Camouflage

by Joe Haldeman

  “What shall I draw?” Dutch said. “Something simple?”

  “Simple but precise. Maybe a cube in perspective.”

  She nodded and did it, nine careful lines in four seconds.

  “Jimmy?” He pushed the pencil toward the boy.

  The changeling was cautious, remembering people’s reaction to the piano playing. It could have duplicated the woman’s actions exactly, but instead slowed down to a crawl.

  Grossbaum noted the speed. He also noted that Jimmy’s cube was a precise copy, even to its position on the page and accidental overlap of two lines, less than a millimeter. An expert artist could have done it if you asked for an exact copy. The slow compulsive precision would be appropriate for an idiot savant.

  But as far as he could find, reading and talking to people, you had to he born with that condition—no normal person had ever become an idiot savant from a blow on the head or a stroke.

  “Let me draw him,” Dutch said, “and see whether he draws me.”

  “It’s an idea,” he said doubtfully. The boy would probably just copy his own portrait, precisely.

  Dutch turned the page back and picked up her pencil and stared at Jimmy.

  It returned her stare, unblinking. She smiled and it smiled. When she began to draw, though, it didn’t do anything but watch.

  She finished the simple portrait in a couple of minutes, and turned the tablet around to show it to Jimmy.

  The changeling studied the picture. The left ear was a half-inch low, and so was the chin. Having seen her use the eraser, it applied it and corrected her work, completely redrawing the whole ear and chin. It added a small mole she had missed.

  “What is that all about?” Grossbaum said.

  “Amazing. I made a slight mistake in proportion, and he corrected it. Added the mole I’d left off.” She set the tablet down. “Do you spend a lot of time looking in the mirror, Jimmy?”

  The changeling didn’t quite understand the question, but nodded, and then shrugged.

  Most people can’t draw freehand circles. Dutch did three concentric ones, and then tapped on Jimmy’s tablet.

  Again it slowed down its natural impulse, and again made a perfect copy.

  “Jimmy, do you know the word for those?” Grossbaum said.

  “Drawing,” it said.

  Dutch tapped the center of the picture. “These?”

  “Circle,” it said. “Circles.”

  “I wonder how much he knows,” she said, “and can’t talk about.”

  “Well, he knows about sex, although he’s never discussed it. They caught him with a nurse.”

  The changeling nodded. “Nurse Deborah. She is kind … was kind. To me.”

  “They let her go.”

  Dutch looked Jimmy up and down. “They should have paid her extra. Poor kid must be going crazy.”

  “Crazy.” The changeling nodded emphatically. “They say I am. Crazy.”

  “Are you?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know.” Jimmy pointed at Grossbaum. “He should know.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Jimmy. You do some things so well.”

  “You should know,” Jimmy repeated.

  “Bruno …” She touched Grossbaum’s arm. “I think you may be inhibiting him. Could you leave us alone for a while?”

  He smiled psychiatrically. “Would you report… everything to me?”

  “You know me, Bruno.” He did, in fact, very well.

  He looked at his watch. “I do have a patient coming to the clinic at one. I could be back by two thirty.”

  “That should do.”

  He stood up. “Jimmy, I’ll be gone for a while. Dutch will keep you company.”

  “Okay.” The changeling understood part of the exchange. Dutch wanted to be alone with Jimmy. The way Nurse Deborah had.

  After Grossbaum went out the front door, Dutch stared at the changeling for a long moment. “You don’t remember what happened to you?”

  “No.” He returned her stare.

  “How long ago was it?”

  “One hundred eighty-three days.”

  “Do people who knew you before—your schoolmates—do they come by to visit?”

  “They … do. They did. No more.” He looked at the ceiling. “Since sixty-two days.”

  “You’re lonely.” He shrugged. “I could be your friend, Jimmy.”

  “You could?”

  She stood up and held out her hand. “Show me around the place? I want to see how the other half lives.”

  The changeling was confused. If she wanted the kind of union that Deborah had, she was going about it in an indirect way. It took her hand, though—she squeezed it, and the changeling returned the soft gesture—and followed her out of the breakfast nook. They walked around into the kitchen.

  It was spotless and elegant. Tile and gleaming enamel everywhere; a constellation of stemware hanging over a bar, shining brass pots and pans on the wall. A Mexican cook, small and fat and timorous, cowering in the corner.

  “Buenos Mas,” Dutch said. “Jimmy me muestra la casa.”

  “Bueno, bueno,” she said, and turned her attention back to the clean pot she was scrubbing.

  Through the kitchen into the dining room, heavy mahogany table under a glittering crystal chandelier, gas converted to electricity. Old paintings on the walls.

  A new painting over the fireplace in the formal living room, of Mr. and Mrs. Berry standing on a lawn with a little boy and a Dalmatian. “Is that you?”

  “No.” The changeling thought. “Was who was me.”

  The furniture in this room was antique, very English, reupholstered in a lush red velvet. It didn’t see much use.

  “It’s hard to believe there’s a Depression on,” she said. The changeling shrugged. It had only heard the word in its psychological sense.

  The music room was cheerful, north light flooding through a picture window that looked down over a formal garden. There was a Steinway baby grand and a harp.

