Joe Haldeman - Camouflage

The changeling was possibly the most intelligent reader who saw that one and wondered if it just might be true. In fact, though, it wasn’t.

There were only two aliens on the island.

Apia was too local and too small for a killing spree, and the chameleon was getting bored. He left work a few minutes early and took a cab to the little Fagali’i Airport outside of town, and got on the six o’clock puddle-jumper over to American Samoa. The twelve-passenger plane had sixteen passengers, but four of them were children sitting on their mothers’ laps. The flight was only forty minutes long, but forty long bouncing minutes locked up with crying and puking children could turn even a normal man’s thoughts to violence. The chameleon distracted himself conjuring images of infanticides past.

It was still blistering hot at the Pago Pago airport, but worse in town: it had been a “bad tuna day.” Almost half of the people in American Samoa work in one of the two tuna canneries; the plants’ malodorous waste goes into the harbor to compete with sewage for one’s attention on hot still days.

Darkness brought a breeze, though. The chameleon went down to the waterfront in search of trouble. The area east of the canneries, the Darkside, was where to find it. On his way down, he ducked into an alley and came out the other end looking like a rumpled Pakistani sailor.

The first couple of bars looked too quiet for fun, catering to the yachties who moored in the cesspool long enough to take on provisions— and perhaps avail themselves of the Darkside’s cheap women and inexpensive drugs.

He heard a commotion and went into a dark dive called Goodbye Charlie’s. Two tall and muscular Samoans were standing at the bar, yelling at each other in a couple of languages. The bartender watched them warily, evidently moving bottles and glasses out of reach. The other patrons were looking on with an air of detachment. It might be a regular evening diversion.

The chameleon took the only empty seat at the bar and waved an American twenty. The bartender sidled over, not taking his eyes off the two. “Yeah?”

“I would like a Budweiser and an ounce of whisky,” he said with a pronounced Pakistani accent. The bartender gave him a look and snatched the twenty away.

He came back with no change, a warm bottle of Bud, and a tumbler that had been rinsed but not cleaned. He poured a generous inch of liquor into it from a bottle without a label.

“Are those gentlemen twinking?” the chameleon asked.

“Tweaking? I guess.” American Samoa’s drug of choice was methamphetamine, ice. People coming off it get into a dark mood, sometimes argumentative and combative, “tweaking.” It could lead to violence.

The chameleon drank the whisky in two gulps and slid off the stool. He walked unsteadily over to stand in front of the two sailors. “I say.” They ignored him. “I say! Will you quiet down?”

“Yeah, right, fuck with ’em,” a drunk American said into the sudden silence. The two looked blearily down at the little Pakistani, a foot shorter than them. One leaned forward and swung at him, an open-handed slap.

The chameleon ducked under the blow and grabbed the man’s wrist and twisted, bringing him to his knees. He twisted harder and pulled, and the man’s shoulder joint popped like a chicken leg coming off. He rolled down on the floor, keening in pain. The chameleon silenced him with two vicious head kicks. Bar stools crashed all around as most people backed away from the action. The drunk American stayed seated and applauded slowly.

“Tough little Paki,” the other Samoan said, and produced a box- cutter from somewhere.

“Enough!” the bartender roared. “Take it outside!”

“Okay.” The chameleon turned on his heel and walked toward the door.

Witnesses would later tell the police that whatever happened was too fast to follow. The Samoan touched the Pakistani on the shoulder, evidently, and he spun around.

The Pakistani handed the Samoan his box knife back and said, “Ta.” The Samoan stood up straight and looked at the scarlet stain spreading on the abdomen of his T-shirt. Then loops of bluish bloodstained guts slid out, hanging to his knees, and he crumpled over dead.

No one saw the Pakistani leave. When they crowded out the door, there was no one there except an old man sitting on the pier, fishing with a handline.

In the morning, the police would find two prostitutes’ bodies in a Dumpster. There were strangle signs on their necks, livid finger and thumb marks, but they’d died of cerebral hemorrhage, their heads beaten together.

When the sun rose higher, they smelled and found a dead Pakistani sailor in an alleyway, inexplicably naked. Case closed, anyhow.

The chameleon was gone by then, on the dawn flight back to Apia, in a much improved mood.

The third morning was clear and calm, so the changeling took mouthgill and gear down to the Palolo Deep Marine Preserve, less than a kilometer down the road. It had formed a bathing suit around its body, modest by American standards, but also wore the lavalava walking to the beach, so as not to offend the locals—who were all sleeping it off anyhow, except for the yawning young girl who took its money at the park entrance.

The tide was high. The changeling put on its unnecessary mask, mouthgill, and fins, and slipped into the familiar medium.

In the shallows between the shore and the reef, there was a scene of unearthly strangeness—a many-acre farm of giant clams, thousands of them, from a foot in diameter to the size of manhole covers and larger. There were smaller ones protected by enclosures of chicken wire; the changeling salivated at the thought of what they would taste like. It worked a small one out of its cage and, hardening its teeth, crunched down on it: delicious.

The reef was beautiful, a multicolor maze of living coral, but that wasn’t the changeling’s destination. It swam quickly beyond, out to where the waves crashed on the barrier reef that separated the island from the deeps. It cut through the strong swirling currents, found a jagged opening, and dove through.

It swam down through the cool stillness to the bottom, and stashed its equipment under a rock.

How fast could it change into a shark?

It took twelve pain-filled minutes, perhaps its fastest time. Halfway through, it was visited by a reef shark almost its size, which circled it a few times and nosed it, and apparently decided that whatever the strange thing was, you couldn’t eat it or breed with it, and drifted away. Sea creatures did occasionally bite the changeling, but most of them immediately spit out the alien stuff.

It became a hammerhead for the good eyesight, and swam a couple of kilometers south, to visit the Poseidon site. It was easy to find, following a metallic taste that was quite different from anything it had experienced before. It found the source easily, warm water coming out of a discharge tube; it evidently cooled the nuclear reactor that powered the place.

After a minute’s search, it found the intake tube as well. That could come in handy. If you plugged it up, how long would it be before the reactor started to heat up and shut down? Or melt down.

It inspected the parts of the blast shield that were in reasonably deep water, not wanting to attract attention. A nine-foot-long hammerhead would be pretty conspicuous in shallow water. It could hear children splashing and swimming on the village side of the shield, and was tempted to give them something to tell their playmates about— just swim up and smile—but no, best not to do anything unusual, unsharklike.