Camouflage Read online

  A shark bit it in two, which was annoying. But it evidently didn’t like the flavor, and left the two halves alone. The changeling crawled along the bottom, crunching up bivalves and crabs, and when it had enough mass, it took the familiar shape of a great white shark itself. By then it was in the South China Sea. It pointed itself east. Only ten thousand miles to California.

  —23—

  Apia, Samoa, 24 December 2020

  The evacuation of the artifact room had taken a little longer than expected, but there were no leaks, and all of the data- gathering equipment seemed to be working fine. At five thirty, Naomi said through the monitor, “Okay. We can start the countdown.”

  Jack nodded. “Fire when ready, Gridley.” No one else in the room knew who Gridley was.

  After a few minutes, there was no temperature change at 10 percent. Naomi increased it to 20, and then to 30.

  “Go to fifty,” Jack said, and Russ and Jan nodded.

  “Where’s it all going?” Jan muttered, a question they’d all asked before. At least when there was air in the building, some of the energy had gone into heating the air. Now, the laser was putting out enough energy to run a small city into a hundred-square- centimeter area, and it was all disappearing—into the artifact, apparently.

  “Go to a hundred?” Jack said.

  “Seventy-five,” Russ and Jan said simultaneously.

  It never got there. The monitor went blank and a second later the people in cottage 7 heard the dull thump of an explosion.

  Jan and Russ were the first ones there, with their bicycles. Half the building had collapsed, the big laser almost submerged in the water. Naomi and Moishe staggered out of the water, coughing and gagging.

  Russ took Naomi’s arm. “Are you all right?”

  She ignored the question, and stared back at the wreck of the lab. “It moved.”

  “Moved?” Russ said.

  “Floated up and crashed down.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Merry Christmas.”

  Most of the equipment was wrecked, but a high-speed camera, which the manufacturer called “ruggedized,” had been rugged enough to record the sequence of events before it lost power and fell into the water.

  When the laser increased to 72 percent output, 300,000 watts, the artifact gently rose off its cradle, at a uniform velocity of 18.3 centimeters per second. When it cleared the laser’s beam, the weapon punched a hole in the opposite wall, causing the slight explosion they had heard, as the building suddenly filled with air. The beam didn’t do any other damage except to explode a coconut at the top of a tree on the Mulinu’a Peninsula, more than two kilometers away.

  The artifact continued rising diagonally until it was poised over the laser’s optical fiber gun-barrel. Then, whatever force had been holding it aloft quit. It fell, destroying the laser and collapsing that side of the building into the bay.

  The camera didn’t record what happened after that, but evidently the artifact floated back up and repositioned itself on the cradle in the now open-air artifact room. When the investigators got to it, a few minutes later, it was still beaded with salt water, and cool to the touch.

  This would change the direction of their research.

  —24—

  Grover City, California, 1948

  The changeling enjoyed swimming for a few years as a great white shark—it had had that form for a thousand times as long as the human one.

  For reasons it didn’t understand, it circled for hours over the deep Tonga Trench, and dove as far as it could in comfort. But it was used to having its animal bodies do things out of obscure impulse, and after awhile moved on. When it got within a few hundred yards of the California coast, it dropped most of its mass and became a bottle-nosed dolphin.

  At two in the morning, it swam into a protected cove, shallow enough to be safe from serious predators, and spent a painful hour turning back into a human being.

  It used the familiar Jimmy template, but made itself a little shorter and gave itself dark hair with a touch of gray. It darkened its skin and created black pants and a black sweater—burglar gear.

  It had to steal some money and information.

  The lay of the land was similar to what it had faced the first time it had been human; it crossed a short beach and climbed some rocks to find a winding coastal road. It headed north at an easy lope.

  Four times it hid from approaching headlights. After a few miles it came upon an isolated service station with a cottage out back.

  Perfect for its petty theft. It could make dollar bills as easily as it made clothing, out of its own substance, but it didn’t know whether currency might have changed, whether you still needed ration books— whether there might be some completely new wartime system. They might be using Japanese yen, if the war was over.

  The placards in the service station window were in English, and none of them exhorted you to join the services—one did have an American eagle with the instruction to buy U.S. savings bonds, but not war bonds. Maybe the war was over and the Japanese hadn’t won.

  The door was locked, but it was a simple one. It turned a forefinger into a living skeleton key, and felt its way through the tumblers in less than a minute.

  It wished for moonlight. Even with irises totally dilated, there was little detail.

  One wall was shelves full of automobile supplies. It opened a quart of oil and drank it for energy and the interesting flavor, altering its metabolism for a few minutes to something it had used a few hundred thousand years before, lying alongside the vent of an undersea volcano.

  It found a box of wooden matches and sucked the end off one, for the phosphorus, and then lit one, with a flare of light and a delicious sting of sulfur dioxide. It saw two things it needed: a 1947 World Almanac and a cash register.

  After stuffing the almanac in its belt, it lit another match and studied the machine. Pushing down on the no sale key produced a loud chime, and the cash drawer slid out with a metallic hiss.