  She plucked the deepest bass string. “Do you play these?”

  “No.” The harp was new; he’d never tried it.

  “That’s surprising. I should think they would make you take piano lessons, considering…”

  The changeling sat down on the stool, uncovered the keys, and played the opening bars of “Appassionata.”

  Jimmy returned her stare. “I play this.”

  “I understand.” It began to play soft chords in a strange rotation, not quite random. It didn’t know the words for them, but they were alternating major and minor chords, wheeling on the flatted third. The effect was unearthly, not quite irritating.

  She stood behind Jimmy and kneaded his well-muscled shoulders. “Could we … see your room?”

  It stood up silently. This part it understood.

  She walked demurely beside Jimmy, admiring his grace. “You get a lot of exercise?” He shrugged. “Swimming? Tennis?”

  “I do those.” Of course it could lie in bed all day and stay in perfect shape—or any shape it wanted. It was exactly the shape Jimmy had been when it dissected him.

  They went through the library, yard after yard of books with uniform leather binding, into the main hall, parquet floor under a domed sky-light of stained glass. Jimmy led her up wide curving steps to his floor, the third.

  “Big place,” she said. “Are you an only child?”

  “Not a child.” He opened the door to his bedroom.

  “I suppose not.” There was an incongruous hospital bed in one corner of the large room, and an elegant four-poster. It was still rumpled, the remains of breakfast on a serving tray. The wallpaper was beige silk. Double glass doors led to a balcony. She crossed the room and opened the doors and stood in the fresh breeze, salt air and flowers. Below her, two men were working on the formal gardens.

  Behind her, Jimmy said, “Take off your clothes and put them on the dresser.”

  “We don’t waste time, do we?” She stepped back into the
room. “Why don’t you take yours off first?” She went back to the door and locked it.

  Jimmy pulled off his white cashmere sweater and the T-shirt beneath it, and stepped out of his sandals and white ducks. Hard muscles and a small penis, which evidently hadn’t taken notice of her yet. He lay down on the bed.

  She sat on the bed and ran a teasing finger down his chest and abdomen. When she touched his pubic hair, the penis sprang up like a tripped mousetrap.

  “Oh my.” It was a little larger than average, but not so big as to be intimidating. She held it, warm in her hand and rigid as a candle, and leaned over to lick it and take it in her mouth, very European.

  “Take off your clothes,” Jimmy said, “and put them on the dresser.”

  “Yes, sir.” She smiled, realizing it was a stock phrase he must have learned from doctors examining him here. She undressed langorously, folding her clothes, carefully rolling her stockings. She turned her back to him when she stepped out of her knickers, discreetly applying saliva. She didn’t expect the preliminaries to be elaborate.

  She felt Jimmy’s clasp on her waist and started to say something— and then there was a horrible stab of pain that forced the breath out of her. She gritted her teeth against screaming. “No, Jimmy! No! That’s the wrong place!”

  He withdrew obediently and she turned around, holding onto his penis, trying not to panic at the string of bloody mucus. “Let’s wash this off and—”

  He picked her up like a large doll and threw her onto the bed.

  It was a good thing she’d left the glass doors open; the gardeners heard her screams. Bad thing that she’d locked the door. By the time they had beaten it open, Jimmy was standing at the end of the bed, naked and unaroused, staring placidly at Dutch, who had crawled to the far corner of the large bed, cowering and whimpering and bleeding.

  They knew better than to call the police. The one who spoke the best English called Mr. Berry at his law office while the others helped Jimmy dress and led him down to the pool. The Mexican cook and one of the male nurses tended to Dutch.

  Mr. Berry showed up in ten minutes, bearing his most potent weapon, the checkbook. He listened to Dutch while she quieted her sobbing and haltingly described what had happened.

  He was extremely sympathetic. Of course she was the victim here, but the law was complicated. Jimmy was, after all, a minor, and an unscrupulous lawyer might claim that she had seduced him.

  She looked him in the eye, resolute through tears of pain. “I did start to seduce him. But then he raped me, two places. Should I go to the police?”

  Mr. Berry asked the others to leave the room. In a half hour, an ambulance from a private hospital rolled up quietly to the service entrance, and Dutch was carried out over the gravel in Jimmy’s old wheelchair.

  The doctor who examined her had never seen a broken pubic bone before. He accepted her story about a bucking horse out of control, but suggested that during her confinement she might want to be examined for pregnancy, just in case.

  —9—

  Apia, Samoa, 2019

  CNN runs a news special on 14 December 2019.

  The camera pans along gentle surf, to rest on the artifact. It closes in during voice-over introduction:

  MALLORY (VO): Over the past several weeks, what began as a mystery has become an enigma. It started when a private marine research organization, Poseidon Projects, claimed salvage rights for an unclaimed wreck deep in the Tonga Trench a few hundred miles from this Samoan island.

  With the help of Poseidon Projects, famous for having raised the Titanic, Atlantis used acres of floats to bring the “wreck” to within a few fathoms of the surface. They towed it with tugs to a holding location…

  Archive footage of towing and parking the artifact.

