Camouflage Read online

  That was an amusing time. His version of English was almost a thousand years old, so he had to masquerade as an idiot while he learned how to communicate. He walked north, again robbing and murdering for sustenance, when he knew he wouldn’t be caught.

  He kept moving north until he got to Boston, and settled in there for a few hundred years.

  —14—

  Apia, Samoa, 2020

  Little green men,” Halliburton said, staring at Nesbitt. “You’ve been reading the tabloids.”

  “The thing is at least a million years old,” Russell said.

  Nesbitt nodded. “But it’s obviously a made thing.”

  “Maybe not,” Russell said. “It could be the product of some exotic natural force.”

  “Assume not, though. If some intelligence made it a million or some millions of years ago … well, we can’t say anything about their motivation, but if they’re like humans at all, there’s a good chance the thing is inhabited in some sense.”

  “Still alive after a million years,” Halliburton said, stacking up two little egg salad sandwiches.

  “We’re still alive after more than a million years.”

  “Speak for yourself, spaceman.”

  “I mean humanity, since we evolved from Homo erectus. We’ve been traveling through space in a closed environment, growing from a few individuals to seven billion.”

  “It’s a point,” Russ said. “That thing is a closed environment, in spades.”

  “Your eight billion little green men are going to be tiny green men.”

  “Well, it’s probably not full of little hamsters in space suits,” Nesbitt said. “It may not be inhabited in the sense of carrying individuals. It could have some equivalent of sperm and eggs, or spores—or it could be basically information, like a von Neumann machine.”

  “Oh, yeah. I sort of remember that,” Russ said.

  “I don’t,” Halliburton said. “German?”

  “Hungarian, I think. It’s an early nanotech idea. You send little spaceships out to various stars. Each one is a machine, programmed to seek out materials and build two duplicates of itself, which would take off for two other stars.”

  “Yeah,” Russ said, “and after a few million years, every planet in the galaxy would have been visited by one of these machines. The fact that there obviously isn’t one on Earth is offered as proof that there’s no other space-faring life in this galaxy.”

  “That’s a stretch.”

  Russ shrugged. “Well, the galaxy is thousands of millions of years old. The logic is that the project would be relatively simple to set up, and then would take care of itself.”

  “But you see the hole in that logic,” Nesbitt said.

  “Sure,” Jack said. “I see where you’re going. The argument assumes we would know the machine was here.”

  “It might well be hidden,” Nesbitt said, “hidden in a place where it wouldn’t be found except by other creatures with high technology.”

  Jack rubbed the stubble on his chin. “You’re right there. No pearl diver’s gonna find that thing and bring it up.”

  “And bringing it out of that environment into this one might be a signal that life on the planet has evolved sufficiently to initiate the next course of action.”

  “Make contact with us.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe eliminate us as rivals.” He looked at both of them in turn. “What if a creature like Hitler had started the project? Genghis Khan? And they were at least humans. There are plenty of animals who simplify their existence by eliminating their own kind who threaten their primacy. We ourselves have destroyed whole species— smallpox and malaria—for our health.”

  “It’s far-fetched,” Halliburton said.

  “But even if the probability was near zero, the stakes are so high that the problem should be addressed.”

  “Hm.” Jack tapped his teacup with his spoon and the woman appeared. “Sun’s over the yardarm, Colleen.” She nodded and slipped away. “So how are your twelve people supposed to save humanity from alien invasion?”

  “We discussed moving the whole operation to the lunar surface.”

  “Holy cow,” Russ said.

  “It would make the Apollo program look like a science fair project,” Nesbitt said. “No one has a booster that can orbit one-tenth that thing’s mass. And we couldn’t send it up piecemeal.”

  Jack squinted, doing numbers. “I don’t think it could be done at all. Mass of the booster goes up with the square of the mass of the pay-load. Strength of materials. Goddamn thing’d collapse.”

  “And you see the implications of that. Someone got that thing here from a lot farther away than the moon.”

  “That’s still just an assumption,” Russ said, “and I still lean toward a natural explanation. It probably was formed here on Earth, by some exotic process.”

  Nesbitt’s temper rose for the first time. “Pretty damned exotic! Three times as dense as plutonium—and that’s if it were the same stuff through and through! What if the goddamned thing’s hollow? What’s the shell made of?”

  “Neutronium,” Russ said. “Degenerate matter. That’s my guess, if it’s hollow.”

  “Baloney-um is what we called it in school,” Jack said. “Make up the properties first; find the element later.”

  Colleen rolled in a cart with various glasses and bottles. “Gentlemen?” The NASA man stuck to tea, Russ took white wine, Jack a double Bloody Mary.

  “So what does your dynamic dozen propose?” Jack asked as the woman left the room.

  He leaned forward. “Isolation. More profound than extreme bio-hazard. The environment the military uses in developing…”

  “Nanoweapons,” Russ supplied. “Of course we’re not actually developing them. Just learning how to defend ourselves against them, if somebody else does.”

  “Well, it’s not just the military. Everybody developing nanotech uses similar safeguards to keep the little things isolated.

  “We’d cover the lab building your crew is finishing now with an outside layer, sort of an exoskeleton. Basically a seamless metal room almost the same size as the lab. To enter, you have to go through an airlock. The atmospheric pressure inside is slightly lower than outside. The airlock’s also a changing room; nobody ever wears street clothes into the work area.”

  “I don’t think our people would enjoy working under those constraints,” Russ said. “Feels like government interference.”

  “You could also see it as taking advantage of the government. We give you the functional equivalent of lunar isolation—air and water recycled, power sources independent of the outside.”

  “Plus getting back all the capital we’ve put in, to date?” Jack said, looking at Russ.

  “That’s right,” Nesbitt said. Russ nodded almost imperceptibly.

  Jack squeezed some more lime into his Bloody Mary. “I guess we’ll look into your contract. Have our lawyers look into it. Maybe make a counteroffer.”

  “Fair enough.” Nesbitt stood. “I’ll go up and fetch it. I think you’ll find it clear and complete.”

  What they wouldn’t find was a little detail about the “independent power source”: As a public health measure for the planet, its plutonium load could be command-detonated from Washington, turning the whole island into radioactive slag.

  —15—

  Amherst, Massachusetts, February 1941

  The changeling could have avoided the draft by simulating any number of maladies or deficiencies; one out of three American men were rejected. Like a lot of men, for various reasons, he avoided it by joining the Marines.

  The Corps was not enthusiastic about recruits like Jimmy Berry, no matter how good they would look on a recruiting poster. He was tall, strong, handsome, healthy, and obviously from a rich family. He was probably lying about not having gone to college, to get out of being assigned to Officer Candidate School. He would be hard to break, which would make it that much harder to break the other shitbirds. And they had to b
e broken before they could be built anew as Marines.

  They called him Pretty Boy and Richie Rich. But he was a little more of a problem than they’d anticipated. On their way to their first day in barracks, a big drill sergeant called him out of ranks— “You march like a fuckin’ girl”—and made him do fifty push-ups, which he did without breaking a sweat. Then the sergeant sat on his back and said, “Fifty more.” He did these with no obvious effort.

  So the first night, the drill sergeant organized a “blanket party” for the annoying shitbird. He got three more big sergeants and three big corporals to throw a blanket over the sleeping Jimmy and beat some respect into him.

  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 window
s 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.