Camouflage

leaned back and shook his head, staring. “Are there more than one of you?”
    “If there is, I haven’t found her. I can become more than one individual; given an hour, I could split this body into three children. But the personality, the intelligence, becomes distributed, and weakened. I made myself be a school of fish once. Each individual fish was pretty dumb.”
    “So you haven’t reproduced that way. By fission, like an amoeba.”
    “In fact, I have some sort of instinct against it. When I’m split, I’m anxious to get back together.
    “I’ve wondered sometimes how they do it at home—wherever or whenever I came from. Maybe they don’t reproduce at all. Why would immortals have to?”
    “You can’t know you’re immortal, can you?”
    “Not until I survive the heat death of the universe, no. But I’ve been through a lot and always seem to recover.” She stood and carried the candle to the bureau mirror, and inspected her transformation. “Shall we go?” she said in Jan’s voice.
    “In a minute. Some of us have to dress.”
    They were only ten minutes from the project site. They said hello to a few people out enjoying the night air or sitting on their porches, no doubt adding grist to the rumor mill—people did suspect a romantic attachment between the two senior researchers.
    The guard was Theodore, a large cheerful Chinese-Samoan. “Nervous about tomorrow, Professors?”
    “You know about tomorrow?” Russ said.
    “Just that there’s something; something big. Simon told me.”
    “They probably know in Pago Pago,” the changeling said.
    “He told me it was a secret.”
    “Still is, I hope.” Russell gestured. “We’re going into the artifact room.”
    “Okay.” He reached down and clicked something. “It’s clear.”
    They went in by the reception desk and walked down a silent corridor to a blast door covered with warnings. Russ unlocked it with his handprint, and the heavy door sighed open.
    In the anteroom there were two complex data consoles. He sat down at the larger one and typed a few lines. “Okay . . . I’ve turned off the cameras for maintenance. That’ll be fun to explain.”
    “I’ll look at it on the way out,” the changeling said. “I think I can cover it.”
    “Computers, too?”
    “MIT. I’ve had a long time to study things.” It opened a locker. “Should we suit up?”
    “Don’t have to. Nothing nano going on.” He put his hand on another door. “Open for me,” he said quietly, evenly, and it slid away into the jamb in absolute silence. It was an airlock chamber. An identical door, without the ID plate, was on the other side.
    They stepped inside and he said, “Close.”
    The door behind closed, but the one in front didn’t open. “There are two people in the airlock,” the room said. “I need a speech pattern from the one who is not Russell Sutton.”
    “I’m Jan,” the changeling said. “Open for me.” The door slid open and they stepped into the long corridor that connected the artifact room to the main building. Fluorescent lights winked on as the door slid silently shut. The windowless metal walls were full of clutter; people had put up cartoons and drawings with refrigerator magnets, and a galaxy of magnetized words coalesced into clusters of poetry, not all of it obscene.
    One block of wall several meters long contained 31,433 ones and zeros, patiently inked in black Magic Marker.
    A final blast door, thick as a bank vault, that opened on to the artifact room, was halfway open. As they passed through it, a bank of floodlights over the artifact came on with a crackling sound. In bright relief, they saw the artifact on its pylons, the big laser, the two useless horizontal microscope machines, the array of communication devices—and a man standing with folded arms. The chameleon.
    “Jack?” Russ said.

- 47 -
apia and beyond
    T he thing that was Jack nodded. “Please do come in.” He clicked an infrared signaler, and the bank vault door boomed shut.
    “The guard didn’t say—”
    “I asked him not to.”
    “You expected us, then.” Russ put a hand on the changeling’s shoulder.
    “Oh, yes. In a way, I’ve expected you for a long time.” He was looking at the changeling. “Jan. Sharon. Rae. You really were a television set once?”
    They both stared at him, speechless.
    “I’ve had a microcamera in your bedroom, Russell, since you first moved into the fale . It’s often been entertaining, but never so much