  It studied a twenty-dollar bill in the match light. No obvious differences. American currency had changed in size three years before the changeling had become Jimmy, and people had still been complaining about it.

  It gave a cursory check to the ten, five, and one, and put them back into the till. Then the lights went on with a loud snap.

  An old white man stood in the doorway with a double- barrelled shotgun. “Finally,” he said in a squeaking, trembling voice. “I finally got your ass.”

  Evidently someone had been robbing him. “I haven’t—” the changeling started to say, but then there was a loud explosion and it couldn’t finish the sentence, for lack of a mouth.

  It ducked, and the second shot went high. Sensible of the impossibility it was creating by not falling down dead, it rushed past the man while he was fumbling to reload, forming a large temporary eye out of the gore of its face, and started sprinting down the road.

  The old man fired two more shots into the darkness, but the changeling was out of range.

  Once around the first bend, the changeling went off the road and sat in the darkness, working on an appearance less incriminating. Elderly farming woman, Caucasian with a deep tan. Faded seersucker dress.

  In the moonless overcast night, the changeling moved swiftly inland. A few farm dogs howled at its passing. As the gray dawn approached, it hid in an abandoned truck in a wooded area outside of Grover City.

  It made itself a purse and filled it with tens and twenties, and at dawn walked into town and sat on a bench outside the train station, reading the almanac.

  There was a center section full of grainy black-and-white photographs, giving a history of World War II. There was even a picture of the Bataan Death March. Jimmy’s was not among the drawn faces, the wasted bodies.

  The Nazi death camps. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. D-Day and Midway and Stalingrad.

  The nature of the world was fundamentally different. More interesting.

  A boy pedaled up to the station o
n a squeaky bike, pulling a red wagon full of newspapers. The changeling tried to buy one, but of course the boy couldn’t change a ten.

  “You look like a nice boy,” it said in what it hoped was a convincing little-old-lady voice. “You can bring me the change later.”

  He was a nice boy, in fact, though his face mirrored an obvious internal conflict. He refused the money and gave her a paper. “You just fold her back up after you finish; put her on this here stack by the station door.”

  It was the seventh of April, 1948. A British and a Russian plane had collided over Berlin, which was evidently split up among the countries that had defeated Germany. Arabs attacked three Jewish areas of Palestine. The House approved the establishment of a U.S. Air Force, and pledged a billion dollars to Latin America to fight communism. Airplane manufacturer Glenn L. Martin predicted that within months America would have bacteriological weapons, guided missiles, and a “radioactive cloud” much more deadly than the atomic bomb.

  So the war wasn’t really over. It had just entered a new phase. The changeling would stay out of this one.

  An obvious game plan would be to go back to college. April was not too late to apply, but there was the problem of high school transcripts, letters of recommendation—the problem of establishing an actual identity with a verifiable past.

  As soon as it defined the problem, the solution was obvious.

  Four people had gathered. They didn’t bother the old farm lady. A train approached, northbound. The changeling folded the paper carefully and replaced it on top of the pile, under the nickels people had left.

  As the northbound train approached, the little old lady asked the four whether it was the train to San Francisco. They confirmed that it was, and she got on board.

  The conductor changed her twenty with pursed lips but no comment. It continued to read the almanac, storing up information about how the world had changed while it swam around for six years.

  Of course the war had changed the world’s map, while leaving whole cities, and even countries, in ruins. The United States had been spared, and now seemed to be leading a coalition of “free” countries versus communist ones. Atomic bombs, supersonic jets, guided missiles, electronic brains, the transistor, and the zoot suit. Al Capone was dead and the changeling’s namesake Joe Louis was still champ, which the changeling found gratifying.

  At the San Francisco station, it picked up a copy of a women’s magazine and stayed in a stall in the ladies’ room for about ten minutes, then emerged as a woman of about twenty, dressed like a college student—two-tone loafers, bobby sox, plaid skirt (that had taken some effort), and a white blouse. It assimilated a chromed toilet-paper holder and recycled it as costume jewelry.

  It took the bus to Berkeley and wandered around the campus all day, eavesdropping on people and getting the lay of the land. It tarried for quite a while in the Admissions office. College student was an obvious choice of occupation, but which major? It remembered all it had learned about oceanography, but of course would have to hide most of that, starting over. Physics or astronomy might be useful, and interesting, but if it were to track down others of its kind, anthropology or psychology— abnormal psychology—would be more useful.

  Of course it had time for all of them.

  It studied the posture, demeanor, and uniform of a janitor, and as darkness fell, let itself into an empty classroom and changed. There were still a few students hanging around in the halls, but a balding fifty-year-old man with a broom was invisible to them.

  Around midnight, the changeling slipped into the Admissions office and locked the door. It moved swiftly and quietly, the room adequately lit, to its eyes, from the dim dappled light that filtered through a tree from a streetlight at the end of the block.

  There were about fifty return letters from prospective students in the in-box of the young woman the changeling had earlier identified as the most junior secretary. It read through forty of the letters before finding exactly what it needed.

