by Joe Haldeman
She dropped out of course work to become a faculty wife, a position for which she was not particularly well suited. She drew a lot of the wrong kind of attention from the faculty husbands, and obviously enjoyed it, flirting with more and more energy as her marriage failed to provide her with children—a reasonable enough ambition, but hard to realize if your husband has no gender and is not really human.
Moody and volatile, she became Jimmy’s Tasmanian Devil, and it was inevitable that other men would try to tame her.
When she became pregnant in the spring of 2008, a lot of people suspected what her husband knew for sure.
The changeling didn’t relish the prospect of complicating its life with children, so it was happier than most husbands would be when it turned out that the newborn’s father was obviously of a different race. (How different, only Jimmy knew.) Some people admired the calm way he took it, and his magnanimity on giving her a no-fault divorce and blessing her remarriage to the only black man in their circle of friends. Other people thought it was a shameful abdication of his rights as a man. Even in Queensland, they wouldn’t say “white man,” but that’s what many of them were thinking.
The scandal might have retarded his advance at JCU, so when an offer came for a full professorship at the University of Hawaii, Jimmy snapped it up like the hungry shark he used to be, on weekends.
The changeling decided to stay in the Jimmy Coleridge persona for a while. Having studied and taught in Australia for thirteen years gave it a slightly exotic accent and manner, having honed its twenty-first-century social skills in the tropical north. Jimmy was popular with the male faculty and students as a hale-fellow-well- met, who never got more than pleasantly tipsy but could drink anyone under the table. Of course to the changeling gin was as harmless as rocket fuel or hydrochloric acid.
Coleridge carried a respectable class load, with two graduate courses and a seminar as well as the large lecture class in Introductory Oceanography, which had room for 150 students and was always oversubscribed. He turned out papers with gratifying regularity, as well; between his social life and academic life, some wondered when he had time to sleep.
He pretended to sleep, of course, sometimes in the arms of a graduate student or young professor, which didn’t harm his reputation. He wrote most of his papers in that mode, eyes closed and mind in high gear.
In the tenth year of his tenure, 2019, everything changed. Like everyone else, he read and saw the news about the strange artifact that Poseidon Projects had brought up from the Tonga Trench. Unlike most people, the changeling felt a shock of recognition.
It immediately got in touch with the project, and hit an absolute wall: no hiring. Every position filled by people who’d been in it from the start. Thanks, but no thanks. You can read our published data and do your own work.
Of course the changeling knew they wouldn’t publish all the data. They were in pursuit of profit, not knowledge.
For the first time in its life it considered revealing its true nature. Want a consultant who can really help you with aliens?
But not yet.
—33—
Apia, Samoa, 30 may 2021
Europa, under its ice surface, was not too difficult. They considered not trying it at all, since the environment—cold saline solution under pressure—wasn’t all that different from the Tonga Trench, where it evidently had been since approximately the dawn of time. Of course that also was a good argument for doing it. The artifact might respond to the familiar.
It showed no gratitude for Old Home Week, though, sitting as passively as ever, mirroring the ambient temperature but not otherwise acknowledging their efforts. It was a good test for the containment dome’s integrity, which was going to be challenged by Jupiter, but otherwise did nothing other than raise the blood pressure of the observers along with the water pressure inside.
After Jan had finished her familiar algorithm, they depressurized and drained the dome, and prepared it for Io, the innermost of the four large moons, the Galilean satellites.
Io’s atmosphere is exotic and variable, but thin almost to the point of being a vacuum. It can get up to about a hundred nanobars and down to one (the air on the top of Mount Everest is 330 million nanobars). The fact that it’s a poisonous mixture of sulfur dioxide and sodium isn’t relevant to human survival; a human would freeze solid in the middle of explosive decompression, not having time to notice that the air smelled bad.
