Camouflage

—26—

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.