  Stuart Tanner, a boy from North Liberty, Iowa, had sent in a letter thanking them for his acceptance, but saying that Princeton had offered him a scholarship, which of course he couldn’t pass up. The changeling found his file in the “Acceptance” drawer and memorized it. He had an almost perfect academic record. No athletics other than swimming team, which was good. The photo was black-and-white, but he was a pale Nordic boy, blond and blue-eyed. The changeling took his face and noted that he’d have to assimilate about twenty pounds.

  After making sure there was no one else on the floor, the changeling typed a letter of acceptance, noting that he was driving out to California immediately, for a summer job, so please change his address to General Delivery in Berkeley. It switched the letters and slipped out the door, a new man.

  The most direct thing to do would be to go to North Liberty and quietly kill Stuart Tanner, and bring his wallet full of identification back to Berkeley. But that wouldn’t be necessary. It would be sufficient to absorb enough of North Liberty to be able to pass for a native. Stuart grew up in Iowa City, so he’d have to check that out, too. An Iowa driver’s license would be easier to counterfeit than a twenty-dollar bill.

  The changeling had seen enough killing in the Pacific to reserve it as a course of last resort.

  The thought gave him pause. Until recently, killing a human had been no more complicated than eating or changing identity. He’d had no special feelings of mercy or compassion for his Japanese captors, at the time, but he did recognize having felt a special empathy with the other American soldiers during Bataan. Being a victim among victims may have done something.

  Whatever it was, it was odd: something was changing the changeling. Something besides itself; something inside himself.

  The change had been slow, actually. It started back in the asylum, when it came to understand the differences between individuals, and to prefer the company of one person over another. To like people.

  Stuart Tanner had wanted to major in American literature. That would be an interesting challenge. Maybe the books, the novels, would help it understand what was happening to itself. “What is this thing called love?” the Dorsey song was always asking. Understanding friendship would be a start.

  The changeling could read a book a day before September, and be ready for the literature major. It could minor in psychology and take an anthropology elective, that would grow into a second bachelor’s degree. Then graduate work, searching for creatures like itself.

  It wandered through Berkeley until it found an all-night cafe, where it sat down with a course catalog it had taken from the office, and mapped this out. Then it scanned the rest of the almanac, appearing to be flipping through it, looking for something. At first light, it walked back to the train station and booked passage through to Davenport, Iowa, which appeared to be the closest stop to North Liberty.

  With three hours to go before the train left, it bought a suitcase at a pawn shop and packed it with used clothing from Next-2-New. At a used book store, it bought two thick anthologies of American literature and a half-dozen tattered novels.

  It wouldn’t do to be walking down the main street of North Liberty and run into Stuart Tanner or someone who knew him. In a stall in the busy men’s room at the train station, he changed his hair to black and skin, swarthy. He flattened his nose and made his blue eyes brown.

  The changeling had reserved a private compartment on the train, since it was only money. At five till eleven it went aboard and settled in.

  It took most of the Rocky Mountains to read through the Joe Lee Davis Anthology, and before it got to the Mississippi it had read one book each by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It had every word memorized, but knew from previous college experience that that wouldn’t do the trick. Jimmy had been able to write well enough, just barely, to get a degree in oceanography, but his grades in English had been unimpressive. That would have to change.

  Among Stuart’s application materials was a
n eleven-page essay on why he wanted to major in American literature. The changeling had memorized not just the words, but also the handwriting. It copied the essay out twice, trying to understand why the writer had used this word rather than that; why it chose one sentence structure over another. Every time it finished a novel it wrote a few pages about it, trying to mimic Stuart’s style and vocabulary; a plot outline and analysis of the author’s intent, as it had done without great success in the required English and literature courses at UMass. By the time the train got to Davenport, it had worn its pencil to a nub, filling most of a thick tablet. The Mississippi looked interesting. Maybe someday it would turn into a huge catfish and explore it.

  It waited out a thunderstorm, since that’s what a human would do, and then walked to the bus station. With a two-hour wait, it read two Iowa papers and reread, in its mind, The Sun Also Rises, which was clear but mysterious: why were these people so self- destructive? The war, it supposed; the previous one. Though it looked as if there might be just one World War, with breathing spaces for re-arming, that would last until somebody won.

  The ride to Iowa City was interesting; the bus rumbling past mile after mile of constant green, farmland occasionally punctuated by wild prairie or forest. There were individual farmhouses with barns, always red, but no towns until they pulled into Iowa City.

  The bus was going on to Cedar Rapids, but the driver directed him to the train station, the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Interurban Railway, which went up to North Liberty. The changeling walked through the university campus to get there, noting that students dressed about the same way they did in Berkeley. A little more casual, not as much obvious wealth. More pipe-smoking among the males, fewer women in slacks. Dresses to midcalf.

  It had been listening carefully to conversations. There was a characteristic Iowa accent, but it had been more pronounced in the Davenport station. It would try to maneuver into a situation where it could overhear Stuart.