Camouflage

—36—

The third morning was clear and calm, so the changeling took mouthgill and gear down to the Palolo Deep Marine Preserve, less than a kilometer down the road. It had formed a bathing suit around its body, modest by American standards, but also wore the lavalava walking to the beach, so as not to offend the locals—who were all sleeping it off anyhow, except for the yawning young girl who took its money at the park entrance.

The tide was high. The changeling put on its unnecessary mask, mouthgill, and fins, and slipped into the familiar medium.

In the shallows between the shore and the reef, there was a scene of unearthly strangeness—a many-acre farm of giant clams, thousands of them, from a foot in diameter to the size of manhole covers and larger. There were smaller ones protected by enclosures of chicken wire; the changeling salivated at the thought of what they would taste like. It worked a small one out of its cage and, hardening its teeth, crunched down on it: delicious.

The reef was beautiful, a multicolor maze of living coral, but that wasn’t the changeling’s destination. It swam quickly beyond, out to where the waves crashed on the barrier reef that separated the island from the deeps. It cut through the strong swirling currents, found a jagged opening, and dove through.

It swam down through the cool stillness to the bottom, and stashed its equipment under a rock.

How fast could it change into a shark?

It took twelve pain-filled minutes, perhaps its fastest time. Halfway through, it was visited by a reef shark almost its size, which circled it a few times and nosed it, and apparently decided that whatever the strange thing was, you couldn’t eat it or breed with it, and drifted away. Sea creatures did occasionally bite the changeling, but most of them immediately spit out the alien stuff.

It became a hammerhead for the good eyesight, and swam a couple of kilometers south, to visit the Poseidon site. It was easy to find, following a metallic taste that was quite different from anything it had experienced before. It found the source easily, warm water coming out of a discharge tube; it evidently cooled the nuclear reactor that powered the place.

After a minute’s search, it found the intake tube as well. That could come in handy. If you plugged it up, how long would it be before the reactor started to heat up and shut down? Or melt down.

It inspected the parts of the blast shield that were in reasonably deep water, not wanting to attract attention. A nine-foot-long hammerhead would be pretty conspicuous in shallow water. It could hear children splashing and swimming on the village side of the shield, and was tempted to give them something to tell their playmates about— just swim up and smile—but no, best not to do anything unusual, unsharklike.

It might be on camera, anyhow. Better act like a confused fish who just wandered in too close to shore. Hammerheads are curious and incautious.

As if in response to the thought, it heard a powerful motor roar into life and begin heading its way. It swam quickly for the depths.

Fast boat. It caught up with the changeling before it got out of the relative shallows. There was a loud bang! and a harpoon spiked completely through the shark body, just below its head.

The motor immediately throttled down, and someone began to haul in his prize. The changeling let itself be pulled halfway to the boat and then flexed a sudden 180 degrees—hammerheads are agile—and swam away at top speed.

At the end of the line there was a sudden tug; then a scream and splash. Just for fun, the changeling flexed again and sped back to the boat, only a little hampered by the harpoon. The man was still halfway in the water when the shark bumped into his foot, the immediate change in the water’s flavor a testimony to how much he enjoyed the experience.

Someone aboard the boat started firing a large pistol into the shark, two hits and two misses. The changeling twisted under the boat and took a healthy bite of fiberglass hull, and then headed at top speed for deep water. Once safely out of sight, it stopped the dramatic but unnecessary bleeding, and temporarily enlarged the first wound so that the harpoon could slide out easily. Then it swam north, staying comfortably deep.

It wondered whether the men had been motivated by fear or greed. Probably greed; with the harpoon and gun, they were set up for shark fishing. Its fins would make several thousand dollars’ worth of soup, which was why there weren’t many large sharks in the area, despite the abundance of food.

The mask, snorkle, and fins were still safe under the rock. It took only ten minutes of pain to change back into the young woman, and another thirty seconds to secrete the bathing suit material. It was an imperceptible half-inch shorter because of the loss of material to the woundings. It would catch and absorb a couple of reef fish on the way back.

