Camouflage

promise anything it wants. But if one of your people stumbles on an antigravity machine, I think he or she might trade a job with NASA for limitless wealth.”
    Nesbitt nodded amicably, tasted his tea, and sifted some sugar into it. “Your investment is, what, about a third of a billion eurodollars?”
    “Close enough.”
    “Then let me go from the general to the specific. We’re prepared to match your funds. Wipe the slate clean.”
    “In exchange for?” Russ asked.
    “A team of twelve researchers who would clear every publication with you, and also assign any present or future profits to you.” He looked at Jack over the rim of his teacup and sipped. “Up in my room I have a long contract to that effect, which I’m told covers everything. Also, dossiers of the twelve.”
    “Including you?”
    “I wish, but no. I’m just an administrator who loves science. I don’t think you’d be impressed by my physics B.S. from Arkansas.”
    Jack smiled. “Maybe more by that than by your MBAfrom Harvard.” He tapped his hearing aid. “Wonderful machines, these.”
    Nesbitt didn’t blink. “Is it tempting?”
    “Of course it is,” Jack said harshly.
    “Jack, we agreed from the get-go. No government. No military applications.”
    “We’d be amenable to that. It’s not what we’re looking for.”
    “What are you looking for?”
    “Half our team are exobiologists. It’s not so much a ‘what’ . . . as a ‘who.’ ”

- 12 -
woods hole, massachusetts, 1935
    T he Berrys were surprised when their son didn’t want to go to Juilliard, which they certainly could have afforded. The changeling was interested in music, but its interest was not human, and it could be indulged anywhere. It could sit alone in the dark and play, in its mind, fantastic compositions that no human could play. With two extra imaginary hands, it could play a Bach fugue forward and backward at the same time. It often did things like that in the hours it had to feign sleep.
    All it really knew of its origin was that it had come from the sea, and before taking human form it remembered having been for centuries a great white shark and a killer whale. There were other manifestations before that, and though the memories were vague, it seemed they had all been sea creatures of some sort.
    Were there a lot of its kind? There was no way to tell. Others who had taken human form could pass for humanindefinitely, appearing to age at a normal rate, “dying,” and resuming life as someone else.
    Its readings in psychology indicated that its transition, while it was learning the difference between killer whale behavior and human behavior, cannot have been common. There were tales of “feral children,” supposedly raised by wolves or other animals, who might fit the pattern. He had plenty of time to investigate that.
    There was no compelling reason for someone like it to become human. They could still be white sharks or killer whales—or coral reefs or rocks, if that made them content. The sea was a good hiding place.
    So it decided that oceanography would be a reasonable place to start. If that didn’t pan out, it could study some other discipline, switch identity and do it again and again. Time was of no importance.
    The leading edge of oceanographic research was Woods Hole, a new, privately endowed institution. It was in Massachusetts, so the changeling applied to several places in that commonwealth. Turned down by both Harvard and MIT, possibly because most of its high school courses had been taught by home tutors, it wound up going to the University of Massachusetts, majoring in oceanography. Woods Hole did take graduate students from there as summer interns, and that was its eventual plan.
    Its academic performance was predictably irregular; it aced anything that had to do with logic or memorization, but didn’t do well in courses like literature or philosophy. It saw that many other students were that way, and most of them were shy loners, too.
    After part of one semester of dormitory life, it moved out and got an apartment in town. That minimized the time and energy devoted to maintaining the Jimmy Berry façade, and gave it freedom to practice being other people, which it assumed would someday be a useful talent. After careful practice, it could become a different person of thesame size in about ten minutes. Smaller or larger took twice as long or more, and was more painful and tiring. Once it became two children, though one had