arriving regularly, crowded with miserable castouts: gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and, mostly, Jews. Himmler had ordered Birkenau built with a capacity for 100,000 prisoners, more than three times the size of Auschwitz proper; its gas chambers and crematoria could destroy 1,500 people in one day. It was all terror and chaos, and Mengele loved it.

One of the duties that doctors shared was to be “choosers,” who stood in front of the doors when the boxcars were opened, and on the basis of visual inspection ordered people to go to the right, for the work camp, or the left, for extermination. A lot of the doctors detested this detail, but Mengele loved it. He even showed up to watch when it wasn’t his turn, an arresting sight in his immaculate uniform, mirror-bright boots, white gloves, and riding crop.

One reason he liked to observe the crowds staggering out of the boxcars was to make sure that no twins were separated or sent to extermination before he could make use of them. Twins comprised his main area of research, and the chameleon helped him in this quest for knowledge.

Mengele’s interest was twofold: He wondered whether there might be some way to induce properly Aryan women to have twins, so the Master Race could grow at twice the usual rate, and he also did simple environmental experiments that were a perversion of “nature versus nurture”—he would leave one twin alone while he stressed the other one to death with starvation, poison, asphyxiation, mutilation, or whatever occurred to him, and then, after killing the control twin as well, usually with an injection of phenol to the heart, he and his assistants (including the chameleon) would conduct parallel autopsies, noting internal changes that might be related to the cause of death.

It was not exact science, and perhaps the motivation for it had little to do with anything more exalted than taking pleasure in control, torture, murder, and dissection. Mengele loved it, smiling and chatting all the while.

The chameleon was amazed. In tens of thousands of years, he couldn’t remember having met a human being so similar to himself. Could Mengele be another one of whatever he was? When the time was right, he might find out by killing him. Meanwhile, he just enjoyed his company.

Mengele appreciated the chameleon’s skill in underwater autopsies, which others found unnerving. When they killed people by asphyxiation, in the high-altitude simulation chamber, they put the corpses immediately underwater for dissection. An observer watched for telltale bubbles, to see which parts of the body retained the most air. There was a lot in the brain.

Most of Mengele’s “scientific” records were destroyed as the Soviets advanced on Auschwitz in 1945. The high-altitude work survived, though, and eventually informed space research in both Russia and the United States.

When the Soviet soldiers marched through the gates of Birkenau, the chameleon was one of thousands of starving Jews. His pal Mengele escaped because, out of vanity, he had opted out of the SS practice of having your blood type tattooed on your arm.

The chameleon proceeded to track him down, keeping his Jewish identity and joining the Mossad under Issad Harel in the 1950s. He left the Israeli Secret Service after ten years, with a few tidbits lifted from the Mengele file, and met him just off a riverbank near Enseada de Bertioga, Brazil, on 7 February 1979.

He was a fit old man of sixty-eight, swimming. The chameleon changed back into his 1941 Nazi appearance when he waded out to say hello. The old murderer’s eyes got very wide before his head vanished under the water. Mortal, after all.

Everything else having failed to impress the artifact, the NASA folks appealed to their opposite numbers in the American military.

For more than fifty years there had been an international agreement forbidding weapons of mass destruction in orbit. That didn’t mean you couldn’t build them on the Earth, of course, and wait for the law to change.

HESL, the High Energy Spalling Laser, was not technically a “weapon of mass destruction” anyhow. It was designed to vaporize a small target, like a tank or a ballistic missile or even a limo with the right person in it, from orbit. What kept it from being orbited, for the time being, was the powerful nuclear reactor that powered up its zap.

The machine had been designed to just fit inside the new space shuttle’s cargo bay, which meant it was way too large for the protective shell around the artifact. It took six weeks to disassemble it and rebuild a structure large enough to house the weapon.

Inevitably, it caused some friction between Russ and Jan.