It was interrupted in that simple task. It had chased and caught a large snapper, and was enlarging an orifice to absorb it, when it heard a human voice.

The ticket-taking girl was about a hundred meters away, at the edge of the reef, shouting and gesticulating. It let the snapper go and relaxed the orifice to its usual size and let the bathing suit cover it. It swam toward her as a human might, relaxed on its back, with the mask pulled up to its forehead.

“You are Mrs. Rae?” the girl said.

“Rae Archer,” the changeling said, standing up in the meter of water.

“Mr. Wade thought you were here.” The man who owned the B-and-B. “He said the project people called for you and they want you to come at eleven. It’s almost ten.”

Time flies when you’re having fun. “Thank you. I’d better hurry, then.” The changeling kept its swimming speed down to that of an athletic human and then waded ashore with convincing clumsiness, in its fins. It could have taken them off, but it knew the pebbles were too sharp for human comfort. It retrieved lavalava and sandals and jogged back to the B-and-B.

It took a cold shower and shampooed quickly, though it could have done a better job on its skin surfaces and hair just by sitting alone for twenty seconds. It put on tropical office clothes and let Mr. Wade drive “her” to Poseidon, though she could have walked and been on time.

But if she had done that and shown up not sweaty and flushed, someone might wonder.

Outside the Poseidon gate, two men had a light fishing boat up on two sawhorses, showing a crowd of gawking kids the shark bite near the bow.

A large muscular woman, Naomi, met her at the door, but instead of going inside, led her back down the road to cottage 7. They left their shoes at the door, along with two other pair, and went into the air-conditioning.

At a wooden table, a man and woman in fit middle age. The woman looked familiar. Some pieces fell into place and the changeling remembered it had graded her papers at Harvard, back in 1980.

It shook his hand, Russell Sutton, and he introduced it to its former student, Dr. Jan Dagmar. They both looked hollow-eyed and wired, as if they’d done a couple of all-nighters on pills and coffee. They sat down heavily.

“Coffee?” Naomi asked, and the changeling said yes, black, and sat down across from Jan.

“First, tell us what you know about the project,” Jan said.

“That would take a while,” the changeling said. “I’ve done my homework.” Jan shrugged in a friendly way.

It accepted the coffee. “Thanks. You stumbled onto this undersea artifact and salvaged it, and soon found that it was made of some substance too dense to find a place on the periodic table. Three times as dense as plutonium, but not radioactive.”

“Three times if it’s solid,” he said. “It’s probably hollow.”

The changeling nodded. “If it’s from Earth, it was made by some process we don’t understand—putting it mildly! Likewise, if it was made on some other planet. You still don’t know how it might have been made, but it’s intellectually less uncomfortable to assume it came from somewhere else.”

“Which is what piqued your interest,” Russ said.

“Me and seven billion others,” it said. “Ever since your announcement, my computer opens up every morning with a search for new material with the word ‘Poseidon.’ ”

It sipped its coffee. “You haven’t been able to drill or file so much as a molecule off this thing. You tried to boil some off with a laser and … there was an accident.”

“You know what happened then?”

“No. I saw the CNN pictures and read the popular press speculations. The thing can levitate?”

He raised an eyebrow. “We saw the pictures, too.”

“But you haven’t published anything about it.”

“No.” He looked at Jan and back at the young woman. “We can tell you a little more if you’re hired and sign the nondisclosure form.”

“But only a little more,” Jan said. “There’s not that much to tell.”

“You got a bachelor’s in astronomy,” Russ said, “and then you quit?”

“Marriage,” the changeling said, “and when it didn’t work out, he left me with too much debt for me to go back to being a student.” This was a part of its autobiography that would stand up to computer search, but not much beyond that. The “husband” had conveniently dropped off the map, and its state and federal tax forms were precisely hacked, as were employment records for the two low-level lab technician jobs.

It had gone to some trouble to find two Los Angeles firms that were so large and mobile that Rae might credibly not be remembered personally.

