Camouflage

by Joe Haldeman

  It was Jan’s turn to run the show. Having scalded and frozen and zapped the thing, with no result other than disaster—maybe now it was time to talk to it.

  —26—

  Berkeley, California, 1948

  College was harder the second time around. Oceanography had been a natural pursuit for the changeling; English and literature were not, especially in the advanced classes mandated by Stuart’s performance in high school. The changeling ground through one semester and changed its major to anthropology.

  Anthro was a natural, too, since it had been objectively studying the human race for sixteen accelerated years. The only problem was limiting its class responses and papers to perceptions appropriate to a bright but unworldly lad from Iowa—who had never been in an insane asylum or boot camp, and had only read about Bataan in the newspapers.

  The changeling changed. It would never be human, but it was human enough for something like empathy with its professors. They were trying to understand, and teach about, the human condition—but were themselves trapped in human bodies; stuck in human culture like ancient insects in amber.

  The changeling had an advantage there. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human. It began to suspect it wasn’t even from Earth.

  A few months before it had come up out of the sea onto California soil for the second time, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold had seen a formation of flying discs weaving through the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. People on the ground reported seeing them, too.

  Then there was a lot of excitement over one of them crashing outside Roswell, New Mexico, though the Army Air Force investigators said it was just a weather balloon. Belief in the “flying saucer” explanation persisted, though.

  During the changeling’s first year at Berkeley, an Air National Guard pilot crashed while trying to intercept an Unidentified Flying Object, as they had come to be called. The Air Force (as it had come to be called) established Project Sign to investigate UFOs.

  The changeling followed press reports avidly. As it turned out, though Project Sign’s report rejected the idea of extraterrestrial origin, saying UFOs were misinterpretations of natural phenomena, an earlier top-secret “Estimate of the Situation” apparently thought otherwise. But that would stay top secret for a long time. Project Sign was changed to Project Grudge, and when it was terminated at the end of 1949, the Air Force explicitly denied the possibility of extraterrestrial origin, adding mass hysteria and “war nerves” to the natural-phenomenon explanation, and also said that many of the reports were cynical frauds by publicity-seekers or the hallucinations of psychologically disturbed people.

  Most of the changeling’s anthropology professors went along with the mass-hysteria/war-nerves explanation, but many of the students felt otherwise. They thought it was a government cover- up.

  There were plenty of books and magazines to support that point of view, but the changeling found them unconvincing, even though it was pretty sure there was at least one being from another planet on Earth. By the time Project Blue Book supplanted Project Grudge, the changeling was looking elsewhere.

  It searched both legend and science for shape-changers; for people suspected of being immortal, invulnerable. There was a lot more legend than science, all of it conveniently buried in history and hearsay.

  It slipped away from Berkeley during vacation periods to search down and interview some suspects: two men who shed their skin every year, like snakes, and a woman who claimed to shed bones, just sliding them out through her skin. The woman was a fraud and the two men were apparently humans, but dermatalogical freaks. One of them had carefully peeled off a hand, outside in, over the course of weeks; he let the changeling put it on like a glove.

  All human. But the changeling itself had instinctively hidden its true nature from the beginning, and had so far been successful. Others would probably do the same.

  It briefly considered running ads in big-city newspapers—“Are you fundamentally different from the rest of humanity?”—but knew enough about human nature to predict the kind of response it would get.

  It didn’t think about the possibility of someone like the chameleon, who might track down the ad’s creator with murderous intent. But then it didn’t think it could die.

  —27—

  Fort Belvoir. Virginia, 1951

  The chameleon also took an interest in UFOs; unlike the changeling, it moved in on the source of information.

  It had spent thousands of years in armies, and in fact had been a Nazi in World War II. The Korean War was kind of unappealing, but the chameleon knew enough about military red tape that it was only a matter of patience to make itself an E4 clerk on the Pentagon staff, Airman (a title only a month old) Fourth Class Patrick Lucas. Once there, it listened to scuttlebutt and managed to move itself into Project Blue Book.

  Once there, it gave itself a promotion in an irregular way, which it had done before: when a new bachelor officer was assigned to the project, the chameleon studied his personnel file, befriended him the first day, got him alone in his apartment, and killed him.

  In the bathtub it performed a rough-and-ready autopsy, thorough enough to ensure that the officer was indeed human— because something like the chameleon, if such existed, might also be drawn to Blue Book.

  It wrote a suicide note for Airman Lucas, and at two in the morning traded uniforms and dogtags with the officer. Drained of blood, the officer looked like a pale, passed-out drunk. The chameleon carried his body quickly to its car, and drove to the end of a dirt road outside of Vienna, Virginia. It saturated the body and the front seat with gasoline, tossed in a match, and changed its appearance, almost instantly, to match the officer’s. Then it ran through the woods back to civilization.

  The short newspaper article only said that the body had been burned beyond recognition, but the car was registered to a Pentagon clerk. Investigators that morning found the suicide note, and the case was closed. Coworkers shook their heads; he always had been a loner.

