Camouflage

by Joe Haldeman

  The father and mother followed the family doctor to a room out of earshot.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Dr. Farben said. “There’s no evidence of any injury. He looks to be in excellent health.”

  “A stroke or a seizure?” the father asked.

  “Maybe. Most likely. We’ll keep him under observation for a few days. It might clear up. If not, you’ll have to make some decisions.”

  “I don’t want to send him to an institution,” the mother said. “We can take care of this.”

  “Let’s wait until we know more,” the doctor said, patting her hand but looking at the father. “A specialist will look at him tomorrow.”

  They put it in a ward, where it was observant of the other patients’ behavior, even to the extent of using a urinal correctly. The chemistry of the fluid it produced might have puzzled a scientist. The nurse remarked on the fishy odor, not knowing that some of it was left over from a porpoise’s bladder.

  It spent the night in some pain as its internal organs sorted themselves out. It kept the same external appearance. It reviewed in its mind everything it had observed about human behavior, knowing that it would be some time before it could convincingly interact.

  It also reflected back about itself. It was no more a human than it had been a porpoise, a killer whale, or a great white shark. Although its memory faded over millennia, past vagueness into darkness, it had a feeling that most of it was waiting, back there in the sea. Maybe it could go back, as a human, and find the rest of itself.

  A couple enjoying the salt air at dawn found a body the tide had left in a rocky pool. It had been clothed only in feasting crabs. There was nothing left of the face or any soft parts, but by its stature, the coroner could tell it had been male. A shark or something had taken both its arms, and all its viscera had been eaten away.

  No locals or tourists were missing. A reporter suggested a mob murder, the arms chopped off to get rid of fingerprints. The coroner led him back to show him the remains, to explain why he thought the arms had been pulled off—twisted away—rather than chopped or sawed, but the reporter bolted halfway through the demonstration.

  The coroner’s report noted that from the state of decomposition of the remaining flesh, he felt the body had been immersed for no more than twelve hours. Sacramento said there were no appropriate missing persons reports. Just another out-of-work drifter. The countryside was full of them, these days, and sometimes they went for a swim with no intention of returning to shore.

  Over the next two days, three brain specialists examined Jimmy, and they were perplexed and frustrated. His symptoms resembled a stroke in some ways; in others, profound amnesia from head trauma, for which there was no physical evidence. There might be a tumor involved, but the parents wouldn’t give permission for X rays. This was fortunate for the changeling, because the thing in its skull was as much a porpoise brain as it was a human’s, and various parts of it were non-human crystal and metal.

  A psychiatrist spent a couple of hours with Jimmy, and got very little that was useful. His response to the word association test was interesting: he parroted back each word, mocking the doctor’s German accent. In later years the doctor might classify the behavior as passive-aggressive, but what he told the parents was that at some level the boy probably had all or most of his faculties, but he had regressed to an infantile state. He suggested that the boy be sent to an asylum, where modern treatment would be available.

  The mother insisted on taking him home, but first allowed the doctor to try fever therapy, injecting Jimmy with blood from a tertian malaria patient. Jimmy sat smiling for several days, his temperature unchanging—the body of the changeling consuming the malarial parasites along with other hospital food—and he was finally released to them after a week of fruitless observation.

  They had retained both a male and a female nurse; their home overlooking the sea had plenty of room for both employees to stay in residence.

  Both of them had worked with retarded children and adults, but within a few days they could see that Jimmy was something totally unrelated to that frustrating experience. He was completely passive but never acted bored. In fact, he seemed to be studying them with intensity.

  (The female, Deborah, was used to being studied with intensity: she was pretty and voluptuous. Jimmy’s intensity puzzled her because it didn’t seem to be at all sexual, and a boy his age and condition ought to be brimming with sexual energy and curiosity. But her “accidental” exposures and touches provoked no response at all. He never had an erection, never tried to look down her blouse, never left any evidence of having masturbated. At this stage in its development, the changeling could only mimic behavior it had seen.)

  It was learning how to read. Deborah spent an hour after dinner reading to Jimmy from children’s books, tracing the words with her finger. Then she would give Jimmy the book, and he would repeat it, word for word—but in her voice.