“I did some checking,” Naomi said. “Your professors at Berkeley had a high opinion of you.”

The changeling gave her a level gaze. “And they wondered why I hadn’t gone on.”

“And why you became a lab tech.”

“I had the training, from summer jobs. There aren’t any jobs in astronomy.”

“That’s for sure,” Jan said. “More than half the Ph.D.s are doing something unrelated to astronomy.”

“I knew that when I chose the major,” the changeling said. “My advisor advised me to learn how to flip hamburgers.”

Jan laughed. “That’s what my advisor told me, back in the eighties. So there’s always hope.”

“Do you plan to go back?” Russ asked. Under the circumstances, a question with no right answer.

“I keep up my reading at the library, A.]. and Aph.J.,” it said carefully. “My interest in astronomy is undiminished, especially globular clusters and star formation.” It realized it was sounding too much like a college professor, but it had been a professor a lot longer than it had been a lab technician. Or a dwarf or a prostitute, for that matter. “But it would be hard to go back to being a student. I’ve been a working woman for too long.” Thirty-one of the past ninety-four years, if being a female shark counted.

“The SETI aspect of working here fascinates me,” it continued. “I never had any course work in it, except as part of radio astronomy. So it would be interesting as a learning experience, even if nothing ever comes of it.”

He nodded and exchanged another look with Jan. “You know what we’ve been doing the past couple of months.”

“The planetary environments thing. I saw the Nova show about Venus; that was incredible.”

“Well …” Russ put his fingertips together and tapped twice. “This is secret. The whole world will know before long, but we’re still sorting out what to say, the timing. You can keep a secret.”

“Absolutely.”

“We got a response from the artifact.”

The changeling articulated a variety of physiological reflexes, that for a change reflected its actual state: pupils dilating, sweat popping, a sharp intake of breath: “During the Jupiter simulation?”

Jan nodded. “Jupiter. At first we thought it was just a glitch. You know we use pi squared as the factor from one frequency to the next?”

“Yes; that was interesting.”

“What the artifact did was repeat the message, the first half of it, but at ten times the frequency.”

The changeling nodded. “So it knows digits.”

“It may know how many digits we have,” Russ said.

“At first we thought it was a transmission mistake,” Jan said. “It was the acoustic phase, tapping out the message. It’s done automatically, with a small solenoid-driven hammer. The response, ten times faster, was in the middle of our stock message.”

“It was recorded but initially ignored,” Russ said. “One of the techs, Muese, was analyzing it as a kind of feedback noise—that’s happened before—and then realized it had to have come from the artifact.”

“We were up in the infrared by then,” Jan said, indicating a distance with one hand over the other, “but we went back to the acoustic mode, returning the faster signal it had sent. It responded with a long burst, twelve minutes.”

“Saying?”

Russ shook his head. “We don’t have the faintest. Not a clue. But it’s not random.”

They seemed calm, but the changeling could hear their pulses. Jan spoke carefully. “You’d think an intelligent creature, an intelligence of some kind, would respond in the same code.” She looked at the pretty woman with a studied casualness that said this is a test. “Why do you suppose it didn’t?”

The changeling paused longer than it needed. “One, Occam’s razor: it didn’t understand that the first series was a code. It was just being like a mynah bird. But the second ‘message’ … the factor of ten is interesting, but maybe it, or whatever manufactured it, had ten appendages.

“I’ll ask the obvious. Have you done Zipf analysis? Shannon entropy?”

Jan and Russ looked at each other, and Naomi chuckled.

“The Zipf slope is minus one,” Russ said quietly, “so the message isn’t just noise.” Dolphin calls and human languages generate a slope of minus one; it can’t occur by chance.

“The Shannon entropy is scary,” Jan said. “It’s twenty-sixth order.”

“Wow,” the changeling said, excitement growing. Human languages only had ninth-order complexity. Dolphins were fourth order. “So it didn’t make up its own version of the Drake message?”

