Camouflage

had severe Arabic features and a bright smile.
    She squeezed half a lime into a glass and bubbled ice water over it, carbonation sizzling, and drank half of it in a couple of gulps. She wiped her mouth with a blue bandana and then pressed it to her forehead. “Pray for rain,” she said.
    “Are you serious?” Halliburton said.
    She grimaced. “My prayers are never answered.” She looked at the cumulus piling up over the island. “Good if we could get most of this done by two thirty.” It usually rained around three. “Comes down hard, we may get sand in the mountings.”
    “Would that throw off the readings?”
    She pulled her sunglasses down on her nose and looked over them at him. “No; they’re locked in now. I’d just rather watch TV tonight than take down the tripods and clean them.” One of the tanks roared and coughed white smoke. “All right. ” She set the glass down and jogged toward Larry with the rest of the bottle.
    Russell and Halliburton didn’t have to be there; the measuring was straightforward. But there wasn’t anything else to do until the artifact was brought in the next day. Halliburton called the central computer with his note pad and gave it the Wallace-Gellman numbers, which werebasically the number of millimeters the concrete pad flexed in three directions as the tanks wheeled from place to place. The artifact would eventually rest in the center of the slab, which was a little smaller than a basketball court, but it would have to be rolled or dragged there from the edge. They wanted to be sure the thing wouldn’t flex the slab so much that it broke in the process.
    Trouble came in the form of a young man who was not dressed for the beach; not dressed for Samoa heat. He belonged in an air-conditioned office, dark rumpled jacket and tie. He walked up to the yellow tape border— DANGER DO NOT PASS —and waved toward Halliburton and Russell, calling out, “I say! Hello?” A very black man with a British accent.
    Russell left Halliburton with his numbers and approached the man cautiously. They didn’t see many strangers, and never without a rent-a-cop escort.
    “How did you get by the guard?” Russ said.
    “Guard?” His eyebrows went up. “I saw that little house, but there was no one in it.”
    “Or just possibly you waited for the guard to take a toilet break, and snuck in. We really should hire two. You did see the sign.”
    “Yes, private property; that piqued my interest. I thought this was free beach here.”
    “Not now.”
    “But the gate of the fence there was open. . . .”
    The guard came running up behind the man. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sutton. He got by—”
    Russ waved it off. “We have a lease on this stretch,” he told the black man.
    “Atlantis Associates,” he said, nodding. That wasn’t on the sign.
    “So you know more about me than I know about you. Work for the government?”
    He smiled. “American government. I’m a reporter for the Pacific Stars and Stripes.”
    A military newsie. “You in the service?” He didn’t look it.
    He nodded. “Sergeant Tulip Carson, sir.” To Russ’s quizzical look, he added, “In the middle of gender reassignment, sir.”
    It was a lot to absorb all at once, but Russ managed a reply. “We aren’t speaking to the press at this time.”
    “You volunteered for the submarine rescue earlier this year,” he said quickly, “and then claimed salvage on a sunken vessel you’d detected on the way.”
    “Public record,” Russ said. “Good-bye, Sergeant Carson.” He turned and walked away.
    “But there’s no record of a ship ever going down there. Mr. Sutton? And now you have that shrouded float waiting out there . . . and the helicopters and tanks . . .”
    “Good day, Sergeant,” he said to the air, smiling. This is the way they’d wanted the publicity to start. Something mysterious? Who, us?
    By the time they unveiled the artifact, the whole world would be watching.

- 6 -
san guillermo, california, 1932
    T he changeling began to construct sentences on its own just after New Year’s, but nothing complex, and often it was nonsense or weirdly encoded. It still “wasn’t quite right,” as Jimmy’s mother nervously said.
    The changeling didn’t have to acquire intelligence, which it had in abundance, but it had to understand intelligence in a human way. That was a long stretch from any of the aquatic creatures it had successfully mimicked.
    It came from a race with a high degree of