Camouflage (8 page)

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."

The changeling went through the door where the exit sign glowed dim green, enjoying the last whiff of chlorine trapped inside the mask.

Outside, twenty men were sprawled around in various attitudes of misery, coughing and retching. There were spatters and pools of vomit everywhere. The changeling ordered his stomach to eject its contents.

A friend, Hugh, came over to where he was kneeling and pounded him on the back. "Geez Louise, Jimmy. You musta held your breath three minutes."

The changeling coughed in what it hoped was an appropriate way. "Swim a lot underwater," it said breathlessly. "God, don't that stuff smell awful?"

But the memory of nostalgia was strong. Where on Earth could it have lived, where chlorine was so concentrated in the air? Nowhere on the surface. That would be a good research project, after the war.

A lot of their training had a quality of improvisation, since much of the material of war had already left for the Pacific. So they learned how to work with tanks by advancing in formation behind a dumptruck carrying tank signs wired to its front and rear. They carried World War I Springfield rifles and practiced with them on the range.

Hand-to-hand combat training was a ballet of restraint for the changeling, who had been a remorseless predator for most of its life. It allowed the other trainees to throw it around and simulate dangerous blows. When it was
its
turn to be aggressive, it spared everyone's lives, knowing it could rip off one person's leg and beat everybody else to death with it.

It was properly respectful to the sergeants, and studied their individual ways with the men. Those techniques were more interesting than the coercive strategies of college professors, who presumably had intellectualized the process. The sergeants instinctively reached back into primate behavior, becoming the dominant male by shoving and punching and screaming. Anyone who resisted them was punished— immediately and then again later, with assignments, "shit details," that were degrading and exhausting.

The changeling did its share of those—cleaning toilets with a toothbrush and pulling twenty-four-hour kitchen police—not, of course, because it had
actually
lost its temper or misread the sergeants' desires. Too much self-control would make it conspicuous. It had to play the game.

-16-

Apia, Samoa, 2020

Russ and Jack, especially, agonized over the contract, distrusting the government on principle, but unable to deny either the financial argument or the scientific one. They faxed it to their Chinese and stateside lawyers, and they agreed that it was what it claimed to be.

They signed it on Friday, and on Saturday morning their work crew was suddenly tripled, cargo helicopters thrumming in hourly with the prefabricated materials for their laboratory's exoskeleton.

The carpenters and painters who were putting the finishing touches on the lab were nonplussed, to say the least. The elegant heat exchange system was carved away and replaced with heavy-duty machinery. The carefully glazed windows that looked out on the ocean now had a view of plain steel plate.

The moat was filled with fast-setting plastic concrete that supported the footers for the new metal walls and roof. NASA dug a new moat, wider and deeper and open to the sea: the lab became an artificial island fortress.

The twelve scientists, seven women and five men, were sensitive to turf. They never approached the artifact unaccompanied by the original team; they spent hours every day comparing notes with them, planning out approaches. It was a congenial, collegial mix, everyone linked by passionate curiosity.

None of the NASA scientists knew that the SNAP-30 reactor had been modified so that it could function as a bomb. Some of the mass that they thought was shielding was actually extra plutonium. Nesbitt had known, but his first allegiance was to the NSA, "No Such Agency," not NASA.

And he was no longer in the picture.

The NASA team was "all chiefs, no Indians," officially, but their nominal leader was Jan Dagmar, a white-haired exobiologist old enough to remember the first moon landing and young enough to go cave-diving for fun. She had advanced degrees in both physical and life sciences, on top of a B.A. in philosophy.

Her eleven compatriate scientists worked daily with the members of the original Poseidon team, and they worked together with them away from the site, too, comparing notes, planning out approaches. They all lived together in the Vaiala Beach Cottages, where number 7 was designated the common room, a big coffee urn always going, refrigerator and pantry full of food for thought.

Russell spent a lot of time in
fale
number 7, and had moved into number 5, leaving the fancy suite at Aggie Grey's, a ten-minute bicycle ride away. Jack stayed at his, saying he could think better in air-conditioning.

They all agreed, although Jack was characteristically impatient, to wait until the isolated environment was finished before starting their tests. So they had eight days of brainstorming their approaches. Equipment and supplies came in daily from Honolulu, Sydney, Tokyo.

The night before the first tests, Russ called Jan and they met at the rocks overlooking the site to share a bottle of the best champagne he could find in Samoa. The relationship that was developing between them was not exactly romantic in a conventional sense, but they had discovered in each other a kind of romantic reverence toward nature and science that went back to childhood. They had both wanted to be astronauts as children; Russell had actually been accepted as a mission specialist when the
Challenger
disaster put everything on hold, and he switched over to the doomed Mars missions.

They shared champagne and a pair of powerful binoculars, studying the crescent moon in the clear dark sky. The nightglass stabilizers hummed and clicked while he looked down the terminator edge and named the craters—Aristarchus, Messier, Globinus, Hell. "That's a deep one," he said.

She laughed. "I used to know some of the names. My dad had a telescope."

"You said they moved down to Florida to watch the moon rockets." She nodded in the darkness. "And all the other ones, the shuttle and all. But the Apollo rockets were the biggies—Saturn V's. Deafening: you could feel the noise rattling your bones. And dazzling, the one they did at night."

"That was the first one?"

"No, the last. The first one was Apollo 11, in 1969."

"Oh, yeah. I slept through it, my mother said. I was not quite two."

"I was twelve," she said, refilling her glass. "The first time I ever tasted champagne. Still makes me think of it."

They stared out over the project into the night, in companionable silence. The dim yellow security lights attracted bugs; small birds swooped out of the darkness. "This may be even bigger," she said. "It almost certainly will be."

"Even if it turns out to be homegrown," he said, "we'll have to totally rethink physics and chemistry."

"Chemistry
is
physics," she said automatically. "Tell you what. If this thing turns out to be terrestrial in origin, I'll buy you the most expensive bottle of champagne in the Honolulu duty-free."

They clicked glasses. "If not, I'll buy you two."

"What, you're that skeptical?"

"Hell, no; I agree with you. And I've got an expense account."

A test area, about four inches square, was marked off by tape on the artifact's side, about midway. An electron microscope and its positron equivalent could be easily brought to bear on the area. They built a forced-draft hood over it, to suck away and analyze poisonous vapors.

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.

-17
-

Bataan, Philippines, 7 December 1941

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.