Camouflage (11 page)

"What was it?" Jan said.

"Just a new angle on the time capsule theory," Russ said. "She thinks our ancestors deliberately renounced technology, and carefully wiped out every trace of their civilization. Except the artifact, which they left as a warning, in case their descendants, us, started on their path as well.

"She handles the problem of the fossil record by postulating that they were as knowledgeable in life sciences as in the physical ones. They repopulated the world with appropriate creatures."

Russ laughed. "And then what did they do with the fossil record that was already there? Carbon dating doesn't lie."

"Maybe they cleaned 'em up. Had some way to find all the fossils and get rid of 'em."

"That's a bit of a stretch."

"Well, think about it," Jan said. "What if the 'million-year-old' part is wrong? What if
that
part of it was faked? Any technology that could build the artifact could bury it under an ancient coral reef. Then you only have to worry about archeology."

"And the historical record," Russ said.

" 'There were giants on the earth in those days,' " Jan said, smiling.

"And fishburgers now," Jack said, as the waiter came through the door.

-22-

Bataan, Philippines, 5 April 1942

The changeling waited until two groups of marchers had gone by, and there was no sound of nearby movement. It knew that the loose dirt of its grave would move around while it went through the hour of agony it took to change from one body to another.

It planned to leave the head behind, and become a foot shorter. Japanese.

"Agony" is really too human a word to describe what it went through. It was tearing its body apart and reassembling it from the center outwards, squeezing and ripping organs, crushing bones and forcing them to knife through flesh, but pain was just another sense to it, not a signal to modify its behavior. Besides, it was nothing new. It had been hundreds of people by now.

When it had become a Japanese private, complete with grimy uniform, it pushed up in a shower of dirt, to its knees, and then stood and brushed itself off. As it had calculated, the sun was well down, and it was pitch black.

Except for the flashlight.

Someone screamed and ran away. The changeling was at first impeded by the loose dirt, but then it sprang out, and in three long steps caught up with the fleeing intruder and pushed him lightly to the ground.

He was a Filipino child, cowering in terror, still clutching a canvas bag. Six or seven years old.

The changeling sorted through the few Japanese phrases it had accumulated, and decided none was appropriate. It used English: "Don't be afraid. I was just resting. We do it that way. It's cool in the dirt."

The boy probably didn't understand a word, but the tone of the changeling's voice calmed him. It helped him to his feet and handed him flashlight and bag, and made a shooing motion. "Now go! Get out of here!" The boy ran wildly away.

Perhaps it should have killed him. With a finger punch it could have simulated a bullet wound to the head. But what could he really do? He would run home and tell his parents, and they would interpret the event in terms of what they knew of reality, and be glad the boy had survived waking up a Japanese soldier. He would tell the other children, and they might believe him, but other adults would dismiss it as imagination.

(In fact, the changeling was wrong. The boy's parents
did
believe he had awakened a dead man, and told him to be quiet about it except to God, and pray thankfulness for the rest of his life, that God had chosen to spare him.)

The changeling widened its irises temporarily, so the starlit desolation was as bright as day, and started moving quietly but swiftly north. It took only a half hour to catch up with a group that had been allowed a few hours of rest. It had passed four Americans lying dead in the road.

It saw only one guard awake, leaning against the fender of a truck. It went behind the truck and forced itself to produce urine, and then casually walked forward, adjusting its clothes.
"Hai,"
it whispered to the guard, ready to kill him instantly if his reaction was wrong. He just grunted and spit.

It walked among the Americans, planning. The masquerade as a Japanese probably wouldn't pass muster during the day, among Japanese. So it would be best to change back into an American before dawn.

By starlight it examined every sleeping face. None of them was familiar, either from the Marine detachment or from the Mariveles camp. So it could become Jimmy again, and not have to fake a new history.

The people at the end of the group would be the ones nearest death, and probably least likely to be keeping track of who was around them. In fact, it found two that were dead, and quietly lay down between them in the pitch darkness.

It made as little noise as possible, changing the bones of its face back into Jimmy's starveling countenance. The uniform was trivially easy, and only made a normal rustling sound. It stretched the Japanese skeleton as much as was practical, with an occasional popped-knuckle noise, and got to within three inches of Jimmy's height.

What it wound up with was an even more famished version of Jimmy, which was fine. The weaker-looking, the better.

With the first light of dawn, the Japanese guards were working through their ranks, shouting and kicking. A sudden blue flash and rifle shot got them moving faster.

They left five behind, dead or so close as to make no difference. The sun sped up over the horizon, and in less than an hour, the morning cool had dissipated.

It had rained torrentially two days before, and although the road was dry and dusty, there were sometimes mud puddles at the edges of the fields. People would fall out of ranks to go to them with their canteens, but the guards would chase them off.

Finally there was a huge puddle, a wallow where two water buffalo were cooling off. The water was green and odoriferous, but there was lots of it, and a guard who was a private made an ironic gesture inviting them over.

A man next to the changeling put his hand on its shoulder. "Wait," he croaked. "That's the asshole got us fucked with yesterday."

Dozens of men staggered to the wallow and pushed the scum aside to drink and fill canteens or cups. Some splashed water over their heads and chests, cooling off like the buffalo, which would prove a mistake.

An officer with a saber came running down the line screaming at the ones in the water. They hustled back to rejoin the ranks.

The officer huddled the guards and then watched smiling while they moved through the crowd and pulled out everyone with damp clothing.

They lined them up along the side of the road. The officer said one word and in a ragged volley they shot them all.

In the ringing silence after the shots, the man next to the changeling said, "Shitty water woulda killed 'em anyhow."

The changeling nodded and, with the others, began shuffling away from the execution scene. It was having difficulty trying to generalize about human nature.

