Camouflage

terror and chaos, and Mengele loved it.
    One of the duties that doctors shared was to be “choosers,” who stood in front of the doors when the boxcars were opened, and on the basis of visual inspection ordered people to go to the right, for the work camp, or the left, for extermination. A lot of the doctors detested thisdetail, but Mengele loved it. He even showed up to watch when it wasn’t his turn, an arresting sight in his immaculate uniform, mirror-bright boots, white gloves, and riding crop.
    One reason he liked to observe the crowds staggering out of the boxcars was to make sure that no twins were separated or sent to extermination before he could make use of them. Twins comprised his main area of research, and the chameleon helped him in this quest for knowledge.
    Mengele’s interest was twofold: he wondered whether there might be some way to induce properly Aryan women to have twins, so the Master Race could grow at twice the usual rate, and he also did simple environmental experiments that were a perversion of “nature versus nurture”—he would leave one twin alone while he stressed the other one to death with starvation, poison, asphyxiation, mutilation, or whatever occurred to him, and then, after killing the control twin as well, usually with an injection of phenol to the heart, he and his assistants (including the chameleon) would conduct parallel autopsies, noting internal changes that might be related to the cause of death.
    It was not exact science, and perhaps the motivation for it had little to do with anything more exalted than taking pleasure in control, torture, murder, and dissection. Mengele loved it, smiling and chatting all the while.
    The chameleon was amazed. In tens of thousands of years, he couldn’t remember having met a human being so similar to himself. Could Mengele be another one of whatever he was? When the time was right, he might find out by killing him. Meanwhile, he just enjoyed his company.
    Mengele appreciated the chameleon’s skill in underwater autopsies, which others found unnerving. When they killed people by asphyxiation, in the high-altitude simulation chamber, they put the corpses immediately underwater for dissection. An observer watched for telltale bubbles, tosee which parts of the body retained the most air. There was a lot in the brain.
    Most of Mengele’s “scientific” records were destroyed as the Soviets advanced on Auschwitz in 1945. The high-altitude work survived, though, and eventually informed space research in both Russia and the United States.
    When the Soviet soldiers marched through the gates of Birkenau, the chameleon was one of thousands of starving Jews. His pal Mengele escaped because, out of vanity, he had opted out of the SS practice of having your blood type tattooed on your arm.
    The chameleon proceeded to track him down, keeping his Jewish identity and joining the Mossad under Issad Harel in the 1950s. He left the Israeli Secret Service after ten years, with a few tidbits lifted from the Mengele file, and met him just off a riverbank near Enseada de Bertioga, Brazil, on 7 February 1979.
    He was a fit old man of sixty-eight, swimming. The chameleon changed back into his 1941 Nazi appearance when he waded out to say hello. The old murderer’s eyes got very wide before his head vanished under the water. Mortal, after all.

- 19 -
apia, samoa, 2020
    E verything else having failed to impress the artifact, the NASA folks appealed to their opposite numbers in the American military.
    For more than fifty years there had been an international agreement forbidding weapons of mass destruction in orbit. That didn’t mean you couldn’t build them on the Earth, of course, and wait for the law to change.
    HESL, the High Energy Spalling Laser, was not technically a “weapon of mass destruction” anyhow. It was designed to vaporize a small target, like a tank or a ballistic missile or even a limo with the right person in it, from orbit. What kept it from being orbited, for the time being, was the powerful nuclear reactor that powered up its zap.
    The machine had been designed to just fit inside the new space shuttle’s cargo bay, which meant it was way too large for the protective shell around the artifact. It took six weeks to disassemble it and rebuild a structure large enough to house the weapon.
    Inevitably, it caused some friction between Russ and Jan.
    Russ sometimes reacted to stress by eating. He got to number 7 a half hour before