Camouflage

by Joe Haldeman

  “I’m over twenty-one and she’s a bitch.”

  “You’re drunk. Sleep it off in the car.”

  “Wait for me in the car,” the changeling said, waving her away. “Give you another hundred if I get what I want.” She walked away, mumbling and staggering.

  Inside, it looked like the party was over but nobody’d gone home. There were about fifty people standing, sitting, or passed out. A table with food and bottles of wine and liquor was a picked- over mess. The air was gray with smoke. The changeling sorted out cigarettes, expensive as well as cheap cigars, the burnt-plastic smell of crack and the heavy incense of hashish. No one was smoking heroin, but there were plenty of needles in evidence; on the buffet table three hypodermics stood point-down in a glass of clear liquid.

  The room had an unfinished look, walls freshly painted with travel posters and Gauguin reproductions thumb-tacked here and there. New cheap furniture in a haphazard scatter.

  “So what can I get for you?” the black man said.

  “Hash, I guess.” The changeling thought back to its circus days. “You have squiddy black?”

  “Dream on. Most of these guys smokin’ slate.”

  The changeling shook its head. “Nothing Moroccan. What you got Asian?”

  “Red seal and gold seal. Cost you.”

  “Little bag of gold seal, how much?” He said $250 and the changeling got him down to $210.

  It took the stuff and a glass bong to a folding chair in a corner where it could survey the room.

  The hash had an interesting flavor. It burned hot, probably because of additives. A little asphalt.

  The changeling was looking for someone who looked like he was used to having money, but was down on his luck. Preferably someone not native; about a third of the men qualified on that score.

  An American would be preferable; one who resembled the changeling would make things easier to explain. There was one light-skinned black man who was fairly close to the changeling’s current appearance, though a few inches taller and considerably heavier. He was sitting backward in a folding chair, chin resting on forearm, intently following a lazy argument two men were having, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Good clothes that needed dry- cleaning.

  He was holding an empty bong. The changeling padded over and sat on the floor next to him, and relit the resin in its bong.

  “So what do you think?” one of the arguers said to the newcomer. “How old is the universe?”

  “Thirteen point seven billion years. I don’t remember half that far back, though.”

  The other one shook his hand. “Close. Sixteen billion.”

  “He’s using the Torah and general relativity,” the black man said. “Smells good.”

  The changeling held out the packet to him. “Gold seal; have a hit.” To the Torah guy: “I could spot you 2.3 billion. That’s six really long days?”

  He launched into an explanation about how small the universe had been back then. The other arguer stared at him with an expression like a spaniel trying to stay awake.

  The black man broke off a little piece, rolled it into a ball, and sniffed it. He nodded and handed the bag back. “Thanks.”

  The changeling lit a wooden match and held it up for him. He breathed the smoke in deeply and held it. After a minute he exhaled slowly and nodded satisfaction. “So what are you after?”

  “What, you don’t believe in spontaneous acts of sharing?”

  “You aren’t fucked up enough to be spontaneous with gold seal.”

  “That’s a good observation.”

  “So you want something, but it’s not drugs. Must be sex or money.” He shook his big head slowly back and forth. “Don’t have either.”

  “There is one other thing.” The changeling stood up, feigning difficulty. “Talk outside?”

  He nodded but stayed put. He held up one finger and stared at it. “Oh, and I can’t kill anybody. Don’t want to go through that again.” The two chronologists looked up at that, faces masks.

  “Nothing like that. Come on.” The man got up and walked with exaggerated care, perhaps more stoned than he looked or sounded. The changeling told their host they’d be right back.

  Some animal scampered away when the door opened. Otherwise the dark forest was silent except for water dripping.

  “This is the score. I have to be on the plane to America tomorrow. But I don’t have a ticket or a passport.”

  The man squinted at him in the faint light from the shaded windows. “Okay?”

  “So do you have a passport?”

  “Course. But no way you could pass for me.”

  “That’s not a problem. I’ve done this before.”

  “But then I’m stuck here. What do I do about that?”

  “Nothin’ to it. I’ll mail it back to you, overnight, from L.A. But you don’t have to trust me. If you don’t get it, wait a few days and you go to the embassy and report it lost. They’ll check you out and issue a temporary; you can replace it when you get back to the States.”

  “I’d have to think about it. How much?”

  “Five thousand up front, plus the cost of a ticket. They probably just have first class open; that’ll be a thousand.

  “But I’ll give you five thousand more if I get to L.A. with no problem. Send it in a package with your passport.”

  “For that part I just have to trust you? A total stranger I met in a hash house?”

  “Think of it as my insurance policy. It’s not in my interest to have you report your passport stolen.”

  He was lost in thought, sorting that out. The changeling took the opportunity to stare into his dark-dilated eyes and duplicate his retinal pattern, in case.

  “You throw in two bags of gold seal and you’ve got a deal.” They shook on it, the changeling getting his fingerprints in the process. Then it wrote down an address for the cash and passport return.

  It had him wait on the doorstep and went back in to score the hash. The man said four hundred dollars and stayed with it; no deeper discounts unless you want a lot more. Ten bags would only be fifteen hundred. The changeling declined and left with the two.