Would Americans have done that, with the roles reversed? It seemed inconsistent with what it had observed, except occasionally at the insane asylum, where there were patients unable to see others as human beings.

After the war, it would have to look into this. That wouldn't be very hard, since apparently the Japanese were going to win, and everyone would have to learn their language, and be assimilated into their culture.

Unless they slaughtered all the Americans like animals, as it had just witnessed. Well, it could become a Japanese who'd lost the power of speech. That had worked before.

They finally got to Balanga, the first town on their route of march. Filipinos lined the road, staring at the Americans, and began throwing food to them—sticks of sugar cane, rice balls, sugar cakes—until suddenly the Japanese started shooting.

The civilians scattered, running for cover. Two young men took off across a field, which apparently caught someone's attention. Three of the guards, clustered together, started firing at them, laughing. They kept missing them, either on purpose or from poor marksmanship, but they finally fell.

The three went out to inspect their handiwork, and evidently the two boys were still alive. They kicked them around and yelled at them, and finally shot them several times point-blank.

Most of the men watched this tableau in shocked silence. Someone behind the changeling growled "fucking Jap bastards," and someone else shushed him.

The changeling tried to interpret what was happening in terms of animal and human behavior, and the little it knew about Japanese culture. If they were trying to scare the Americans with a show of brutality, it wasn't working well; the ones susceptible to that were already nearly paralyzed with terror. Most of the prisoners by now assumed they were going to die, and were just concentrating on not being next. Each fresh horror seemed to increase the men's contempt for the Japanese "animals" (as if nonhuman animals ever behaved in such elaborate ways), and also increased their dissatisfaction with their own command, who had surrendered them. Though their defense of Bataan would have been unimpressive, without food, water, gasoline, or ammunition.

The Japanese behavior revealed vicious contempt, as if the individual Americans had decided to throw down their arms rather than fight. That was an understandable simplification, for young men so unsophisticated they evidently still thought, after all these days, that the Americans would understand Japanese if they spoke it loudly enough.

The gulf between the two sides was so large it was as if they were two different species. The changeling wished it had had an opportunity to observe other cultures than American without the complication of war. It resolved to do that when the war was over.

The Japanese marched them into the middle of town, into a dark hot warehouse building. It was already crowded with prisoners, but the guards pushed them in tighter and tighter, until it was literally impossible to sit or lie down; the men were packed like sardines in a can.

They smelled worse than sardines, though, with no toilet other than their own clothing. The guards evidently couldn't stand it after a half hour. They padlocked the door and stood guard outside, while their charges steeped in their own excrement. Many or most of them had some degree of dysentery, and had lost control of their bowel function. Urine baked on skin and the rags of uniforms, and if someone fainted from the stench, or died, he remained standing, just another sardine.

The changeling was near the padlocked door, and knew it could break it down with little effort. That would probably earn a few people a minute of fresh air before they were shot. If the men had been in a position to vote, they probably would have said "go for it."

But it was content to wait and watch, the miasma no more or less pleasant than the sea breeze outside. People stopped talking and concentrated on living another minute, hour, day.

In the morning, the Japanese opened the door and the prisoners staggered or crawled out into the sudden light, leaving twenty-five dead behind. They were beaten into line and fed a small rice ball and a little tepid tea before getting back on the road, which was already shimmering with heat.

Even with its superhuman metabolism, the changeling had lost five kilograms by the end of the march, on the morning of 15 April, at the San Fernando railway station.

The Japanese kicked and shouted the men awake and herded them into narrow-gauge boxcars, more than a hundred men per car. It was like a reprise of Balanga, packed shoulder to shoulder, with the added factor of the train's queasy rocking motion. A few people near the doors had actual air to breathe; the others had to make do with a hot stale atmosphere combining shit, piss, and vomit with carbon dioxide and dust.

One hundred and fifteen had been packed into the changeling's car. When they stumbled out five hours later, they left behind four corpses.

They were made to sit motionless in the hot sun at Capiz Tarlac for three hours, and then were marched across town to their final destination, Camp O'Donnell. There they confronted a nightmare several orders of magnitude larger than the march itself: twelve thousand prisoners were confined to a square of baking concrete one hundred yards on a side.

Most of the thousands of Americans and Filipinos were standing in a slow line waiting for the one water spigot. The old hands told them that it usually took about six hours—sometimes ten or twelve—to get to the spigot and fill your canteen. So after you filled it, you might as well just go back to the end of the line.

They were supposedly going to get food tomorrow. But the Japanese had been saying that for three days.

The changeling got into line, even though if it wanted water it could assimilate it directly from the air, or even break down carbohydrates for it. As the line inched along, the prisoners walking back toward the end would scrutinize faces, trying to identify old comrades through the masks of filth and exhaustion.

The inevitable happened. "Jimmy? My God—Jimmy?"

The changeling looked up. "Hugh."

"You're alive," he said.

"Just barely," the changeling said. "You, too."

"No! I mean ... I mean ... I saw you get your head chopped off! After you pulled the Jap off the truck."

"Must have been someone who looked like me."

One of the Japanese guards stepped over and seized Hugh by the shoulder. "Repeat what you just said," he said in almost perfect English.

Hugh cringed. "Thought he looked like somebody."

"Repeat!" The soldier shook him. "The truck!"

"He—he looked like someone who pulled a guard off a truck. But he's someone else."

The guard shoved Hugh away and clamped on to the changeling's shoulder and stared. "I buried you. I saw your face in the hole, looking up."

The changeling thought back and realized that he indeed was one of the guards on that detail. "Then how am I alive now?"

The man continued staring, the blood draining out of his face. Then he jerked the changeling out of the line and shoved him through the crowd toward a line of white buildings.