Still, it was possible that Io’s surface conditions were not unusual in the universe, so they went ahead with the model, a frigid near-vacuum with a scattering of frozen sulfur dioxide on the floor. They varied the temperature from 100 degrees K. to 130 degrees, enough for some of the sulfur dioxide to sublimate, and then fall back as snow.
The artifact faithfully mirrored the changes in temperature, but otherwise ignored the investigation.
It wasn’t much of a change to simulate Pluto, just suck out the sulfur dioxide, lower the temperature to minus 233, and put in a dusting of snow: solidified nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide, with a squirt of ethane flavoring the nitrogen. To any Earth creature, it would be indistinguishable from Io, but conceivably might make all the difference in the world to you, if you were used to living on a snowball in Hell.
They used the space suits for the last time—that was a part of the deal, that they record the suits’ performance in the various environments—and then sent them back to NASA. They would be no help for Jupiter.
For the other planets, they had simulated surface conditions. That wouldn’t be possible on Jupiter. Theoretical models allowed the possibility of a rocky core, but you can’t get there. As you descend through Jupiter’s increasingly thick atmosphere, it becomes more like a star than a planet—the temperature coming to about thirty thousand degrees and the pressure about 100 million atmospheres. It’s “liquid metallic hydrogen” there, and if anything could live under those conditions, it was unlikely to find Earth interesting.
Jan decided to try two Jovian regimes: the one deep enough into the atmosphere that it enjoyed the same air pressure as Earth at sea level, though the temperature was minus 100 degrees C, and the deeper one where the pressure was five atmospheres, but the temperature was an Earth-like zero degrees. In both cases the atmosphere was about 90 percent hydrogen, and the rest helium with a little spicing— methane, ammonia, ethane, acetylene.
In terms of temperature and pressure, it was a lot easier to handle than Venus. But carbon dioxide isn’t flammable. She looked at the huge tanks of hydrogen waiting for the high-pressure phase and tried not to think of it as a fireball waiting to happen.
It was more than a thousand times the quantity of hydrogen that exploded in the Hindenburg disaster.
By now, most of the people, Jan included, had little hope that the artifact was going to respond to anything. When it did, they thought it was an experimental error.
The thing inside the artifact didn’t think, not the way humans think. It didn’t pose problems and solve them. It didn’t wonder about its place in the universe. It felt no real need to communicate.
Its mandate was survival, and it had powerful tools to that end. If the life that decorated the surface of this planet seemed to be a threat, it could simplify the situation. It had patience, fortunately, beyond any human reckoning of the term. All this tapping and zapping and flashing—it could stop the annoyance with one exercise of will, fry the planet clean.
But a central part of it was still out there. It could wait for its return. Maybe, it finally decided, speed up the return by tapping back.
When the changeling got off the plane at the Apia airport, the place was crazy with celebration, even though it was three in the morning. A couple of dozen young men and women danced and clapped and sang in harmony; bunting and flags were everywhere.
When it had boarded in Hawaii, it couldn’t help noticing that several of the Caucasian passengers were unusually old. When the singing stopped, while it was waiting for its luggage,
it found out what the story was. It was the sixtieth anniversary of Samoa’s independence, and these old guys were the last survivors of the American forces that had been stationed here in World War II.
Bataan came back in a rush of bad memory, while the mayor of Apia welcomed the old vets and told stories she’d heard from her father and grandfather. The changeling listened respectfully, its face revealing nothing.
It was a pretty face. The changeling had the form of a young attractive woman.
The ad it had answered on the net was looking for a laboratory technician who could operate this and that machine and had knowledge of marine biology and astronomy. It didn’t call for doctorates in those subjects, but then the changeling could hardly advertise those. Its faked credentials were impressive enough; it only claimed “wide reading” in marine biology and a B.S. in astronomy. (The degree actually belonged to the woman whose appearance it had taken. Safely out of the job market herself, she was the mother of triplets in Pasadena.)
