Camouflage

—29—

For a few months, the changeling and the chameleon were in the same city, doing more or less the same things.

The chameleon was at MIT, studying marine engineering. It had enjoyed Korea as a naval officer, and wanted to learn more about the design of warships.

It liked anything about killing.

The changeling had gotten its doctorate in anthropology in 1960. Combining its deep knowledge of Earth’s biology with a broad knowledge of the cultures that crawled all over the planet convinced it that it had to be from somewhere else. So it went to Harvard with impeccably faked credentials (again a boy from California) and began the study of astronomy and astrophysics.

If they ever rode together on the Red Line or had a beer at the same time at the Plough and Stars, they were unaware of being in the company of a fellow extraterrestrial. They were both looking for other aliens; they were both too experienced to be found out.

Neither one was drafted for Vietnam. The changeling faked severe stomach ulcers. The chameleon finished its master’s degree and joined Officer Candidate School.

So while the chameleon pointed eight-inch guns at unseen targets in the Vietnamese jungle, the changeling pointed huge telescopes at unseen targets outside the galaxy. It mostly counted photons and put the numbers into a BASIC program, which dispensed something like truth. Sometimes, unlike professional astronomers, the changeling unhooked the telescope from its photon counter and actually looked through it at the night sky.

It was fascinated with globular clusters, and eventually hunted down all of the hundred-some visible from Massachusetts. It saw its home, M22, as a fuzzy blob shot through with sparkles, and returned to it many times without knowing why.

The changeling had a master’s in astronomy by 1974, but felt it had to know more about computers before continuing on, so it moved down to MIT for a couple of years, studying electrical engineering and computer science.

Two of its professors had taught an alien before.

It liked the area, and so returned to Harvard for its Ph.D. in astrophysics, where it had another coincidental encounter. As part of its graduate assistantship, it graded papers for an elementary astrophysics course, Atmospheres of the Sun and Stars. One of its students was Jan Dagmar, who it would meet more than forty years later, in Samoa.

Harvard followed the tradition of kicking its chicks out of the nest, so after its doctorate, the changeling had to look elsewhere for work. The natural place was the National Radio Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, where Frank Drake had started Project OZMA, which after twenty years had evolved into the SETI Project, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

The changeling worked there, massaging data, for two years, and then took an indefinite leave of absence, and a series of profound career shifts. It was an exotic dancer and part-time prostitute in Baltimore for a while, then a short-order cook back in Iowa City. As an old lady, it read palms on the county-fair circuit in the Midwest, and returned to California in its old Jimmy body to be a surf bum for a couple of seasons.

Sacrificing half its mass, it became a juggling dwarf with the Barnum Bailey Circus, making contacts in the freak world. It met some interesting people, but they all seemed to be from Earth, no matter what they claimed.

It married the Bearded Lady, an even-tempered and sardonic hermaphrodite, and they lived together until 1996. The changeling left behind a hundred ounces of gold and no explanation, and became a student again.

After absorbing two stray dogs, it went back to the Jimmy template, but took the body past California and down to Australia. It studied marine science at Monash University, aware that most of what it had studied a half century before had been profoundly revised.

It had learned to trust certain feelings—memories buried so deep they were no longer memories—and one of those feelings was a special affinity for deep waters, and the Pacific.