“We hoped for that,” Russ said, “but it doesn’t meet the first requirement: the two primes that would tell us the proportions of the information matrix.”

“We did the obvious,” Jan said, still testing.

The changeling stared at her. “Assumed the matrix would be the same size as yours, or the product of two other primes. But that didn’t work.”

“Not quite,” Russell said. “We finally figured out that it’s three primes multiplied together. That sort of ups the ante.”

Jan nodded and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You know, this organization is only weakly hierarchical. That is, Russ and Jack Halliburton call the shots; direct and define what the rest of us are going to do. At the working level, well, it’s pretty chaotic. That’s the way we want it.

“This isn’t like some R D enterprise, where you can assign duties and work to a timetable. We’re all wandering in the dark, in a sense, going on intuition.

“Even old people like Russ and me know that education and experience can get in the way of intuition. When we hire people at your level, it’s with the understanding that, although much of your work will be routine, there’s always room for your input. The woman you may replace was always coming up with off-the-wall ideas, and sometimes they were helpful.”

“Why did she leave?” the changeling asked.

“Illness in the family, her daughter. She might be back once things settle down, but it looks like a long watch.”

“Meanwhile, we need someone like you,” Russ said. “You’re not likely to … this is embarrassing. But the woman she replaced had to leave to have a baby. Likewise, we’re about to lose our receptionist to motherhood.”

“I can’t have children,” the changeling said, not adding except by fission. It reddened and touched its lips.

“We didn’t mean to pry,” Jan said, giving Russ a sharp look.

“Of course not, no.” He looked like a man who desperately needed some papers to shuffle through. Instead, he studied the inside of his empty coffee cup.

“Oh, I’m not sensitive about it,” the changeling said. “It’s only biology. Simplifies my life.

“If I do get the job, what would the job be, at this stage? It doesn’t sound like gas chromatography or spectroscopy are on the menu right now.”

“Not now, not anymore.” Russ took the cup over to the coffee urn and filled it. “Your CV mentioned cryptography.”

“One course and some reading.” A lot more, actually, in another life. When it had studied computer science at MIT, everyone was interested in it.

Jan tapped twice on her notebook and studied the screen. “It’s not on your transcript.”

“I just sat in. My advisor vetoed it as frivolous. She would’ve killed me if she’d known I was doing that rather than advanced differential equations.”

“Been there,” Jan said.

“Might have been a lucky choice,” Russ said. “It’s what you’ll be doing for awhile, I think.

“With this pesky data string from the artifact, we’re dividing into two groups. One, the one you’d be in, will try to decipher the message. The other’s keeping after the artifact with a series of more complex messages, along the lines of the first one. That’ll be Jan’s group.”

“You’re keeping it in house? Keeping the government out?”

“Absolutely. We’re a profit-making corporation, and there just might be an obscene profit in whatever this thing has to say. Better be, to justify what Jack’s sunk into it.”

“If we were in the States,” Jan said, “the government might be able to step in on grounds of national security. But there’s not much they can do here. Jack’s even a Samoan citizen.”

“You do have a NASA team,” the changeling said.

“I’m on it,” Jan said. “And we used NASA space suits, and they got us the use of the military laser that made things so interesting a couple of months ago. But our agreements with them are carefully drawn up, and the deal with the individual employees, well, it’s kind of mercenary.”

“It gives them all a cut of the profits if everyone behaves,” Russ said, “and nobody gets anything if anyone leaks anything. Not to mention the pack of lawyers that will descend to worry the flesh off his bones and then crack the bones.”

“Something like that will be in your nondisclosure statement, too. Jack is fair, I think, but not flexible.” Jan tapped on her notebook again. “Obviously, I think you’re hired. Have to pass it by Jack, who crashed a few hours ago and probably won’t be making decisions until tomorrow morning. But the two of us and Naomi really do all the tech and administrative hires.”

“So I just stay by the phone?”

Russ shook his head. “It’s not that big an island. We’ll find you.”

“You can run, but you can’t hide,” Naomi said, and smiled.