Putting together a fake identity was more complicated than it used to be. It was not particularly hard for the changeling to pretend to be the woman from Pasadena; it even had her fingerprints and tattoos and scent. But it had taken a bit of computer wizardry to erase the records of her husband and triplets and substitute an impressive job record. It had taken even more to temporarily make sure that computer, phone, and fax messages were routed through the changeling before Rae Archer got them.
The actual Rae Archer was beautiful, and took pains to look less than her thirty years. The changeling modified the details so that it was the same face, but merely pretty, and thirty.
It had done it all in less than a day, once the ad appeared on Shy and Telescope’s website. (It automatically monitored anything with the key words “Apia” or “Poseidon Projects.”) As Rae, it had talked to Naomi and then Jan, who agreed to give Ms. Archer an interview if she were willing to gamble the airfare out to Samoa and back. The changeling thought it had done a good job of imitating an excited young woman trying to contain her enthusiasm.
The real gamble, of course, was background checking. The changeling had inserted files attesting to Rae Archer’s job competence in every position she’d held. But if Naomi or Jan decided to call the States and ask for an actual person’s recollection of the woman’s work, the web of deception would evaporate.
Apia was muggy and buggy at three in the morning. Almost every cab in town was waiting outside the airport—the plane from Honolulu only came in twice a week—but the changeling asked directions and did the sensible thing, taking the bus into town. It was twenty miles of slow driving either way. For an extra three dollars, the bus went a block out of its way and delivered the changeling to its door, a bed-and-breakfast just a kilometer up the beach from the Poseidon site.
The proprietor was there, heavy-lidded but friendly, to show the changeling to its room. It feigned a couple of hours’ sleep (while relaying four e-mails to the real Rae Archer and monitoring a wrong number) and then went out to watch the dawn come up over the mountains.
—34—
Apia, Samoa, June 2021
The changeling suspected there might be some slowdown in things because of the anniversary, but it didn’t expect an absolute rejection.
“Come back day after tomorrow,” the guard with the phone said. “It might even be a week before anyone can see you.” She asked why and he shook his head, listening to the receiver. “We’ll reimburse you for your extra expenses.” Listening again. “There’s too much happening now. Just enjoy the town.”
The changeling, of course, could clearly hear the other side of the conversation. The excitement in the woman’s voice—it knew she was Naomi from the Stateside calls—was palpable. It had obviously come one day too late. There had been some breakthrough.
It walked most of the mile into town, stopping at a souvenir store to buy some informal clothes and change out of its business attire. The clerk showed it how to tie a lavalava dress, and it chose a matching blue shirt that it would have called Hawaiian in any other context. Gaudy earrings and a necklace of shells completed its camouflage.
Samoa had actually gained its independence on January first, but since that was already a holiday, they sensibly moved the celebration up to June. The changeling walked on into town in a resigned, almost grim, mood. Enjoy, enjoy.
It found all kinds of dancing and singing, which might have been more interesting to an actual human. Feasting, similarly irrelevant. Canoe and outrigger races and horses prancing through dressage routines.
The changeling used its simulated Americanness and feminine charm to get close to a couple of the vets, both slightly over a hundred years old.
One was surprisingly clear-headed and articulate, especially about war: he was against it. After WWII, he had fought in Korea and had no sympathy for it or Vietnam or the dozen smaller wars and fake wars that followed.
(His WWII assignment to Samoa had been a stroke of luck. The Japanese high command had at the last minute decided not to invade and occupy the Samoan Islands; the only contact with them in the whole war had been a long-distance burst of machine-gun fire from a passing submarine, which hurt no one.)
He was unaware of the Poseidon project, though he well remembered the submarine disaster that had provided a pretext for its beginning. Never would have happened if the goddamned fat cats had kept their mitts off Indonesia, a not uncommon opinion which had not kept the United States out of the current conflict there. As part of the international peace-keeping force, that is, which was 88 percent American and was conspicuously not keeping the peace.
