Joe Haldeman: Camouflage

Naomi was brown from the sun and as big as Russell, athletic, biceps tight against the cuffed sleeves of her khaki work clothes, dark sweat patches already forming. She had severe Arabic features and a bright smile.

She squeezed half a lime into a glass and bubbled ice water over it, carbonation sizzling, and drank half of it in a couple of gulps. She wiped her mouth with a blue bandana and then pressed it to her forehead. “Pray for rain,” she said.

“Are you serious?” Halliburton said.

She grimaced. “My prayers are never answered.” She looked at the cumulus piling up over the island. “Good if we could get most of this done by two thirty.” It usually rained around three. “Comes down hard, we may get sand in the mountings.”

“Would that throw off the readings?”

She pulled her sunglasses down on her nose and looked over them at him. “No; they’re locked in now. I’d just rather watch TV tonight than take down the tripods and clean them.” One of the tanks roared and coughed white smoke. “All right.” She set the glass down and jogged toward Larry with the rest of the bottle.

Russell and Halliburton didn’t have to be there; the measuring was straightforward. But there wasn’t anything else to do until the artifact was brought in the next day. Halliburton called the central computer with his note pad and gave it the Wallace-Gellman numbers, which were basically the number of millimeters the concrete pad flexed in three directions as the tanks wheeled from place to place. The artifact would eventually rest in the center of the slab, which was a little smaller than a basketball court, but it would have to be rolled or dragged there from the edge. They wanted to be sure the thing wouldn’t flex the slab so much that it broke in the process.

Trouble came in the form of a young man who was not dressed for the beach; not dressed for Samoa heat. He belonged in an air- conditioned office, dark rumpled jacket and tie. He walked up to the yellow tape border—danger do not pass—and waved toward Halliburton and Russell, calling out, “I say! Hello?” A very black man with a British accent.

Russell left Halliburton with his numbers and approached the man cautiously. They didn’t see many strangers, and never without a rent-a-cop escort.

“How did you get by the guard?” Russ said.

“Guard?” His eyebrows went up. “I saw that little house, but there was no one in it.”

“Or just possibly you waited for the guard to take a toilet break, and snuck in. We really should hire two. You did see the sign.”

“Yes, private property; that piqued my interest. I thought this was free beach here.”

“Not now.”

“But the gate of the fence there was open…”

The guard came running up behind the man. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sutton. He got by—”

Russ waved it off. “We have a lease on this stretch,” he told the black man.

“Atlantis Associates,” he said, nodding. That wasn’t on the sign.

“So you know more about me than I know about you. Work for the government?”

He smiled. “American government. I’m a reporter for the Pacific Stars and Stripes.”

A military newsie. “You in the service?” He didn’t look it.

He nodded. “Sergeant Tulip Carson, sir.” To Russ’s quizzical look, he added, “In the middle of gender reassignment, sir.”

It was a lot to absorb all at once, but Russ managed a reply. “We aren’t speaking to the press at this time.”

“You volunteered for the submarine rescue earlier this year,” he said quickly, “and then claimed salvage on a sunken vessel you’d detected on the way.”

“Public record,” Russ said. “Good-bye, Sergeant Carson.” He turned and walked away.

“But there’s no record of a ship ever going down there. Mr. Sutton? And now you have that shrouded float waiting out there … and the helicopters and tanks…”

“Good day, Sergeant,” he said to the air, smiling. This is the way they’d wanted the publicity to start. Something mysterious? Who, us?

By the time they unveiled the artifact, the whole world would be watching.

The changeling began to construct sentences on its own just after New Year’s, but nothing complex, and often it was nonsense or weirdly encoded. It still “wasn’t quite right,” as Jimmy’s mother nervously said.

The changeling didn’t have to acquire intelligence, which it had in abundance, but it had to understand intelligence in a human way. That was a long stretch from any of the aquatic creatures it had successfully mimicked.

It came from a race with a high degree of social organization, but had forgotten all of that millennia ago. On Earth, it had lived as a colony of individual creatures in the dark hot depths; it had lived as a simple mat of protoplasm before that. It had lived in schools of fish, briefly, but most of its recent experience, tens of thousands of years, had been as a lone predator.

It had seen that predation was modified in these creatures; they were at the top of the food chain, but animal food had long since been killed by the time they consumed it. It naturally tried to understand the way society was organized in those terms: food was killed in some hidden or distant location, and prepared and distributed by means of mysterious processes.

The family unit was organized around food presentation and consumption, though it had other functions. The changeling recognized protection and training of the young from its aquatic associations, but was ignorant about sex and mating—when another large predator approached, it had always interpreted that as aggression, and attacked. Its kind hadn’t reproduced in millions of years; that anachronism had gone the way of death. It didn’t know the facts of life.

At least one woman was more than willing to provide lessons.

When it knew it would be alone for a period, the changeling practiced changing its appearance, using the people it observed as models. Changing its facial features was not too difficult; cartilage and subcutaneous fat could be moved around in a few minutes, a relatively painless process. Changing the underlying skull was a painful business that took eight or ten minutes.

Changing the whole body shape took an hour of painful concentration, and was complicated if the body had significantly more or less mass than Jimmy. For less mass, it could remove an arm or a leg, and redistribute mass accordingly. The extra part would die unless there was a reason to keep it alive, but that was immaterial; it still provided the right raw materials to reconstruct Jimmy.

Making a larger body required taking on flesh; not easy to do. The changeling assimilated Ronnie, the family’s old German shepherd, in order to take the form of Jimmy’s overweight father. Of course Ronnie was dead when he was reconstituted; the changeling left the body outside Jimmy’s door, and the family just assumed it had gone there to say good-bye, how sweet.

The changeling had seen Mr. Berry in a bathing suit, so about 90 percent of its simulation was accurate. The other 10 percent might have made Mrs. Berry faint.

Similarly, the changeling could, in the dark privacy of Jimmy’s bedroom, discard an arm and most of a leg and make itself a piece of flesh that had a shape similar to that of the nurse Deborah, at least the form she apparently had under her uniform, severely corseted. But it had no more detail than a department store dummy. The times being what they were, it could have had free rein of the house and not found any representation of a nude female.

It was still months away from being able to simulate anything like social graces, but to satisfy this particular desire, no grace was needed. Precisely at 7:30, Deborah brought in the breakfast tray.