  His partner in crime wanted them right away, but the changeling said no; not until it had the ticket in hand. They crunched down the driveway to the rusty Toyota. The young prostitute had reclined in the driver’s seat and was deeply asleep, snoring softly. The changeling gently transferred her to the back seat and took the keys from her pocket.

  The black man also slept while the changeling drove back into town. It wanted to avoid Beach Road and downtown; the police probably would recognize the car, and might wonder why he was driving it. It didn’t know the back roads, and so proceeded by dead reckoning, bearing roughly west and south until it came to Fugalei Street, which it knew would have the Maketi Fou—central market—on the right and nothing but swamp on the left. Then it hit the beach at the flea market on the edge of town and turned onto the airport road.

  It was a half hour of slow driving, the changeling easy on the speed bumps, to keep its crew asleep. The airport was brightly lit, and there were lots of cars and cabs waiting. The airplane that it would take out tomorrow would be landing in about an hour. It remembered that, the late hour notwithstanding, the ticket office had been open when it had arrived the month before.

  The black man rubbed his eyes and yawned; no room to stretch. “So. You give me the money. I go in and get myself a ticket to L.A.; bring it back and collect my hash.”

  “Close.” The changeling handed him a roll of bills secured by a rubber band. “But I’m going to keep you company. The hash stays here, in case they have dogs or sniffers. We come back here. You give me the ticket and passport; you keep the change and the hash. I drive you back into town.” The changeling pulled into a space close to the waiting area.

  “Okay up to the driving. I take a cab back.”

  “What, you don’t trust me?”

  He snorted. “Once you have the ticket and passport, I’m m
ore use to you dead than alive.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” the changeling said honestly. “You must know the criminal mind better than I do.”

  “ ‘Ask the man who owns one,’ ” he said. They got out and walked into the building. It was open-air, no walls on the ground floor.

  There were dozens of people sitting around on plastic chairs, reading or watching television. A group of teenaged boys and girls in traditional garb chattered happily. They would be the song-and- dance welcome for the flight from the States.

  The changeling went upstairs to the bar while his accomplice approached the ticket counter. There was no line and only a single agent, making no effort to appear happy or alert.

  It got a beer and sat near the stairway, where it could watch the transaction. It could imagine what would happen Stateside, if you walked up after midnight and tried to buy an international ticket with fifties and hundreds from a thick roll, no luggage.

  The young woman treated it as if he were buying a loaf of bread, though she looked at his passport.

  Back at the car, the changeling checked the passport and ticket, and handed the black man the keys. “You okay to drive?”

  “If I go as slowly as you did, yeah. You staying here until the flight?”

  The changeling reached over to the back seat and stuffed a bill into the girl’s shirt pocket. “Go back to the hash house and don’t tell anybody where you’ve been.”

  “I might just go back and get my car, and head home. Enough excitement for one night. What if the girl wakes up?”

  The changeling considered. “Best just tell her you dropped me off at a house in town. And … don’t come back to the airport tomorrow. That could be awkward.”

  “Yeah. I already figured that out.” He started the car, then shook his head. “This is crazy.”

  “Just keep an eye on the mailbox.” They exchanged stares for a moment, and the man drove off.

  The changeling had a few things to do, but there was no rush; the gate didn’t open till twelve. It went back inside and left passport and wallet in a storage locker, and then set out to find twenty pounds of flesh.

  In the daytime it would have been easy: just go into a supermarket and buy twenty pounds of meat. It didn’t want to chance taking someone’s dog or piglet, so it had to be the sea.

  It walked back to the road and headed away from town. Everyone had gone to bed and clouds covered the stars; between headlights the world was black as pitch. The changeling came to a path that led to a stone beach, and slipped quietly into the water.

  There was no need to masquerade as a fish. It just stretched its feet into something resembling swim fins, unhinged its jaws, and made its mouth and throat wide enough to accept a large fish. It glided out to the reef and looked around with nose and skin more than its large eyes—like a shark, it could sense the change in electric potential that meant a large fish in trouble.

  That was the meal ticket—it felt the slight tingling and went straight toward it, and came to a reef shark wrestling with a skipjack tuna half its size. The changeling killed the shark with a big bite, severing the notochord, and easily chased down the crippled tuna and ingested it in one gulp. Then it went back and consumed the shark.

  The two of them had provided plenty of mass. It swam back to the shore, grew feet inside shoes, and walked back toward the airport, a large white American, and took a cab into town.

  Bad Billy’s was still open—it advertised being the last bar to close in the Western Hemisphere—but the changeling didn’t want to attract attention, so it had the cab stop at the first vacant motel, the Klub Lodge, where it took a small room and lay thinking for some hours.

  It hated leaving the artifact, hated leaving Russ, and considered just presenting itself for what it was: obviously from another planet, and possibly related to that impossible machine. But it didn’t want to wind up a specimen to be examined, and they could probably infer enough about its abilities to build a cage from which it couldn’t escape.

  Would Russ protect it? If it returned as Rae? No; he knew by now that Rae wasn’t really a woman, and had tricked him.