The changeling having practiced its “pretty American girl” routine on the old man got her a holovision news spot. That didn’t hurt her job prospects, as it turned out, because it happened to be aired at the time when the exhausted research team broke for dinner, and Jan recognized her name. Russ probably decided right then that he was going to hire her, just to brighten up the place.
The changeling walked all day exploring Apia, aware that it was far from a typical day. No race could play so hard and expect to survive.
The next morning it was again rebuffed; everyone was too busy for interviews. It went back to the B-and-B and spent the rest of the day searching the web, building a mosaic of such information as Poseidon had parsimoniously released, along with a wealth of rumors and speculation.
Some of the speculation was extremely bizarre, ascribing to the project a CIA genesis, or even suggesting that they were all aliens, and had made up this ruse to slowly break the news to the human race.
The changeling was possibly the most intelligent reader who saw that one and wondered if it just might be true. In fact, though, it wasn’t.
There were only two aliens on the island.
—35—
Pago Pago, American Samoa, June 2021
Apia was too local and too small for a killing spree, and the chameleon was getting bored. He left work a few minutes early and took a cab to the little Fagali’i Airport outside of town, and got on the six o’clock puddle-jumper over to American Samoa. The twelve-passenger plane had sixteen passengers, but four of them were children sitting on their mothers’ laps. The flight was only forty minutes long, but forty long bouncing minutes locked up with crying and puking children could turn even a normal man’s thoughts to violence. The chameleon distracted himself conjuring images of infanticides past.
It was still blistering hot at the Pago Pago airport, but worse in town: it had been a “bad tuna day.” Almost half of the people in American Samoa work in one of the two tuna canneries; the plants’ malodorous waste goes into the harbor to compete with sewage for one’s attention on hot still days.
Darkness brought a breeze, though. The chameleon went down to the waterfront in search of trouble. The area east of the canneries, the Darkside, was where to find it. On his way down, he ducked into an alley and came out the other end looking like a rumpled Pakistani sailor.
The first couple of bars
looked too quiet for fun, catering to the yachties who moored in the cesspool long enough to take on provisions— and perhaps avail themselves of the Darkside’s cheap women and inexpensive drugs.
He heard a commotion and went into a dark dive called Goodbye Charlie’s. Two tall and muscular Samoans were standing at the bar, yelling at each other in a couple of languages. The bartender watched them warily, evidently moving bottles and glasses out of reach. The other patrons were looking on with an air of detachment. It might be a regular evening diversion.
The chameleon took the only empty seat at the bar and waved an American twenty. The bartender sidled over, not taking his eyes off the two. “Yeah?”
“I would like a Budweiser and an ounce of whisky,” he said with a pronounced Pakistani accent. The bartender gave him a look and snatched the twenty away.
He came back with no change, a warm bottle of Bud, and a tumbler that had been rinsed but not cleaned. He poured a generous inch of liquor into it from a bottle without a label.
“Are those gentlemen twinking?” the chameleon asked.
“Tweaking? I guess.” American Samoa’s drug of choice was methamphetamine, ice. People coming off it get into a dark mood, sometimes argumentative and combative, “tweaking.” It could lead to violence.
The chameleon drank the whisky in two gulps and slid off the stool. He walked unsteadily over to stand in front of the two sailors. “I say.” They ignored him. “I say! Will you quiet down?”
“Yeah, right, fuck with ’em,” a drunk American said into the sudden silence. The two looked blearily down at the little Pakistani, a foot shorter than them. One leaned forward and swung at him, an open-handed slap.
The chameleon ducked under the blow and grabbed the man’s wrist and twisted, bringing him to his knees. He twisted harder and pulled, and the man’s shoulder joint popped like a chicken leg coming off. He rolled down on the floor, keening in pain. The chameleon silenced him with two vicious head kicks. Bar stools crashed all around as most people backed away from the action. The drunk American stayed seated and applauded slowly.