Camouflage

if they cooperated, Jack would, in gratitude, renovate both schools and build a new church.
    He never mentioned Poseidon. The deal had been with him.
    It wound up costing the renovation of two more churches and the sponsorship of a celebratory feast. But honor won the day.
    (The fact that the Samoan national government wanted the village to evict Poseidon had worked to Jack’s advantage. The primacy of village law was written into theconstitution, and there was no question that in matters of real estate—a touchy subject on the finite island—village law trumped the feds. The elders took pleasure in reaffirming this principle.)
    The rebuilding was profound. The dome over the experimental area, besides providing environmental isolation, was to serve as a double blast confinement volume, a dome of titanium inside a dome of steel. Jack and Russ and Jan united in opposing the extra expense and complication. If the artifact decided to explode, the domes might as well be made of cardboard.
    The government, still under the aegis of NASA but with much more money and clout than the agency possessed, agreed that they were probably right. The double dome was a just-in-case precaution.
    Also “just in case” were the manacles that supposedly held the artifact down, attached to arm-thick cables that were deeply anchored in bedrock. They had calculated the amount of force it had taken to lift the artifact off its cradle; the manacles could hold down four to six times as much. No one who had seen the airy effortless grace with which the artifact had floated up would bet on the cables.
    It was Jan’s turn to run the show. Having scalded and frozen and zapped the thing, with no result other than disaster—maybe now it was time to talk to it.

- 26 -
berkeley, california, 1948
    C ollege 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.