  The new lieutenant seemed to be a loner, too, and once the theory that he was a plant from the CIA was whispered around, people pretty much did leave him alone.

  The chameleon-lieutenant’s function for several months was to winnow through UFO reports, to find the 10 percent or so that warranted some follow-up. It ordered calendars back to 1948, and with the aid of an ephemeris, marked off the evenings and mornings when the planet Venus was particularly bright. That saved a lot of time.

  It knew about Projects Sign and Grudge, and was not surprised to get the feeling that Blue Book was less interested in scientific evaluation of UFO reports than in public relations, mostly debunking. Some people saw evidence of a conspiracy there, but the chameleon just saw the conservative military mind at work. Project Blue Book was basically one officer and a few low-ranking clerks, with a couple of dozen other people, military and civilian, poking their noses in every now and then.

  It seemed to spend as much time dealing with the press and politicians as with UFOs. Whenever there was a slow news day, reporters would show up or phone, in search of copy. Politicians would demand to know why nothing had been done about some sightings in their districts.

  With a typically military instinct for putting the right man in the right job, they put the chameleon in charge of the phone. Of course, it had had thousands of years’ experience in dealing with people. But tact had never been its usual weapon of choice.

  The chameleon observed its fellow investigators as keenly as it did the pilots and police and farmers who had reported the phenomena, reasoning that if there were something else like it in the world, it might gravitate to Fort Belvoir. But its counterpart was on the other coast, involved in the same pursuit in its own way, having given up on flying saucers.

  After another year, the chameleon did, too. One day, instead of reporting for duty, it drove on into Washington and bought a wardrobe of work clothes from used-clothing stores, and by the time its superiors realized one of their investigators had gone AWOL, i
t was working on a dairy farm in western Maryland.

  —28—

  Apia, Samoa, 2021

  The idea of signaling alien intelligence with a message that didn’t depend on language went back to 1820: the mathematical genius Carl Friedrich Gauss suggested clearing an immense section of Siberian forest, and then planting wheat in three squares that would diagram the Pythagorean theorem. An observer on Mars would be able to see it with a small telescope.

  There were other schemes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, involving mirrors reflecting sunlight, huge fires demonstrating geometrical shapes, or cities blinking their lights on and off.

  Around 1960, Mars no longer a compelling target, Frank Drake and others suggested an elaboration of this “Morse code” approach that would be visible from interstellar distances, using radio telescopes as transmitters rather than antennas, sending out a tight beam of digital information. The reasonable assumption was that any civilization advanced enough to receive the message would be able to understand binary arithmetic. So they sent, in essence, a series of dots and dashes that said “1 + 1=2,” and went on from there.

  The idea was to establish a matrix, a rectangle of boxes that would make an understandable picture if you made some of the boxes (corresponding to “1”) black and left the others (corresponding to “0”) white— like a crossword puzzle before it’s filled out.

  For it to make sense, you had to know the dimensions of the rectangle. The easiest way to do it would be to broadcast the information one line at a time, with pauses between the lines. Then a longer pause, and repeat the same thing over, for verification.

  That does take a long time. Drake suggested that a single long string of ones and zeros would suffice, if there were some way to tell how many of them made up each line.

  Prime numbers were the answer. Any pair of prime numbers, multiplied together, produces a number you can’t arrive at with any other pair. The number thirty-five can only come from seven times five, so a sufficiently clever alien could look at this string of ones and zeros:

  10101011010001111010110101001010101

  and come up with this rectangle:

  Of course a five-by-seven rectangle is just as likely, but gives this:

  —which we would hope is not insulting in the alien’s language.

  With a large enough number of spaces, the difference between order and chaos is obvious. Drake’s example was 551 characters, which made a map twenty-nine by nineteen spaces. Of course it didn’t spell out an English word; in fact, it was meant to be an incoming signal: it showed a crude drawing of an alien creature and a diagram of its solar system, along with other shapes that indicated it was carbon-based life, that it was thirty-one wavelengths tall, and that there were seven billion individuals on its planet—and three thousand colonists on the next planet in, and eleven explorers on the next one.

  The message Jan would send the artifact used the same technique, though it could be much more elaborate, since the receiver was inches away rather than light-years. Starting with the same arithmetic and mathematics, it went beyond a stick-figure- plus-DNA diagram to present digital representations of Einsteinian relativity, photographs of several different people, a Bach fugue, one of Hokusai’s views of Fujiyama, and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in black and white.

  The signal took about fifteen minutes to transmit. Focusing on various parts of the artifact, they beamed it in every frequency from microwave to X ray; they tapped it out mechanically on the thing’s surface. Of course there was no way of predicting what its response would be. Maybe it was responding in some way they couldn’t detect— saying “Shut up and give me some peace!” It was reasonable, though, to expect that it would respond in a way similar to the message: light or sound in a similar binary sequence.

  Of course it might just be a dumb machine, capable of moving itself out of harm’s way, and nothing else.

  After two weeks of no results, Jan was discouraged. She asked Russ and Jack to meet her at the Sails for dinner and strategy.

