Camouflage (3 page)

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."

"Public record," Russ said. "Good-bye, Sergeant Carson." He turned and walked away.

"But there's no record of a ship ever going down there. Mr. Sutton? And now you have that shrouded float waiting out there ... and the helicopters and tanks..."

"Good day, Sergeant," he said to the air, smiling. This is the way they'd wanted the publicity to start. Something mysterious? Who, us?

By the time they unveiled the artifact, the whole world would be watching.

-6-

San Quillermo, California, 1932

The changeling began to construct sentences on its own just after New Year's, but nothing complex, and often it was nonsense or weirdly encoded. It still "wasn't quite right," as Jimmy's mother nervously said.

The changeling didn't have to acquire intelligence, which it had in abundance, but it had to understand intelligence in a human way. That was a long stretch from any of the aquatic creatures it had successfully mimicked.

It came from a race with a high degree of social organization, but had forgotten all of that millennia ago. On Earth, it had lived as a colony of individual creatures in the dark hot depths; it had lived as a simple mat of protoplasm before that. It had lived in schools of fish, briefly, but most of its recent experience, tens of thousands of years, had been as a lone predator.

It had seen that predation was modified in these creatures; they were at the top of the food chain, but animal food had long since been killed by the time they consumed it. It naturally tried to understand the way society was organized in those terms: food was killed in some hidden or distant location, and prepared and distributed by means of mysterious processes.

The family unit was organized around food presentation and consumption, though it had other functions. The changeling recognized protection and training of the young from its aquatic associations, but was ignorant about sex and mating—when another large predator approached, it had always interpreted that as aggression, and attacked. Its kind hadn't reproduced in millions of years; that anachronism had gone the way of death. It didn't know the facts of life.

At least one woman was more than willing to provide lessons.

When it knew it would be alone for a period, the changeling practiced changing its appearance, using the people it observed as models. Changing its facial features was not too difficult; cartilage and subcutaneous fat could be moved around in a few minutes, a relatively painless process. Changing the underlying skull was a painful business that took eight or ten minutes.

Changing the whole body shape took an hour of painful concentration, and was complicated if the body had significantly more or less mass than Jimmy. For less mass, it could remove an arm or a leg, and redistribute mass accordingly. The extra part would die unless there was a reason to keep it alive, but that was immaterial; it still provided the right raw materials to reconstruct Jimmy.

Making a larger body required taking on flesh; not easy to do. The changeling assimilated Ronnie, the family's old German shepherd, in order to take the form of Jimmy's overweight father. Of course Ronnie was dead when he was reconstituted; the changeling left the body outside Jimmy's door, and the family just assumed it had gone there to say good-bye, how sweet.

The changeling had seen Mr. Berry in a bathing suit, so about 90 percent of its simulation was accurate. The other 10 percent might have made Mrs. Berry faint.

Similarly, the changeling could, in the dark privacy of Jimmy's bedroom, discard an arm and most of a leg and make itself a piece of flesh that had a shape similar to that of the nurse Deborah, at least the form she apparently had under her uniform, severely corseted. But it had no more detail than a department store dummy. The times being what they were, it could have had free rein of the house and not found any representation of a nude female.

It was still months away from being able to simulate anything like social graces, but to satisfy this particular desire, no grace was needed. Precisely at 7:30, Deborah brought in the breakfast tray.

"Please take off your clothes," it said, "and put them on the dresser."

Deborah may or may not have recognized the doctor's voice. She managed not to drop the tray. "Jimmy! Don't be silly!"

"Please," Jimmy said, smiling, as she positioned the lap tray. "I would like that very much."

"So would I," she whispered, and glanced back to see that the door was almost shut. "How about tonight? After dark?"

"I can see in the dark," it said in her whisper, husky. She slid her hand into his pajamas, and when she touched the penis an unused circuit closed, and it enlarged and rose with literally inhuman speed.

"Oh my God," she said. "Midnight?"

"Midnight," it repeated. "Oh my God."

Her smile was a cross between openmouthed astonishment and a leer. "You're strange, Jimmy." She backed out of the room, mouthing "midnight," and closed the door quietly.

The changeling noted this new erect state and experimented with it, and the unexpected result suddenly clarified a whole class of mammalian behavior it had witnessed with porpoise, dolphin, and killer whale.

The music teacher came for his twice-weekly visit, and was stupefied by the sudden change in Jimmy's ability. The boy had been a mystery from the start: before the accident, he had taken piano lessons from age ten to thirteen, the teacher was told, but had quit out of frustration, boredom, and puberty. Or so the parents thought. He must have been practicing secretly.