Camouflage by Joe Haldeman Read Free Book Online Page A

the ten-minute warning. You might want your cameraman out of there.
    Mallory stands up and looks through the glass.
MALLORY
    They’re gone. Just the camera attached to the booster.
RUSS
    I hope it doesn’t give you anything too interesting.
MALLORY
    Have to agree, for once. . . . So this has to be some artifact from outer space.
RUSS
    Well, you know as much about that as we do. It could possibly be the result of some natural process we’ve never encountered before.
JACK
    Though its density makes that unlikely. Or inexplicable.
MALLORY
    It’s very ancient.
RUSS
    The coral it was embedded in was old before there were any primates resembling humans.
MALLORY
    So you don’t think much of the “lost weapon” theory?
JACK
    Bullshit.
RUSS
    You do have to wonder how it got there, if it’s an old Soviet or American device. If we’d just found it lying someplace,sure, that would be the first assumption. But it was below million-year-old coral.
MALLORY
    So maybe they hid it there?
RUSS
    You’d have to ask why. I’d want to hide it in my own country.
MALLORY
    Have the Russians or Americans contacted you?
JACK
    Sure.
RUSS
    We don’t want to talk about that. Yet.
    Screen changes to an aerial view with countdown superimposed. A 360-degree pan shows all the military helicopters watching. At ten seconds, it zooms in on the artifact. A laconic voice offscreen counts down.
VOICE (OFF)
    Ten.
JACK (Rising)
    About time.
    The three of them move to the window to watch. A split screen adds an aerial view. The voice counts down to zero.
    The Chinese rocket ignites, its exhaust churning billows of steam in the sea behind it. For long seconds, as the noise increases to a banshee scream, it doesn’t move. Then the artifact lurches and moves slowly, then faster, up the guiderails toward the metal cradle that will be its resting place. A camera by the cradle shows it fall into place with a jarring crash, just as the rocket goes silent.
RUSS
    Textbook. Those Chinese are pretty damn good.
JACK
    Glad they’re on our side. For the time being.

- 10 -
san guillermo, california, 1932
    T he Berrys had to admit that Jimmy was unmanageable, and quietly had him committed to St. Anthony’s, a private insane asylum.
    It was a valuable change of venue. The drugs the changeling was compelled to take by mouth or injection were metabolically insignificant. The shock treatments, where they wrapped you in wet sheets and splashed you with buckets of ice water, were gently stimulating to a creature who could live on Mercury or Pluto.
    But the changeling was surrounded by extremes of human behavior, in both the patients and their attendants, that it would never have seen at the mansion. It learned more in its first week than it had in months of cossetted coddling.
    The guards were brutal and stupid. If the changeling did anything outside of a certain range of behaviors, they would wrap it in a straitjacket and throw it in the rubber room.
    It came to understand coercion and confinement. It could have slipped out of the straitjacket, prefiguring Plasticman, and kicked down the door like Superman. But there would be no education in that. It submitted to beatings and rapes—rich pretty boy who can’t tell on you. It learned something like sympathy for Dutch, though pain was just input to it, and humiliation was not yet in its emotional range.
    It listened to the other patients when they had social time together. That it responded in monosyllables, sometimes bizarre, went unnoticed. In fact, it was getting a slow, and somewhat skewed, version of the learning process that a human child would go through. It “grew up” by observation and assimilation.
    A large part of the puzzle was human linguistics, and the ultimately related problem of mimicking human thought processes. It took two years, but by the time “Jimmy” was twenty, no one was beating or raping him. He was moved into a clean, quiet part of St. Anthony’s, and after awhile was allowed to have