Camouflage

set up for shark fishing. Its fins would makeseveral thousand dollars’ worth of soup, which was why there weren’t many large sharks in the area, despite the abundance of food.
    The mask, mouthgill, 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 tropicaloffice 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’sintellectually 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