  The two men showed up together just as the sundown storm started. The setting sun was a dull red ball on the horizon while sheets of rain marched sideways across the harbor. No thunder or lightning; just an incessant downpour.

  “Another wonderful day in paradise,” she said.

  “E.T. hasn’t phoned home?” Jack said as he sat down.

  “Got ‘call waiting.’ ” The waiter appeared with the wine list. Jack waved it away and ordered a bottle of Bin 43.

  “So what do you think?” Russ said.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She refilled her coffee cup from a silver thermos flask. “I guess it’s time to move on to the planetary environments phase. If it reacts to anything, I can repeat the Drake algorithm then.” She sipped the coffee. “As you say, Russ, maybe it’s asleep or in some dormant mode. Maybe if we reproduce its home planet’s conditions, it will be more inclined to talk.”

  Jan winced as a shift of wind sent a fine spray over them. “Waiter,” Jack said, standing and pointing to a table just inside. He carried Jan’s coffee flask in, and while a woman lit candles, the waiter appeared with a bottle and three glasses.

  “I’m willing to be patient,” Jack said, going through the tasting ritual.

  “It’s not a matter of patience.” She put her hand over her wineglass. “I feel as if we’ve gone as far as we can in this direction.”

  “Well, we knew it was going to be all or nothing,” Russ said. “Just one peep out of the thing and we’d be …” He rose an eyebrow and took a sip of wine.

  “Yes, we would,” she said. “But we’re not. Let’s move on.”

  “Starting at square one?” Jack said. “Mercury?”

  “We could start anywhere,” Russ said. “Mercury is going to cost out better. Just hot vacuum.”

  “So there’s a decision?”

  He looked at Jan. “Acoustic. We want to continue tapping out your message on the thing’s surface. If it responds acoustically, we won’t hear it in a vacuum.”

  “We can run a taut wire from it,” Jack said, “like a tin-can telephone.”

  “Hard to get it through the wall without damping vibrations.”

  Jack shrugged. “So don’t run it through.” He spread out his napkin and clicked a pen open. He drew a square inside a square and attached the inner to the outer with springs. “See? You have your taut wire pulling on the back of this”—he tapped the inner square—“and it acts like an old-fashioned speaker. It’s gonna vibrate in a way that mimics the artifact’s vibrations.”

  “But we still can’t hear it,” Jan said.

  “Ah, but we can watch it. Draw a grid on the square and put a camera on it.”

  “Fourier transforms,” Russ said with approval.

  “Duck soup,” Jack said.

  “We have no duck,” the waiter said. He was standing behind Jack’s shoulder. “We have clam chowder or chicken with mushrooms.”

  Russ looked at him and decided he wasn’t joking. “I’ll have the chowder and grilled masimasi.”

  “Me, too,” Jan said.

  “The usual,” Jack said.

  “Cholesterol with cholesterol sauce,” Jan said.

  “You will have a red wine with that?”

  “Bin 88,” Jack and Russ said simultaneously. “And I want it really blue this time,” Jack said of his steak. “Cold in the center.”

  The waiter nodded and left. Russ imitated his accent: “Sir, we cannot guarantee that you will survive this meal. Samoan cattle have parasites for which there are no Western names.”

  Jack smiled and refilled both glasses of white wine. “Mercury, and then go on to Mars? Vacuum with a little carbon dioxide. Then Venus and the gasbags.”

  “Good name for a rock band,” Russ said.

  “Titan?” Jan said. “Europa?”

  “Makes sense,” Russ said. “And just outer space, 2.8 degrees above absolute zero. It probably spent a long time in that environment.”

/>   “Hold on,” Jan said, and took an old computer out of her purse. She unrolled the keyboard and pulled out the antenna and typed a few words. “Let’s be methodical here. Starting with the mercurian environment.” They got halfway through the solar system before dinner came, and finished it over sherry and cheese, mapping out a rough schedule. They would spend five days with each environment, and one to four days in transition.

  Hot Mercury, cool Mars, hellish Venus, cold poison Titan, arctic Europa, then the jovian model: high-pressure liquid hydrogen and helium, flowing at about 150 meters per second, flavored with methane and ammonia.

  Jan took a sip of sherry and scrolled through the schedule. “Something bothers me.”

  Jack nodded. “The pressure chamber’s—”

  “No. What if the thing misunderstands? What if it thinks we’re attacking it?”

  Russ laughed nervously. “I thought I was the anthropomorphic one.”

  “If it does its little jump-off-the-pedestal trick while it’s in the Jupiter simulation…”

  “Be worse than a daisy-cutter bomb,” Jack said. “Flatten everything out to here. They’ll hear it in American Samoa.”

  “In Fiji,” Russ said. “Honolulu.”

  —29—

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967

  For a few months, the changeling and the chameleon were in the same city, doing more or less the same things.

  The chameleon was at MIT, studying marine engineering. It had enjoyed Korea as a naval officer, and wanted to learn more about the design of warships.

  It liked anything about killing.