  MALLORY (VO, CONT.): …just offshore of Independent Samoa, where they had secured a ninety-nine-year lease on a piece of undeveloped land, which was being turned into a small research center…

  Archive footage of the shrouded artifact being pulled toward shore.

  MALLORY (VO, CONT.): built solely to investigate this thing, which was obviously not the wreck of a ship.

  Archive underwater footage: the shroud flaps teasingly, to show the bright metal surface of the thing. A montage of scenes while Poseidon engineers attach the towing collar to the artifact, and start dragging it in.

  MALLORY (VO, CONT.): That cable is powered by this machine … capable of moving thousands of tons.

  But when this heavy thing—more massive than a Nautilus submarine, but smaller than a delivery van—when it came to the shoreline and dug into the sand…

  Archive footage of the cable accident.

  MALLORY (VO, CONT.): it had met its match. One man was almost killed when the cable broke.

  They had to find a way to move it the last hundred yards, to the concrete pad that would become the floor of their laboratory.

  Screen fades to a live image of the thing with its rocket attached.

  MALLORY (VO, CONT.): This is a self-contained Chinese booster rocket, normally used in the Glorious Wonder series, to carry up to a ton into low Earth orbit. It’s not going quite so far today.

  Interior view: an improvised bunker a couple of hundred yards from the thing. You can see the artifact through a thick window. Mallory is sitting with two men, drinking coffee at a table made of a plank on stacked boxes.

  MALLORY: We’re going to watch this with Jack Halliburton and Russell Sutton, joint directors of Atlantis Associates.

  I suppose this is going to be the shortest rocket trip in history.

  JACK: There were some last century that only got an inch off the pad.

  RUSS: This one’s reliable as a Ford truck, though. Except…

  MALLORY: What could go wrong?

  JACK: We’re not worried about the rocket. Just its attachment to the artifact.

  RUSS: It’s the irresistible force versus the immovable object.

  JACK: We know the thing’s mass; we know the properties of the sand it’s resting on. The rocket generates plenty enough thrust to do the job.

  RUSS: The only problem is the attachment between the rocket and the artifact. If the collar that connects them breaks … we’ll need another approach.

  MALLORY: And the rocket goes screaming into the center of town there?

  Telephoto zoom from the rocket’s POV: straight into Aggie Grey’s.

  JACK: No, there’s an automatic shutoff if the rocket suddenly feels no resistance. It might go fifty or a hundred feet.

  MALLORY: But if it doesn’t work?

  JACK: Glorious Wonder carries a lot of insurance.

  RUSS: A lot of people in Apia are off visiting relatives in the country. I think I would be, too.

  A loud whistle blows.

  JACK: That’s the ten-minute warning. You might want your cameraman out of there.

  Mallory stands up and looks through the glass.

  MALLORY: They’re gone. Just the camera attached to the booster.

  RUSS: I hope it doesn’t give you anything too interesting.

  MALLORY: Have to agree, for once… So this has to be some artifact from outer space.

  RUSS: Well, you know as much about that as we do. It could possibly be the result of some natural process we’ve never encountered before.

  JACK: Though its density makes that unlikely. Or inexplicable.

  MALLORY: It’s very ancient.

  RUSS: The coral it was embedded in was old before there were any primates resembling humans.

  MALLORY: So you don’t think much of the “lost weapon” theory?

  JACK: Bullshit.

  RUSS: You do have to wonder how it got there, if it’s an old Soviet or American device. If we’d just found it lying someplace, sure, that would be the first assumption. But it was below million-year-old coral.

  MALLORY: So maybe they hid it there?

  RUSS: You’d have to ask why. I’d want to hide it in my own country.

  MALLORY: Have the Ru
ssians or Americans contacted you?

  JACK: Sure.

  RUSS: We don’t want to talk about that. Yet.

  Screen changes to an aerial view with countdown superimposed. A 360-degree pan shows all the military helicopters watching. At ten seconds, it zooms in on the artifact. A laconic voice offscreen counts down.

  VOICE (OFF): Ten.

  JACK: (rising) About time.

  The three of them move to the window to watch. A split screen adds an aerial view. The voice counts down to zero.

  The Chinese rocket ignites, its exhaust churning billows of steam in the sea behind it. For long seconds, as the noise increases to a banshee scream, it doesn’t move. Then the artifact lurches and moves slowly, then faster, up the guide rails toward the metal cradle that will be its resting place. A camera by the cradle shows it fall into place with a jarring crash, just as the rocket goes silent.

  RUSS: Textbook. Those Chinese are pretty damn good.

  JACK: Glad they’re on our side. For the time being.

  —10—

  San Quillermo, California, 1932

  The Berrys had to admit that Jimmy was unmanageable, and quietly had him committed to St. Anthony’s, a private insane asylum.

  It was a valuable change of venue. The drugs the changeling was compelled to take by mouth or injection were metabolically insignificant. The shock treatments, where they wrapped you in wet sheets and splashed you with buckets of ice water, were gently stimulating to a creature who could live on Mercury or Pluto.

  But the changeling was surrounded by extremes of human behavior, in both the patients and their attendants, that it would never have seen at the mansion. It learned more in its first week than it had in months of cossetted coddling.