Camouflage

thousand lizard legs to the ditch. Slid in and found a few inches of sewage, and slithered south.
    It remembered from ordnance maps at the Bataan base that Manila Bay was about forty kilometers south, and there were plenty of rivers through the Panga and Bulacan Provinces. Once in Manila Bay, it was about sixty kilometers around the Bataan Peninsula to the South China Sea.
    In the six hours that it took to get to the bay, there was only one witness, to its knowledge: a drunken man on a narrow wooden bridge. He screamed and fled. If anyone came out into the night to check his preposterous story, the changeling would be long gone.
    Dawn was still hours away when the final ditch widened into a mud flat and the changeling wormed its way into the bay. It dove down to the bottom and began the process of changing into a fish.
    A shark bit it in two, which was annoying. But it evidently didn’t like the flavor, and left the two halves alone. The changeling crawled along the bottom, crunching up bivalves and crabs, and when it had enough mass, it took the familiar shape of a great white shark itself. By then it was in the South China Sea. It pointed itself east. Only ten thousand miles to California.

- 23 -
apia, samoa, 24 december 2020
    T he evacuation of the artifact room had taken a little longer than expected, but there were no leaks, and all of the data-gathering equipment seemed to be working fine. At five thirty, Naomi said through the monitor, “Okay. We can start the countdown.”
    Jack nodded. “Fire when ready, Gridley.” No one else in the room knew who Gridley was.
    After a few minutes, there was no temperature change at 10 percent. Naomi increased it to 20, and then to 30.
    “Go to fifty,” Jack said, and Russ and Jan nodded.
    “Where’s it all going?” Jan muttered, a question they’d all asked before. At least when there was air in the building, some of the energy had gone into heating the air. Now, the laser was putting out enough energy to run a small city into a hundred-square-centimeter area, and it was all disappearing—into the artifact, apparently.
    “Go to a hundred?” Jack said.
    “Seventy-five,” Russ and Jan said simultaneously.
    It never got there. The monitor went blank and a second later the people in cottage 7 heard the dull thump of an explosion.
    Jan and Russ were the first ones there, with their bicycles. Half the building had collapsed, the big laser almost submerged in the water. Naomi and Moishe staggered out of the water, coughing and gagging.
    Russ took Naomi’s arm. “Are you all right?”
    She ignored the question, and stared back at the wreck of the lab. “It moved.”
    “Moved?” Russ said.
    “Floated up and crashed down.”
    “Holy shit.”
    “Merry Christmas.”
    M ost of the equipment was wrecked, but a high-speed camera, which the manufacturer called “ruggedized,” had been rugged enough to record the sequence of events before it lost power and fell into the water.
    When the laser increased to 72 percent output, 300,000 watts, the artifact gently rose off its cradle, at a uniform velocity of 18.3 centimeters per second. When it cleared the laser’s beam, the weapon punched a hole in the opposite wall, causing the slight explosion they had heard, as the building suddenly filled with air. The beam didn’t do any other damage except to explode a coconut at the top of a tree on the Mulinu’a Peninsula, more than two kilometers away.
    The artifact continued rising diagonally until it was poised over the laser’s optical fiber gun-barrel. Then, whatever force had been holding it aloft quit. It fell, destroying the laser and collapsing that side of the building into the bay.
    The camera didn’t record what happened after that, but evidently the artifact floated back up and repositioneditself on the cradle in the now open-air artifact room. When the investigators got to it, a few minutes later, it was still beaded with salt water, and cool to the touch.
    This would change the direction of their research.

- 24 -
grover city, california, 1948
    T he changeling enjoyed swimming for a few years as a great white shark—it had had that form for a thousand times as long as the human one.
    For reasons it didn’t understand, it circled for hours over the deep Tonga Trench, and dove as far as it could in comfort. But it was used to having its animal bodies do things out of obscure impulse, and after awhile moved on. When it got within a few hundred yards of the