  She had the male nurse, Lowell, read to him, and then of course he would mimic Lowell. That made the feat less impressive, as reading. But his memory was astonishing. If Deborah held up any book he had read and pointed to it, he could recite the whole thing.

  Jimmy’s mother was encouraged by his progress, but his father wasn’t sure, and when Jimmy’s psychiatrist, Dr. Grossbaum, made his weekly visit, he sided with the father. Jimmy parroted the list of facial nerves that every medical student memorizes, and then a poem by Schiller, in faultless German.

  “Unless he’s secretly studied German and medicine,” Grossbaum said, “he’s not remembering anything from before.” He told them about idiots savants, who had astonishing mental powers in some narrow specialty, but otherwise couldn’t function normally. But he’d never heard of anyone changing from a normal person into an idiot savant; he promised to look into it.

  Jimmy’s progress in less intellectual realms was fast. He no longer was clumsy walking around the house and grounds—at first he hadn’t seemed to know what doors and windows were. Lowell and Deborah taught him badminton, and after initial confusion he had a natural talent for it—not surprising, since he’d been the best tennis player in his class. They were amazed at what he could do in the swimming pool— when he first jumped in, he did two rapid lengths underwater, using a stroke neither of them could identify. When they demonstrated the Australian crawl, breast stroke, and backstroke, he “remembered” them immediately.

  By the second week, he was taking his meals with the family, not only manipulating the complex dinner service flawlessly, but also communicating his desires clearly to the servants, even though he couldn’t carry on a simple conversation.

  His mother invited Dr. Grossbaum to dinner, so he could see how well Jimmy was getting along with the help. The psychiatrist was impressed, but not because he saw it as evidence of growth. It was like the facial nerves and German poetry; like badminton and swimming. The boy could imitate anybody perfectly. When he was thirsty, he pointed at his glass, and it was filled. That was what his mother did, too.

  His parents had evidently not noticed that every time a servant made a noise at Jimmy, he nodded and smiled. When the servant’s action was completed, he nodded and smiled again. That did get him a lot of food, but he was a growing boy.

  Interesting that the nurses’ records showed no change in weight. Exercise?

  It was unscientific, but Grossbaum admitted to himself that he didn’t like this boy, and for some reason was afraid of him. Maybe it was his psychiatric residency in the penal system—maybe he was projecting from that unsettling time. But he always felt that Jimmy was studying him intently, the way the intelligent prisoners had: what can I get out of this man?

  A better psychiatrist might have noticed that the changeling treated everyone that way.

  —5—

  Apia, independent Samoa, 2019

  It takes a long time for cement to cure in the tropics, and the artifact stayed floating offshore, shrouded, for two weeks while the thick slab, laced wi
th rebar, slowly hardened. They knew that no conventional factory floor could support the massive thing without collapsing. It was the size of a small truck, but somehow weighed more than a Nautilus-class submarine: five thousand metric tonnes. It would be three times as dense as plutonium, if it were a solid chunk of metal.

  Halliburton had started to let his beard and hair grow out the day he retired his commission. The beard was irregular and wispy, startling white against his sun-darkened skin. He had taken to wearing gaudy Hawaiian shirts with a white linen tropical suit. He would have looked more dapper if he didn’t smoke a pipe, which accented his white clothes with gray smudges of spilled ash.

  Russell regarded his partner with a mixture of affection and caution. They were waiting for lunch, sipping coffee on a veranda that overlooked the Harbour Light beach.

  The morning was beautiful, like most spring mornings here. Tourists sunned and strutted on the dark sand beach, children laughed and played, couples churned rented dugouts with no particular skill in the shallows over the reef, probably annoying divers.

  Russell picked up a small pair of binoculars and studied a few of the women on the beach. Then he scanned the horizon line to the north, and could just make out a pair of fluttering pennants that marked their floating treasure. “Did you get through to Manolo this morning?”

  Halliburton nodded. “He was headed for the site. Says they’re going to test the rollers today.”

  “What on earth with?”