  And could trick him again. After a cooling-off period, the changeling could show up as another woman, and win his love again. It wouldn’t even be acting.

  But it wouldn’t be smart to hang around Samoa. The island would be thick with U.S. government agents in another day or two, once they figured out what they had almost caught. Even if they didn’t figure it out, and thought the changeling was some sort of augmented human or spy machine, they’d still be all over the island trying to track it down. It hoped they were looking for a one- armed woman.

  It waited until almost ten to walk into town; the sidewalk was crowded enough that it didn’t stand out particularly, just another sunburnt tourist. It had earlier, as Rae, found a church charity store; it went straight there and bought a suitcase and a few changes of clothing. At a more touristy place, it bought a couple of bright shirts and a souvenir lavalava. An assortment of toiletries from a convenience store, and a couple of gift bottles of Robert Louis Stevenson liqueur. In a coffeehouse rest room it disposed of some of the toothpaste and shaving gel, so they wouldn’t look just- bought, and caught a cab to the airport.

  There were three uniformed policemen on duty, and one Samoan woman in a business suit pretty obviously surveying the crowd. It occurred to the changeling that its choice of identity might have been disastrous, if Scott Windsor Daniel, African- American hash hound, was known to the police.

  Best done quickly. The changeling went into a crowded men’s room and waited for a stall. Once behind the door, it went through the uncomfortable business of changing its face and hands to match Daniel’s. It also changed shirts, putting on a souvenir one that, under the circumstances, acted as protective coloration.

  The whole business took fifteen minutes. If anyone noticed that a white man had gone in and a black man had come out, they didn’t say anything.

  The first test was passport control. A native woman checked documents and retinal scan, and collected departure tax, but the woman sitting behind her in the booth, right arm in a sling, was the one from “the United States intelligence community,” who had almost put a bullet into Rae the day before.

  Neither of them paid any special attention to Scott Windsor Daniel, so maybe they actually were looking for a woman. A small white one with a missing arm? They did do a fingerprint check, though, as well as the usual retinal scan. The spy woman put on a jeweler’s loupe and, glancing, clumsy with one hand, compared the thumbprint to one on a card.

  Security was likewise easy, which was encouraging. It hadn’t occurred to them that they were looking for a shape-changer. They sorted through Daniel’s unremarkable luggage, wanded him, and sent the suitcase down a chute and him through an optical baffle into the multilingual murmur of the waiting room.

  It sat at the bar and nursed something they claimed was chardonnay, leafing through the Samoa Observer. The disturbance at Aggie Grey’s was the front-page story, with an interesting twist—the movie people were “not at liberty to say” whether it was part of the thriller they were filming. Presumably someone had coached them; they were an American company, and the government could hassle them if they didn’t cooperate. Though it could be that they came up with the evasiveness on their own, latching onto free publicity.

  Interviews with Aggie Grey people and the police were not much more informative. Some tourists agreed that the “man” who ran across the park and dived into the harbor appeared to be one- armed. Their consensus was movie.

  Hard to plan with so little information. The flight switched to Delta in Honolulu, and there was a six-hour layover. It might be prudent to switch identity again there, in case they’d picked up the trail to Daniel. If they had, there would be a greeting party at LAX. If Mr. Daniel didn’t show up there, they would no doubt smoke the real one out in Samoa.

  Or they might be waiting in Honolulu. What would it do? The airp
ort wasn’t too far from the sea, but harder to emergency-exit from than the Wing Room at Aggie Grey’s. They would presumably be expecting someone with unusual powers— depending on who “they” were. The spies might not have told the police everything. So one scenario was “police looking for a drug dealer with Mr. Daniel’s passport,” which wouldn’t be that hard to step around.

  It set that problem aside, and returned to its usual mental occupation, analyzing 31,433 bits of information. Or noise. It continued its methodical way through those gazillion permutations as it filed through early boarding, took its seat in first class, and selected a random movie on its monitor. It nodded for champagne and made rote responses to the attendant’s rote queries.

  If it spent one second on each possible combination of the 31,433 digits, it would take about as long as the Roman Empire had lasted. The changeling did have the time, but it was hoping that some sort of pattern would emerge long before that.

  It had no seating companion, so the time went quickly, in a blur of ones and zeros. It came out of its five-hour reverie when the landing gear hit the tarmac in Hawaii.

  First class exited democratically, allowing one hoi polloi interleaved between each of the elite, and the changeling entered the airport with a neutral expression, looking around with no particular interest, just a guy changing planes, who had to go through the inconvenience of passport check and baggage transfer.

  There was nothing unusual at first. But then he saw that every u.s. citizen checkpoint was protected by a large policeman, standing between passport control and the luggage check.

  Maybe they were always there. He didn’t remember them from earlier flights, when he was going back and forth between Australia and the States. It would be better not to take the chance.

  There were two bathrooms, for the convenience of people who were willing to take a later place in line, in exchange for comfort. The changeling angled toward the men’s. Its timing was good.

  As it entered the privacy baffle between the corridor and the men’s room, an attendant with a cart was backing out of a utility room. After a glance confirming that there were no witnesses, it covered the man’s mouth and nose and shoved him back into the room.