  “A couple of U.S. Marine Corps tanks. They went missing from the Pago Pago armory, along with a couple of crews. You want to know how much they cost?”

  “That’s your department.”

  “Nada. Not a damn thing.” He chuckled. “It’s a mobilization exercise.”

  “Convenient. That colonel we had dinner with, the Marine.”

  “Of course.” Three waiters brought their meal, two piles of freshly sliced fruit and a hot iron pan of sizzling sausages. Halliburton sent away his coffee and asked for a Bloody Mary.

  “Celebrating?”

  “Always.” He ignored the fruit and tore into the sausages. “The test should commence at about 1400.”

  “How much do tanks weigh?” Russell served himself mango, pawpaw, and melon.

  “I’d have to look it up. About sixty tons.”

  “Oh, good. That’s within a couple of orders of magnitude.”

  “Have to extrapolate.”

  “Let’s see.” He sliced the melon precisely. “If a two-pound chicken can sit on an egg without harming it, let’s extrapolate the effect of a one-tonne chicken.”

  “Ha-ha.” The waiter brought the Bloody Mary and whispered, “With gin, sir.” Halliburton nodded microscopically.

  “It’s not exactly Hooke’s law,” Russell continued. “How can you get a number that means anything?”

  Halliburton set down his silverware and wiped his fingers carefully, then took a pad out of his shirt pocket. He tapped on its face a few times. “The Wallace-Gellman algorithm.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  He adjusted the brightness of the pad and passed it over. “It’s about compressibility. The retaining plates we drove down into the sand. It’s actually the column of sand supporting the thing’s mass, of course.”

  “A house built on sand. I read about that.” Russell studied the pad and tapped on a couple of variables for clarification. He grunted assent and passed it back. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Best Buy.”

  He winced. “The algorithm.”

  “California building code. A house built on sand shall not stand without it.”

  “Hm. So how much does an apartment building weigh?”

  “We’re in the ballpark. It’s going to settle some. That’s why the moat-and-dike design.”

  “If it settles more than five meters, we won’t have a moat. We’ll have an underwater laboratory.” Once the thing was in place, the plan was to put a prefabricated dome, five meters high, over the thing, dig a moat around it, and then build a high dike around the moat. (If it settled more than a couple of feet, water would seep around it at high tide anyhow. The moat made that inevitability a design feature.)

  “Won’t happen. It was in sand when we found it, remember?”

  Not volcanic sand, Russell thought, but he didn’t want to argue it. The coral sand wasn’t that much more compressible, he supposed. He signaled the waiter. “Is it after noon, Josh?”

  “Always, sir. White wine?”

  “Please.” He reached over the fruit and speared a sausage.

  “So when do we expect the tanks?”

  “They said 1300.”

  “Samoan time?”

  “U.S. Marine Corps time. They have to get them back by nightfall, so I expect they’ll be prompt.”

  The Marines were a little early, in fact. At a quarter to one, they could hear the strained throbbing of the cargo helicopters working their way around the island. They probably didn’t want to fly directly over it. Don’t annoy an armed populace.

  They were two huge flying-crane cargo helicopters, each throbbing rhythmically under the strain of its load, a sand-colored Powell tank that swung underneath with the ponderous grace of a sixty-tonne pendulum. They circled out over the reef before descending to the Poseidon site, a forty-acre rhombus of sand and scrub inside a tall Hurricane fence.

  Two men on the ground guided them in, the tanks settling in the sand with one solid crunch. The helicopters hummed easily as they reeled in their cables and touched down delicately on the perforated-steel-plate landing pad just above the high-tide line.

  There were three Poseidon engineers waiting at the site. Greg Fulvia, himself just a few years out of the Marines, went to talk with the tank crews, while Naomi Linwood and Larry Pembroke did a final collimation of the four pairs of laser theodolites that would measure the deformation of the concrete floor while the great machines crawled back and forth on it.

  A couple of workers rolled up in a beach buggy and set up a canopy over a folding table where Russell and Halliburton were waiting under the sun. They put out four chairs and a cooler full of bottled water and limes on ice. Naomi came over to take advantage of it, yelling “Bring you one” to Larry over her shoulder.

  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.”